Digital Transformation in Government Insight #53: Growth mindset and digital transformation

What is a growth mindset?

If you’ve got kids, chances are you may have heard something about a growth mindset. At least, it’s often mentioned in the educational setting. And that's because it came out of research over 30 years ago on student learning and how students’ attitudes towards learning affected their results and success.

The leading researcher in growth mindset is Dr Carol S Dweck. Her book, Mindset: How you can fulfil your potential is something you’d expect to see in the hands of parents, students and maybe X-geners. But her research has far-reaching consequences in many fields.

Dr Dweck identified two mindsets — growth and fixed. People with a growth mindset are characterised by the ability to learn from their mistakes and continually improve. It’s based “on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.” (Dweck, page 7)

In contrast, people with a fixed mindset believe qualities are “carved in stone” and are more likely to take ‘failure’ personally. As Dweck says in her book: “the fixed mindset creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over.” (Dweck, page 6)

You can find a great summary and more information about the mindsets at the Mindset Works science page, including a couple of good diagrams and interesting case studies. For example, one American school that implemented growth mindset saw its maths results go from the 50th percentile to the 75th percentile in one year.

Growth mindset and digital transformation

Last month, Gartner issued a press release that looked at growth mindset and digital transformation. The press release talked about the importance of employees ‘buying into the vision’ and research analyst Aashish Gupta said: "Staff trapped in a "fixed" mindset may slow down or, worse, derail the digital business transformation initiatives of the company." A few mags picked up the story (we first saw it in NZ’s CIO).

Gupta isn’t the only expert talking about fixed and growth mindsets in digital transformation. An article for The Telegraph quotes Clare Barclay, chief operating officer at Microsoft UK, as talking about the importance of cultural change to enable digital transformation, and relating this back to moving people away from fixed mindsets and towards growth mindsets.

Salsa Digital’s take

While technology often plays a very large role in digital transformation in government, it’s important to consider other factors for a more holistic approach. Cool tech should be an enabler — something that lets you deliver better services to citizens. But often implementation is about an internal cultural shift, about getting your staff to move from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

We also see the idea of a growth mindset as being linked to the agile process, where you understand things change, and so you need to work quickly and nimbly. Like the students Carol Dweck studied, you learn and continue to improve.

If you think your agency might benefit from a cultural shift, perhaps the growth mindset is something you need to explore in more depth.