Want to cultivate a growth mindset? Become a beginner.
In the summer of 2022, I was facing a monumental task at work. Our organization of about 40 employees had 12 internal teams that were all tasked with doing the same things, but with different resources, abilities and capacity on each. In looking at this complex issue and delving deeper into it, I alongside the rest of our organizational leadership team, realized that in order to create consistency among the teams we would need to reorganize them. At this point, I had only been a part of one other reorg and although I was no longer a beginner, I definitely did not consider myself an expert in change management or leading reorgs.
Around the same time, I had the sudden urge to learn to quilt. I had been making garments for a year and was intrigued by the combination of textiles and math, two things I loved, to create something beautiful and useful. I made a test quilt out of scraps and immediately saw some areas I needed to improve upon. My seams didn't line up perfectly with each other, my binding was not attached to both sides of the quilt and there were places it wasn't perfectly square.
So I sought more information about those parts of my quilting process -- I took a class on binding, I watched countless YouTube videos on lining up seams and I watched a few quilt a long videos so I could see step-by-step visual instructions for how people moved through the process of completing a quilt top. Through this, I learned the language of quilting and how to get precise about what issues I was having and then seek solutions.
Less than a month after my first quilting attempt, I decided to make a queen size quilt for my bed. It was the same basic premise as my first quilt, but instead of the 24 squares I cut and sewed in my first attempt, this time there were 225 in 18 different fabrics. And once again, I learned an enormous amount, like how to sew multiple rows together at once, how to quilt using a long arm machine, and how to bind a 106" square quilt using my home sewing machine. In six weeks, I had gone from never having sewn a quilt to creating one that could keep me warm as a bed size blanket.
This journey was relatively low stakes. If I didn't complete the quilt, or I messed it up so badly that it was unusable, the absolute worst case scenario was that I would waste fabric and the money I spent on it. At work, I was dealing with a much higher stakes scenario. Reorganizing teams that people had built from the ground up and were incredibly passionate about was extremely high stakes and even though I wasn't an expert, I didn't want to mess it up. Learning to quilt at the same time reminded me of how I learn and that I have the capacity to continue to grow and learn.
This translated into a clear growth plan for myself alongside my plans for supporting the organization in a few ways. First, I had senior leadership buy in from the beginning to take my time to explore what was out there and understand the scope of the problem before jumping in with a solution. In that time, I learned as much as I could about how other people engaged with change and transition management, from a variety of sources and perspectives. I looked to large organizations, what we can learn from startups growing deeper roots, the wisdom of my fellow students and faculty in the Masters of Learning and Organizational Change Program at Northwestern, and the psychology and neuroscience of how people move through change.
Before quilting, I would have done my due diligence to learn these things through reading about them, taking avid notes in class and generally spending a lot of time on my own reflecting. But that's not how I learn best. Instead, I sought conversation and practice, as much as I could in environments where I could fail and it would be okay. Sometimes this was at school, with my own coach, with colleagues or even with my partner. We prototyped almost every part of the final product with anyone who was interested in my organization and from my community at school. I asked questions, and when someone asked me a question that I didn't know the answer to, I did a deep dive using precise language just as I had with quilting.
I want to be clear, I do not recommend jumping into leading a reorg or any other major organizational activity with no experience, and that's not what happened here. I had enough experience to start and to know what I didn't know and then seek that information out and an incredibly supportive organization that allowed me the time to figure it out with clear accountability for that knowledge and facilitation of this process. But quilting, failing fast and actively working to learn reminded me that I needed to be continuously learning through my reorganization process too.
Research has long shown that how people perceive their abilities impacts their motivation and achievement. Carol Dweck, a leading researcher in growth mindsets offers that with a growth mindset “people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment” (Dweck, 2015). The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, which Dweck describes as "people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort” (Dweck, 2015). Cultivating a growth mindset can be a challenge! Especially in a world that often praises documenting intelligence, as Dweck points out.
There are so many ways that people have offered to build a growth mindset including calling your growth an experiment, trying to fail fast, early and often and starting with something small. Based on this experience, I think becoming a beginner in something else, completely unrelated to the area you are actively trying to grow in, that has lower stakes, can actually help cultivate a growth mindset in other areas of your life. As a coach, I believe that creating things with your hands, finding ways to engage with how you learn best and remembering what it's like to be a beginner are crucial to our success at work, but also in life. If a client were facing a significant challenge, I might have them use being a beginner as a tool to help them learn about themselves and how they learn, to highlight where they already have knowledge and to give themselves grace for the times they don't have all the answers.
One more little quilt story for you. A few months into this process, I had completed two large quilts and was learning more techniques (besides just sewing squares together!) when I was at an onsite retreat for one of my MSLOC classes. We were tasked with silently creating a usable quilt out of only strips of fabric as a small group. Not wanting to jump in and take over, I waited to see what my group wanted to do, but no one had any idea. Looking around the room, I saw a hutch that had perfectly spaced knobs to create a loom and gestured for my team to follow. Together, silently, we created this incredible woven quilt. Afterwards, when we were allowed to speak my team verbally expressed their surprise. How did you think to do that? one person asked. I told them about my quilting and laughed about how I didn't think it would be practically helpful in work or school ever. One of my teammates reminded us that the expertise we bring at work, home, school, in relationships or anywhere else all come from the same person. It's all woven together inside of us, and you never know when one part of your expertise might be helpful in an entirely new situation. Given that, how could you not want to learn as much as possible?
