Switch by Chip Heath; Dan Heath

Author:Chip Heath; Dan Heath
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-fiction, Sociology, Psychology, Business, Self Help, Adult
ISBN: 9780307590169
Publisher: Crown Business
Published: 2010-02-16T10:00:00+00:00

10.

In the business world, we implicitly reject the growth mindset. Businesspeople think in terms of two stages: You plan, and then you execute. There’s no “learning stage” or “practice stage” in the middle. From the business perspective, practice looks like poor execution. Results are the thing: We don’t care how ya do it, just get it done!

But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team. Why is that so critical? Because, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter observes in studying large organizations, “Everything can look like a failure in the middle.” A similar sentiment is expressed by marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis, who says that “real change, the kind that sticks, is often three steps forward and two steps back.”

If failure is a necessary part of change, then the way people understand failure is critical. The leaders at IDEO, the world’s preeminent product design firm, have designed products and experiences ranging from the first Apple mouse to a new Red Cross blood donation procedure. They understand the need to prepare their employees—and, more important, their clients—for failure.

Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, says that every design process goes through “foggy periods.” One of IDEO’s designers even sketched out a “project mood chart” that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project. It’s a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled “hope,” at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled “confidence,” at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled “insight.”

Brown says that design is “rarely a graceful leap from height to height.” When a team embarks on a new project, team members are filled with hope and optimism. As they start to collect data and observe real people struggling with existing products, they find that new ideas spring forth effortlessly. Then comes the difficult task of integrating all those fresh ideas into a coherent new design. At this “insight” stage, it’s easy to get depressed, because insight doesn’t always strike immediately.

The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they’ve made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we’ve cracked this problem. That’s when the team reaches the peak of confidence.

Notice what team leaders at IDEO are doing with the peaks-and-valley visual: They are creating the expectation of failure. They are telling team members not to trust that initial flush of good feeling at the beginning of the project, because what comes next is hardship and toil and frustration. Yet, strangely enough, when they deliver this warning, it comes across as optimistic.

That’s the paradox of the growth mindset. Although

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