Growing your mind.

Brain Coral

I have been looking into some research that Standford psychologist Carol Dweck has done into achievement and success and what it has to do with how you think about yourself. She describes people as having basically two mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. These two mindsets can greatly affect how you approach problem solving and how likely you are to take risks and potentially go about innovating. Your frame of mind can greatly affect your self esteem and affect your likely success at a task or venture. Mindset is something very insightful and worth considering if you are in any task that involves some risk and possibility of failure.

Looking firstly at the fixed mindset, it is described as simply having a point of view that talent and intelligence are fixed traits that cannot be changed. These types of people spend their time and effort documenting their abilities and talents instead of expanding them, they are primarily looking to prove themselves to others. They believe that talent leads to success. This mindset is formed through interactions with other people that respond to situations like testing, with attitudes about success and winning. It can be an outside influence such as a parent, boss or teacher, that creates this feeling and mindset in the individual or something that a particular person feels inside themselves that is reinforced through repetition. In children this mindset is formed with statements like "Good job, you are very smart" are more likely to develop a fixed mindset. This mindset is of course can be great when things are working and all is performing well, the problem really arises when something goes wrong or fails to meet expectations. The negative feelings that emerge can be inhibiting to later activities, as the fear of failure can make someone become more risk averse.

A growth mindset, on the other-hand, is someone that believes their abilities can be improved and expanded through practice, experimentation and physically performing tasks. In this mindset, learning and acceptance of failure is critical to success. This mindset has been shown by Carol, to increase motivation and productivity. This mindset is encouraged through positive reinforcement of the effort that has been put into a project rather than the results. In children this can be encouraged with words like "Good job, you worked very hard", this can make all the difference in how they percieve themselves if things go wrong, and willing they are to take risks later. What can be learnt from what went wrong is seen as something valuable to gain from what is done as well as what worked. This mindset, of course, is exactly the mindset you would need as a creative thinker, where often experimentation and discovery into unknowns will produce failures as well as successes.

The great thing about these mindsets is that they are not born into us, they are something learnt, and as a result we can alter our mindsets to the more positive growth mindset with an attention to how we perceive ourselves and what we do. It just takes practice in how we deal with failure and how we learn from mistakes. In my role as a creative director, this work is very insightful and valuable to how I approach projects with an open  mind to the risks and possibilities of some failure. It helps make sure the team understands that things can go wrong in development, especially if our assumptions are wrong. If I am wrong   then this is okay, what really matters to me and the team is what we can learn. What is most valuable is to evaluate what went wrong and how it can be improved towards a successful outcome. The ability to make and learn from mistakes, without retribution,  is what differentiates the successful companies and projects from the doomed to never work ones that will probably never innovate. Even beyond the practical use of this mindset in work, it is a good way to consider all aspects of you life and journey, with openness to unexpected opportunities and adventure. Sometimes following an unexpected path can lead to amazing new discoveries, that just needs a willingness to adapt and keep a mind that wants to grow.

Design Thinking

Design thinking is an alternative way of thinking about problem solving and idea generation. It could well be one of the most important new ways of structuring new business teams and creating environments for future workers that has been put forward in recent years. The concept is not really anything new, and certainly many historical figures like Edison, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Tesla, would be in my mind classed as design thinkers. Really the newest step forward is the more formal acceptance of the process of design thinking as promoted by companies such as IDEO that produces reproducible successful results. Most people in the realm of invention and idea creation really have been practicing design thinking for centuries.

Design thinking is a really a process in approaching a problem. The basic four steps of design thinking are: 

Define the problem

Create and consider possibilities

Refine and dissect results

Repeat(optional)

Execute most successful outcome

Within each of these steps are tools and methods that help get the most out of the process. 

Defining the problem, involves a discovery phase with analysis of the problem space. At this point in the process it is critical to immerse oneself in the problem, existing solutions (if any), and the all the available resources and literature. It may also require observation of people and processes already in place. Only after a full discovery would it be worth moving onto a creation phase. At this point in the process it is worth considering tools like brainstorming on smaller parts of the problem, grouping and ideating ideas together to be evaluated as worth pursuing. Which leads nicely into to a complimentary part of the phase of creating prototypes of various levels of fidelity. To test out concepts and encourage team engagement at the early production stage. This is when things begin to really stand out as feasible and worthwhile solutions or not. Then, comes the refine and dissection of those ideas that seem most worthy. Further prototyping, and maybe some usability tests can help refine the results. repeating earlier stages may also prove advantageous. After things seem to funneling into a particular result it then becomes time to execute the most successful outcome into the final product or service.

That in a nutshell is design thinking. Again nothing completely new but really people's acceptance and corporate push for innovation has brought these now more well defined steps into new consideration. They are effective and powerful ways to generate ideas and produce prototypes that lead to more successful end products and services, when done correctly.

Other breakdowns of the steps include.

Discover, Analysis, Ideation, Prototype and Evaluate.

Define, Research, Ideate, Prototype, Choose, Implement, Learn.

In each instance you can see the common form of four basic steps.

I have some further reading here for design thinking.

You can read some more of my thoughts on prototyping here.

And some ideas on idea generation here.