Mind Your Business: Growth Mindset for Digital Transformation Success
Let’s begin with a story about a group of young students tackling a complex puzzle. The first puzzles were fairly easy, but the next ones were hard. The students grunted, perspired, and toiled to solve the puzzle. Confronted with the hard puzzles, one ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and cried out, “I love a challenge!” Another, sweating away on these puzzles, looked up with a pleased expression and said with authority, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative!” These positive responses of the students were unexpected and surprising for Carol Dweck, the renowned American psychologist. She was deeply intrigued by understanding how people cope with failures, and to explore this, she conducted the above experiment with them. Their reaction made her question her own assumptions. She had always thought that people either coped with failure or didn’t cope with failure. The children’s responses challenged her beliefs, and she became determined to figure out what they knew that she didn’t. This encounter became the catalyst for her research on the concept of mindset, to understand the underlying factors that influenced these diverse responses to challenges. This is where she introduces the concept of two mindsets: fixed and growth.
