A growth mindset is the belief that our skills and abilities can be improved through effort. It’s a concept developed by Stanford psychologist Carol Deck, who demonstrated that it’s core to enabling people to take on new challenges. We need to believe we can learn in order to learn.

The opposite is called a fixed mindset. If you’ve ever heard someone say ‘oh, I’m just not good at maths’, or ‘that’s just the way I am’, that’s a fixed mindset at play! Assuming our abilities are set parts of our personalities means we don’t really try to change them. And that makes it impossible to grow.

People with a growth mindset are happy to learn from failure. They are open to feedback, resilient and actively embrace challenges. They see effort as the key to success rather than innate ability.

You might see some parallels to last week’s discussion of psychological safety. Both are about making it ok to take risks. We have to take risks in order to learn, to keep going through the uncomfortable phase of not knowing and deal with the possibility of being wrong.

Whilst psychological safety is about the organisation or team dynamic, growth mindset works at the level of individuals. An individual can have a growth mindset in a psychologically unsafe culture (although that’s much more difficult).

Like a lack of psychological safety, a fixed mindset can be a barrier to adopting agile. Let’s look at why.

Why you need growth mindset to work in an agile way

Firstly, you need to believe that your ways of working can improve in order for it to be worth changing them. Challenging the status quo is inherently difficult. If you feel hopeless that you and the others you are working with can get better at collaboration and focus, you won’t give agile a fair shot.

Secondly, agile is all about experimentation. When working in this way, you should be learning your way forward, working in short loops where you deliberately test things to learn what your audience needs, before stopping and reflecting on what to do next. Some of these experiments will fail – that’s how you know they were true experiments! A growth mindset allows you to embrace these failures as long as they are contributing to your learning.

How to grow a growth mindset

Regular reflection and experimentation are at the heart of agile, and these can help reinforce a growth mindset. Pay attention to the fact that you are learning and changing both individually and as a team. Acknowledge that it’s ok to make mistakes along the way.

This is easier to do if you start small. Pick one thing you could experiment with and see how it goes. If it succeeds, brilliant! If not, notice what happens. The world doesn’t end because you tried something that didn’t pan out. Try lots of small experiments to build your confidence over time.

Reframe how you see challenges. People with a growth mindset welcome challenges as new and interesting ways to learn. It’s what Oliver Burkeman calls developing a taste for having problems.

The language we use can also help shift our mindset. Instead of telling yourself ‘I’m not good at xyz’, try expressing it as ‘I’m not good at this yet‘. If you are giving people positive feedback, focus on the effort they made or things they learned, rather than describing them as inherently good at the task they completed.

This is part of a series on possible barriers to agile. Subscribe to my newsletter for a monthly agile tip and a round-up of posts.