Humble Commitment: The Growth Mindset Phoenix?
How a few tweaks could get Growth Mindset back on track
In last week’s newsletter - The Slow Decline of Growth Mindset, I shared how a fairly obscure book from a psychologist at Stanford became a phenomenon in both educational and business circles, and how it’s sheen has begun to fade.
Now to be clear, while we are almost certainly past “peak” Growth Mindset, it’s still very much on the minds of businesses.
As an example, take this article from HR Dive just a few months ago. It reported on a study from TalentLMS which showed that a full 90% of senior business leaders believe that a growth mindset is important for organizational success.
So, how can it be on the decline?
Well the clues are also in the same study. Senior executives were also polled on whether they believed they personally exhibit a growth mindset, and 96% agreed. But, and here is the kicker, a majority of people reporting to them (54%), disagreed that their own leaders show a growth mindset.
That’s crucial, because a key enabler of growth mindset training is modeling from leadership. If employees don’t believe that their leadership is all in, it will not trickle down in behaviors of the rest of the organization.
From this research, and our own, I believe this indicates three things are true about Growth Mindset:
A dumbed-down (and incorrect) version of Dweck’s research has emerged, which can be simply stated as “growth mindset good, fixed mindset bad”. This version is the one that has achieved almost total saturation in the business world at this point.
Because of this, we have an explosion of what Carol Dweck called “False Growth Mindset”, something she explicitly warned about in 2015.
The result is failure of most Growth Mindset initiatives, sometimes leaving organizations worse off than when they started.
So, if this is happening, the question is, what can we do about it?
Humble Commitment: Growth Mindset 2.0?
When I started BillionMinds, I was searching for something that kept the good aspects of growth mindset—the permission to struggle, the focus on continuous improvement, the rejection of fixed limitations—but left out the more problematic parts like the weaponization potential and the toxic positivity.
The overall aim was to capture something that worked at a deeply personal level for the individual, where there was little if any benefit for simply pretending to exhibit the trait, but where the individual benefits would still accrue to the organization. This was crucial, because it would help prevent faking and weaponization scenarios.
But also, we realized that we needed to capture a set of behaviors that some people already exhibit, otherwise it would all be theoretical.
Initially the picture was very confusing, because high performers exhibit a whole bunch of traits, some of them related to mindset and some of them related to skills. But over time we were able to isolate behaviors that were close to growth mindset, but different to them in some helpful areas.
And once we had done that, we also had a name - Humble Commitment.
At the heart of humble commitment is an apparent paradox. People who exhibit it hold the following two truths simultaneously:
I am not, nor will I ever be, a master (Humility)
I will relentlessly pursue mastery (Commitment)
That might sound weird, but we have found that once people internalize it, it becomes very powerful. The elements of it are in a specific order (i.e. humility comes first, commitment come second), and both are equally necessary.
The humility part is actually a particular type of humility, something that philosophers refer to as epistemic humility. The idea is simple - that you recognize that there are limits to your own knowledge - that your understanding is always partial, that your assumptions might be wrong, and that you are ready to revise your beliefs.
In other words, you are not an expert, not because you haven’t learned enough yet, but because it’s not possible to be one. We’ve found this to be the single most important prerequisite of any form of growth, because without it, you don’t recognize that growth is possible.
The commitment part involves trying to achieve mastery despite knowing that it is impossible. This involves falling in love with the journey not the destination. As the high performance expert Michael Gervais puts it - “With no finish line to cross, mastery is a love affair with experience, honesty, truth, and continual exploration.”
This approach differs from growth mindset in some key ways, even though both came from observation of people who do well and people who do not. Growth Mindset looked at the limitations we place on ourselves (and others place on us) and how much better we can perform if those limitations are lifted. Humble Commitment starts with a limitation, but a universal one, and then challenges the individual to improve while acknowledging the limitation.
There are many public examples of people who exhibit humble commitment, particularly in sports. Golfers are renowned for studying and tweaking their swings, basketball players often spend hours reviewing their body mechanics and even runners pour over video footage to review stride patterns, arm carriage and posture. Often truly elite sports people do this the most. Kobe Bryant and Tom Brady for example, were both notorious for it. They could be confident, even arrogant when it came to comparing their abilities to others, but never lost their epistemic humility. They knew that improvements were always there to be made, and retained the commitment to making them.
How Humble Commitment Changes Durable Skills Training
Growth Mindset training is often seen as standalone and broad. In some cases it represents the start and end of helping organizations to get the best out of their people.
Humble commitment training can be used in a similar way, but we’ve found it to be most beneficial when it’s placed at the beginning of durable skills training. It basically becomes the catalyst that improves the effectiveness of durable skills training.
The main reason for this is the pesky set of cognitive biases we all carry around - particularly the Dunning Kruger effect and related cognitive biases. Most of us start a durable skills journey with a very inaccurate picture of what our durable skills are, in some cases our ideas about our own competencies are completely upside down. Knowing that these biases exist in all of us is very helpful, but it will not miraculously make us fully self-aware. However, if we learn to approach all self-improvement from the starting point that there is no such thing as mastery, by definition there is always more to learn. In this case, the cognitive biases don’t disappear, but nor do they prevent our ability to grow.
For this reason, we now include an element of humble commitment training at the start of all of our durable skills programming, to remind everyone that there are always gaps to fill.
And this mindset doesn’t just affect what we teach in what order, but also how we teach. An essential part of humble commitment is modeling. So teachers are not experts, nor are CEOs. One of the most powerful starts to any program can be the acknowledgement from a CEO of the gaps they have found in themselves, and what they are doing to address them. Once you see that nobody is perfect, it is so much easier to acknowledge that you are not either, and therefore can always grow.
The Rest of this Story
The title of this newsletter is Humble Commitment: The Growth Mindset Phoenix? That was very much intended to be tongue in cheek.
Yes, we’ve seen that this mindset is practically useful when it comes to helping people develop durable skills, and it appears to address the more major issues we’ve seen with growth mindset.
But right now that’s all it is. It’s certainly not an oven-ready replacement for every growth mindset initiative in every company. And perhaps it will never be that.
I know there is much more to learn about it. In fact that learning will never cease. But, I’m committed to the learning journey, and to sharing it with you.
I hope you see what I did there…