ESSENTIALS OF SAFETY BLOG 4/14
Having a growth mindset expands. Having a fixed mindset limits. We can change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset – if we want to.
This is the fourth of a dozen or so blogs covering the Essentials of Safety that I talked about in the first blog of this series. We have covered an introduction – which we called Essentials of Safety, Understands their ‘Why’ and Chooses and displays their attitude.
The other blogs in the series are:
- Has a high level of understanding and curiosity about how work is actually gets done.
- Understands their own and others’ expectations.
- Understands the limitations and use of situational awareness.
- Listens generously.
- Plans work using risk intelligence.
- Controls risk.
- Applies a non-directive coaching style to interactions.
- Has a resilient performance approach to systems development.
- Adopts an authentic leadership approach when leading others.
- Bonus – The oscillations of safety in modern, complex workplaces.
Adopts a growth mindset – including a learning mindset
If we are clear about why we do what we do and we are approaching it with a positive attitude, the chances are that we will have a growth mindset that aligns with our ‘Why’. Having a mindset that aligns with our ‘Why’ sets us up for success.
A mindset is simply a state of mind, a way of thinking, looking, or reacting to a situation or state. The two I will principally talk about here are a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. We generally talk about people either having a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is limiting. A growth mind- set is infinitely expanding. We include in the arena of a growth mindset the idea of a learning mindset. Taking it one step further, Simon Sinek talks about an infinite mindset, where we take a much longer and wider view of the world.
Folks with a fixed mindset believe that people, including themselves, can absorb skills only to a defined level (e.g. ‘I could never learn to juggle’) or that their intelligence is limited up to a certain point (e.g. ‘I haven’t got the intelligence to be a doctor’). They often have a static view of how to handle complexity or believe they have limited capability to improve because they think they have hit their maximum potential. No matter how much effort and time they put in, they feel they cannot become what others think they are capable of.
People with a growth mindset, on the other hand, understand that stuff can change. They have a belief that people, including themselves, can learn, reshape their intelligence, adapt their approach to complexity, have the capability to improve, and with effort and time can achieve much more than they are currently achieving. Those with a growth mindset recognise that there are always opportunities to learn and improve. These two mindsets are clearly at opposite ends of the pole and it becomes very obvious very quickly which mindset a person has.
The important point to remember is that people’s mindsets are not stable in the long term. People can choose to have a fixed mindset or they can choose to have a growth mindset and this can change over time. This choice is what makes all the difference. It is vital that people understand that mindset is a decision and based on belief, attitude, and their ‘Why’. After all, mindsets are things that occur within the mind and as we all know, we can change our mind.
It makes sense, therefore, that we should want to have a fair proportion of people in our teams possessing a growth mindset. To get to that point we should not rely on luck but rather on good management. Helping establish a team of people with growth mindsets cannot start on day one of each person’s employment – it needs to start during the selection and recruitment process phases. During early screening and interviewing, it is possible to determine whether the prospective employee believes they can learn more and grow and whether they have a growth mindset. To me, this needs to be an integral component of the recruitment process.
The creation of a team with a high percentage of growth mindset thinkers also needs to extend beyond the original employment selection process well into the daily life of each employee. By specifically calling out growth mindset during inductions, regular performance appraisals, task assignments, development planning sessions, etc., you can assess whether the person is up for some challenges, whether they are okay to explore some of their failures, are eager for feedback, and generally whether they are keen to stretch themselves to the next level. These traits should be encouraged and prioritised in conversations around an individual’s development.
One manifestation of a growth mindset is associated with learning. We can use the term learning mindset for this. In addition to helping our people develop a growth mindset, it is useful to cultivate a learning mindset through- out the various training and learning processes and activities.
One easy way to do this is to talk about learning during conversations, inductions, activities, workshops, learning studies (incident investigations), and field leadership conversations. This can be achieved by talking about the ‘Why’ of a training/learning workshop at the start of the session. This really helps set the scope and encourages better learning and engagement in the workshop, especially if the ‘Why’ of the session strikes a chord with the ‘Why’ of the participant. I also ask this question at the end of any workshop I run: ‘As a result of the conversations we have had over the last hours/days, ask yourself what you will do that is different? or what you will do differently after today?’ The intent is for the participants to understand that learning is about changes in behaviour driven through a change in thinking and believing new concepts and ideas. I want them to think about whether they have actually learnt anything.
A learning mindset can manifest during safety-related incidents and investigations into them. An organisation that possesses a growth mindset will endeavour to learn from incidents. This can sometimes tend to be an element of wanting to punish people for making mistakes that result in workplace safety- related incidents. This can be minimised or avoided – and the incident can be learnt from – by asking questions differently and having a growth mindset approach to incident investigations generally.
When an incident occurs, the way we ask questions, what we focus on as leaders, and how we react can all have a big impact on the ability of the business to learn from the incident.
In order to focus on learning during an incident investigation, it is important to remember that human performance is variable and that unexpected events come from good as well as bad decisions. This means that we should not simply focus on bad decisions when investigating incidents. Bad outcomes do not always come from so-called bad decisions. Good outcomes do not always come from good decisions. Human performance variability is neither positive nor negative – it just is. We need to seek to learn, regardless of what opinion we have of the decision made by an individual that may have played a part in the incident. It is important to learn from major incidents. Applying a learning mindset to low-level incidents as well as to major level incidents is a very sensible approach. There is often a lot to learn. The decision to learn from an incident should not be based solely on the level or magnitude of the outcome. It is even better to learn from Work-As- Normal – when things go right as we talked about earlier on LNW (learning from normal work) reviews.
Inclusion of discussions on fixed and growth mindsets in leadership development activities is also an important component of getting the essentials of safety right. Talking with leaders about how their mindset can impact the safety of their team and whether they have a growth mindset – believing they can all learn, get better, and grow – or whether they have a fixed mindset – where things are simply how they are and that is that – can greatly impact leaders’ thoughts and hence their words, their actions, and their behaviours. A growth mindset or a fixed mindset can also manifest in the way leaders search out for and listen to expertise. If we have a fixed mindset and believe that we know all we need to know and do not defer to expertise where it resides, trouble ensues. You should strongly consider only promoting people to leadership roles if they have a growth mindset. Having said that, a fixed mindset can be expanded into a growth mindset with some work and will. Coaching and supporting in this space is well worth the effort. Leaders simply being aware of the two mindsets (fixed and growth) helps them recognise they can change – if they want to.
People with a growth mindset tend to pay close attention to experiences and challenges that will stretch them, furthering a belief that brilliance is not the key to success – a growth mindset and passion is. On the other hand, leaders with fixed mindsets seem not to feel happy or strong when significantly challenged – they can tend to lose interest. They can also tend to take their personal failures as a declaration that they are failures. People with a growth mindset meanwhile tend to view their failures as lessons and opportunities for learning.
For all of these and many other reasons, helping people, especially leaders, to evolve from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset needs to be a critical component of everyone’s personal leadership development plan.
So, a solid way to apply a learning mindset to a business needs to be focussed initially on exactly what the lesson to be learnt is. Language becomes critical here as we have just seen. The lesson could come from a workplace incident, an audit, a recent change, a part of the business that has had excellent or poor performance, or in fact from many other activities. The approach I find best is as follows: the lesson needs to be worded in a way that it is provocative – something that challenges the status quo or existing mental model of the work or topic and excites leaders into action. For example, ‘procedures must be SUE – Simple, Useful and Effective’ is not very provocative. ‘In the real work- place, Work-As-Normal does not always equal Work-As-Written’ is perhaps an improvement, but only just. The wording needs to prompt some inquiry as to Work-As-Normal in the part of the business where you want the learning to occur. As an example of a leader with a learning mindset, if the first response to reading a ‘lesson to be learnt’ from a General Manager, senior line, or functional HS manager is ‘We absolutely need to check this out for our bit of the world’, or ‘There is no easy answer for this’. Then we are at the right level. Of course, to make sure a lesson to be learnt reaches a state where it does attract attention also relies on a learning mindset amongst those who created it.
Once the lesson has been worded appropriately, we need to work out what the best way is to help the people learn the ‘lesson to be learnt’. This may be very different for different parts of the business as well as for different levels in the business and also different for various professions and worker groups. It may also only apply to a select group or team within the business.
We know that it is important to consider who the audience of a learning activity will be and then tailor the learning approach to match that audience. For example, some lessons to be learnt will be better suited to the supervisor level in the organisation because they are the ones who orchestrate work, approve risk assessments and task-based risk assessments, and also provide frontline guidance and leadership for the achievement of safe work. At other times, the lesson will need to be aimed at the broader audience of those actually doing the work.
What we do to impart the lessons needs to be in a language that resonates with the audience, is meaningful in a manner that fits with their worldview and mental models of the work, and results in ‘discovery’ of the learning rather than a rote learning of it. If they get their own ‘why’ in relation to the learning, the learning becomes important for them. It is only then that it will result in changed mental models, thinking, and behaviour.
Once you have gathered enough information to form an opinion on the target audience/s, it is then up to the leaders to share the lessons in such a way that promotes learning and the required changes in behaviour. The work of driving the change so that the lesson is learnt needs to explore the current mental model of the work and where it needs to get to. It could explore Work-As-Normal and Work-As- Written in relation to the topic of the lesson and what the current drivers are for Work-As-Normal, especially if it does not align with where the Work-As-Normal needs to be for the lesson to be learnt. We will talk more about Work-As-Done, Work-As-Normal, and Work-As-Written later in the chapter. For now, think about Work-As-Done simply as how work is being done on any specific day, Work-As- Normal as how the task is done by others on a routine day-to-day basis, and Work- As-Written is what the rules, procedures etc., say about how the work ‘should’ be done. In many ways, considering a lesson as being about changing behaviour is useful as this is what learning is all about. This leads it to be open to an investigation or learning study-style approach, where the teams get together and explore Work-As-Normal and Work-As-Written.
Get a group of say ten people together and after explaining the concepts of Work-As-Done, Work-As-Normal, and Work-As-Written, create sets of Elements of Interest where gaps or differences lie between Work-As-Normal and Work-As-Written as it relates to the lesson to be learnt. Then you can run a simple Five Whys process for each Element of Interest. Don’t forget to explore the mental models associated with the current Work-As-Normal, and instead of a list of actions, come up with what routines might look like to promote alignment between the old Work-As-Normal and the new Work-As-Normal. Also consider what barriers may be present that may prevent this from occurring, what changes need to be made to their mental models, beliefs, and systems. This session will probably take an hour, including some formal time for discussion, thinking, and contemplation.
Always remember that learning is difficult when the teams are harried or are rushed. So, build some soak time into the process so that the participants can discuss and self-reflect on the learning and what it means to them specifically. Doing this sort of work shows that a business has a growth mindset and more specifically a learning mindset.
Key Takeaway: Having a growth mindset expands. Having a fixed mindset limits. We can change a fixed mindset to a growth mindset – if we want to.