Can you change mindsets?

Organisations cannot keep up with change with old management styles.

In a recent article , McKinsey highlights a new form of organisation and management that has been emerging.

This approach focuses on a powerful aspiration: creating sustainable, inclusive growth.

Companies that go down this path will be really hard to catch because inclusion allows people to unleash their potential, and growth gives more people a space in which they can self-actualise.

Will this approach improve company performance too?

McKinsey gives the right answer to this question by saying "We are moving from an era of individual leaders to an era of networked leadership teams that steer the organisation".

It emphasises that this requires connecting at a human level, sharing values, beliefs, hopes, and fears and enabling all to reveal the greatness that lies within.

How can organisations create sustainable, inclusive growth?

McKinsey believes this new approach calls on leaders to make fundamental evolutionary shifts, well beyond the standard expectation that they continually develop additional skills.

?According to McKinsey, the problem stems from traditional mindsets and leaders must make fundamental shifts in their mindsets.

I agree…

If you define the root cause of the problem as traditional mindsets, the solution would seem to be to shift these mindsets.

?"Mindset shifting" is a popular concept these days.

For example, many people point to the "fixed mindset" as the obstacle that prevents organisations from performing much better. When you define the root cause in this way, the solution is to change the mindset, for example to a "growth mindset".

?It all makes sense.

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But how can mindset be changed?

Do you think that people like me, who read this article and say "I think it that is right" can change their mindset and behaviour at work? In other words, can they adopt possibility, abundance, partnership, discovery, and authenticity mindsets?

Not easily. Being convinced isn’t enough to shift mindsets.

At the end of the article, McKinsey explains how these shifts can be made with a leadership transformation program. In this method, the change environment is created and maintained for a long time and it is supported by the top management of the organisation. This allows new mindsets and behaviours to sprout and develop.

Nothing is surprising in this. This is how people learn.

The question is:?

Is it the best solution?

Sometimes, representing, reframing, restructuring or reimagining a problem brings better solutions.

Let's ask some questions to represent the problem from a neuroscience-based BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) perspective.

What exactly is ''mindset?'' Is it something we can change?

These questions are important because I see people discussing mindset change, assuming they mean the same thing but they don't.?

• Some think a mindset is a set of thoughts that can be changed with training/persuasion.
• Or, mindset is something people can choose, like a fixed/growth mindset.
• For some others, mindsets are beliefs that produce thoughts, feelings and actions.

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According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a mindset is a person's way of thinking and opinions.

From the #BTFA lens, a mindset is an instant state of mind. It is what we instantly think, feel and plan to act about something. A state of mind is a prediction the brain constructs by using

• Exteroception (sensory stimuli, what's happening in the environment)
• Interoception (internal signals about the state of our body)
• Past experiences (beliefs, encoded as neural pathways)

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A mindset can’t be fixed:

Neural networks in our brains continuously fire and produce predictions depending on these three factors. As all these factors change in time, the predictions (mindsets) change constantly. In addition, neural networks are biological circuits that live and change, therefore the way they produce predictions changes every day. A mindset can’t be fixed.

We can only talk about someone’s mindset at a certain time and context. It's like taking a picture of our thoughts, feelings, attitudes, preferences, and emotions. Pictures remain fixed but mindsets change constantly, just like people change but their pictures don’t.

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Mindsets don’t exist all the time, they are produced every time:

How people prefer to behave in certain conditions, or mindsets/predictions, are not recorded and recalled in the brain. They are constructed automatically, every time before we act. Efforts to change mindsets usually fail because mindsets are just the outcomes/products of a mechanism.

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A mindset is not hardwired:

There is no specific circuit in our brains corresponding to specific mindsets. A mindset is not something hardwired or innate. They are built with neurogenesis and neuroplasticity as we live and experience our environment.

Among exteroception, interoception and beliefs that affect mindset, we have control only over the first one, we can change the environment.

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Deal with the root cause, not the symptoms:

People don’t shift their mindsets just by reading an article or attending training.

The replacement of one belief by another is related to the strengthening of the relevant neural pathways in the brain. This is a process which is influenced by sensory stimuli provided by the environment. You can hardly teach people to be creative in a place where their manager is bullying them every day.

Transformation programs similar to those proposed by McKinsey create a suitable environment where new beliefs can thrive. People think and behave according to their new beliefs and when they see that the results improve, their beliefs can reach the power to override their old beliefs, that is, they change.

When beliefs change, thoughts and feelings (mindsets) change. Actions change.

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?Accelerate change with BTFA.

?Learning from the consequences of our actions is an effective way to learn.

?"The only source of knowledge is experience."- Albert Einstein

Fortunately, there is another way. Given that the brain believes stories in the form of cause and effect, it is easy to believe the cause and effect relationships proven by science.

• BTFA uses the latest findings in neuroscience and accelerates the process of shifting beliefs.
• BTFA does not try to persuade leaders by explaining that new mindsets will benefit individuals and organisations. Instead, BTFA shows under the light of neuroscience, how practices with "traditional" skills degrade the performance of brains.
• BTFA shows that human behaviours are not random, they are produced by a mechanism that works on the cause-effect principle. Almost all human behaviour can be predicted if one knows what is going on in the environment and one's past experiences.
• Managers who are unable to reason about the causes of other people’s behaviours tend to control or suppress them. Managers who know the BTFA mechanism of the brain move from being problem creators to problem solvers.

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Too ambitious?

You might say, "Well, wasn't this known before?

In recent years, rapidly developing technology has improved imaging techniques and fuelled neuroscience research drastically. Much of what has been achieved in recent years has not yet been reflected in the field of management. This is what we're trying to do with BTFA.

Leaders who decode the BTFA mechanism no longer have to worry about mindsets because they can create the conditions in which brains work at their best.

?"Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime''

For more information about the BTFA Online Course, please message me or my partner David Bovis, M. npn here.