Thought Experiment #35: Why every org needs a Head of Mindshifts

This is the seventh post in the series examining new roles that organisations would do well to consider creating. Some of the previous posts, ranging from Director of Failure to Head of Experimentation to Head of Stories, have subsequently resulted in new roles being created.

In this post, I put forward a hypothesis that every organisation would do well to create a new role – Head of Mindshifts. It's a role that is meant to challenge (or augment) how we do learning and development inside organisations.

Almost every sizeable organisation is going through more than one kind of transformation. This may be a purpose transformation (e.g. going back to an old core reason for being that was there when it was founded but lost along the way), a strategy transformation (e.g. new markets, customers or business models), technology transformation (digital-first, electric-first, AI, etc) or an operational transformation (e.g. agile, hyper growth, going lean). The success or failure of the whole organisation often depends on how successful these transformations are.

The job of Head of Mindshifts is to identify the current mindsets entrenched in the organisation which inhibit achievement of these transformations or broader purpose; qualify the new mindshifts that teams or departments within the organisation need to make; identify and support people and processes to make these mindshifts more probable; and amplify as well as track the results to ensure it diffuses through the organisation.

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Before I unpack this role, two things:

Firstly, the inspiration for this role came from four distinct ‘dots’:

●  ‘Dot’ one: There is a growing recognition of the role mindsets play in any transformation. Mo Gawdat, the ex-chief business officer of Google X aptly describes the moonshot factory not as a tool, structure or process, but as a mindset. And, the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation is explicitly focusing on cultivating an experimentation ‘mindset’, as a critical enabler of their advanced innovation strategy.

●  ‘Dot’ two: Some organisations hire psychologists; for example, to help traders to develop a ‘bullish mindset’. This is a “mindset for analyzing and interpreting ambiguous, complex, stressful, and uncertain events by neutralizing crippling emotional states that may be associated with them”. This raised the question for me, what if instead of working on the individual, we had a psychologist of sorts working at the organisation level?

● ‘Dot’ three: As my wife and I are home-schooling our kids, we have seen first-hand the importance of helping our kids make mindshifts from their ‘default’ way of thinking. I have been infusing them with the ‘never give up’ mindset to the point, they give goosebumps, by reminding me now if I lose sight of it in everyday situations. This focus on mindshifts has meant that we don't need to keep telling them 'how they do' at every juncture and decision, as it is rooted in 'how they think'. Most recently, we are focused on shifting from the “It’s hard, I can’t do it” default to “Let me just give it a few tries and see” (aka experiment-first mindset).

• 'Dot' four: Shift mindsets first, before shifting to (new) tools

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Secondly, let us unpack the importance of shifting mindsets (mindshifts), in at least 3 ways:

1. ROI

At the outset, it is important to recognise and address the fact that mindsets can be connected to Return on Investment. Boston Consulting Group’s Chris Zook’s research revealed that the founder’s mindset – containing a sense of ownership, insurgency, and front-line obsession – is correlated to an outsized contribution to growth and profitability of a company’s stock price. Many organisations lose this founders’ mindset once the original founder(s) leaves and getting (shifting) back to it can have a significant financial impact.

2. Purpose and values anchored mindshifts

Most organisations start off with some core reason for being. This purpose is often rooted in people. However, like every organisation, as it grows that purpose is harder and harder to convey and maintain. For example, for a cafe, it may have started out to create a 'space to serve conversations' and ended up with the mindset of the 1000th employee as 'serving coffee'. The subsequent (hundreds of) actions of this new employee, depends on their default mindset.

Also, mindshifts can be anchored to organisations' values. Leaving aside how values statements are so abused, assigned to post-it notes, annual performance reviews, and conferences - the main challenge of value statements is that they are not rooted in a timely problem. They were most likely forged several years ago when your organisation was at a different juncture. They were designed for a static world, ignoring the context of the organisation’s life-stage.

Just as product, services, and whole industries are moving towards a faster pace of change, it is too much to expect our values to serve ever-shifting industry landscapes, challenges, and threats. Taya astutely points out that one way of anchoring mindshifts is to map them to specific organisation values. This creates a win-win scenario, making values more relevant for the here and now and getting organisation level buy-in for the new mindshifts.

3. Shared mindshifts

Mindsets is essentially “the established set of attitudes held by someone” - their default frame of mind and thoughts. And, Carol Dweck’s research brought attention to ‘fixed vs growth’ mindsets, mostly at the individual level. It is time to take the conversation further, at the level of whole organisations, departments, or teams.

However, the reason why I prefer the term ‘mindshifts’ is that it focuses on the change element – we all have entrenched mindsets which need to be shifted.

Shifting the mindsets of one individual is hard, let alone shifting it at the organisation level. But the benefits of mindshifts is that they live for a longer time as opposed to delivering knowledge and tools, which often have a short timeframe of usefulness.

Of course, you need both. And, that’s the shortfall of most efforts inside organisations. For example, we see too many organisations espouse innovation as a tool, and therefore run workshops, rather than shifting to ‘innovation as a mindset’. 

Having attended many innovation-related courses, workshops, and talks, it’s no exaggeration to say that many of them fail to yield the intended results because not enough attention is paid to mindshifts. Almost every organisation focuses on developing the knowledge and skills of their people, with somewhat incremental return on this learning. Very few, if any, organisations focus on cultivating mindshifts.

One explicit concern of having shared mindshifts is that we are stripping away the benefits of diverse perspectives. Absolutely not. The Head of mindshifts is not there to create clones. The value of having some critical mass of shared mindshifts is it allows us to build on each other's thinking through a shared understanding, language, experiences, and spend less time bridging the gap between our differences.

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Job spec of Head of Mindshifts

The Head of Mindshifts may choose to create some or all of the following components:

Observe failures in existing mindsets

The first job of the Head of Mindshifts is to understand the organisation, without the agenda to serve a particular function or department. Hence, ideally this role reports to the CEO. Second best option is that this role sits within Learning and Development or HR department.

The owner of this job needs to build an understanding of which current prevalent mindsets are blocking the vision, purpose, and plans of the organisation.

Through observations and conversations from top to bottom of the organisation, ranging from post-mortems of failed projects to those projects that never took off, the Head of Mindshifts gets to understand the current mindsets that are often entrenched inside the organisation.

Create new ‘shared mindshift" statements

Next, the Head of Mindshifts’ job is to figure out what are the ‘new’ mindshifts required for the organisation as a whole to succeed.

For example, if your organisation is in the ‘Series A blitzscaling life stage’, you may need to drop the conventional norms and go for the ‘move fast and break things’.

If you’re in a global spotlight (think Facebook), you may want to drop the ‘move fast and break things’ which served you well in the past and shift to a ‘space to deliver’.

As Teresa Torres neatly summarises “ There are times to grow business and moments to stay plateau. Time when seeking diverse perspectives adds richness and others when shipping a Minimal Viable Product and letting the market give feedback is the better play. ”

You may frame the move as a 'from-to' mindshift statement. For example,

• From project to experimentation mindshift
• From ‘we have the answers’ to co-creation mindshift
• From delivery mindset to discovery mindshift
• From products to platform mindshift

Qualify and quantify the mindshifts

Next, the Head of Mindshifts’ job is to quantify and qualify the mindshift statements, so people may understand it better.

For example, if you want to infuse an experimentation mindshift, you may choose to codify it in a number of different ways e.g. "Weekly touchpoints with the customers by everyone, where they conduct at least one experiment every month, to see what works and what doesn't"

Remove mindshift frictions

Of course, mindshifts are not going to happen easily, but at the same time you can't make them too difficult or painful to achieve. The Head of Mindshifts job includes identifying (and fixing) existing organisation processes, from recruiting to finance to procurement to compensation to operating norms, which create friction against the mindshift taking root. 

For example, with an experimentation mindshift, the Head of Mindshifts job can be help create specific experiment-permissions to make the mindshift easier.

Identify the right people

The Head of Mindshifts job is to leverage the positive deviance examples (those who already embody this mindshift) to identify the early diffusers - the right people who are more likely to have an outsized contribution on the organisation as a result of going through some level of support.

Additional criteria you may use can include:

• You may choose people from different back-office departments, for example, legal, procurement, and IT, to ensure greater alignment of thinking between front-end and back-end systems of your organisation.
• Or choose from a mix of senior, middle and junior staff. You probably will also need the CEO to go through a mindshift journey. As Wissam reminds us "don’t presume that the CEO’s mindset is correctly aligned. Very often s/he is the most in need of a mindshift (in fact that's where mindshifts can start)".
• Or choose from a mix of people depending on specific teams or projects that they working on - those which need a greater, immediate need for this mindshift.

Create mindshift interventions

Although there is no silver bullet answer to a mindshift, it's unlikely to come from another workshop, conference, or information slash talking-at-you training intervention.

The Head of Mindshifts job is to create daily touchpoints (dots) as well as more orchestrated experiences, network-building, success, and stories, so the chance of it happening is not just possible, but more probable.

Dots: Daily touchpoints may include light, drip feed of readings, videos, stories and example actions. The idea is to make the mindshift accessible, creating as many 'dots' and light interactions as possible.

Experiences: I have witnessed my fair share of poor learning experiences being created. For example, a group of leaders are taken to silicon valley and go through a tour of organisations, which largely consist of 'talking at you' sessions sprinkled with comfortable questions at the end of each session. More often than not, what you are creating is more 'dots' but not shifts. I have also seen awesome experiences, where the goal was to create as many uncomfortable conversations to help increase the likelihood of a shift happening. Where before going through the experience, participants were supported to turn their old default thinking into new questions and hypotheses which were tested through conversations.

I would go as far as saying that it's conversations that have the greatest potential for a mindshift (not tools, presentations, workshops, etc).

For example, it was a 30-minute conversation between an aspiring Australian education entrepreneur and a Stanford (silicon valley) maths professor, who told him to take a risk on his idea which led to his mindshift on risk taking, and launch what has now become a successful venture changing the way maths is taught in Australia. The same advice given to him by his colleagues in his own network had not done the trick. Nor, had any presentation or talk about innovation. Nor, had the use of the many business-model canvas tool.

Ghaith reminds us that these experiences can be created, as an experiment, through existing role(s) in learning and development, and using the results can help create the case for a full-time role in Head of Mindshifts.

Success: Without a doubt, the best way to create a mindshift is by allowing people to experience some level of success. Having personally supported startup founders who are failing in some key areas of customer, product or funding - I've seen that active co-creation (rather than mentoring) helps to accelerate their learning to the point where mindshifts happen more often than not.

Networks: The Head of Mindshifts job is first to identify and then to make external networks (co-creators, those who have already made the mindshift and can coach others, those going through the 'messy middle' of it) accessible to the people inside of your organisation. This is building on the logic that if you are an aspiring innovator and you 'hang' around with enough other innovators, you will end up thinking, talking, and acting in similar ways in due course.

Stories: As mindshifts happen it's important to capture them as effective stories of before, during and after. These stories are best told orally, or through video - rather than the written text. These stories become your tool to diffuse or scale them to all areas of the organisation.

Of course, individuals will most likely have to go through their own mix of 'dots', experiences, success, networks and stories. The Head of Mindshifts job is to be deliberate in designing and delivering a variety of interventions that proactively support mindshifts.

Mindshifts metrics

Every quarter the Head of Mindshifts may choose to focus on one particular mindshift. Why? Because, focusing on one for a period of time will help create the space to build the collective understanding and momentum required for ‘shared’ mindshifts to thrive. It also creates the opportunity to focus on more than one, and different mindshifts at different times of the year, as the organisation’s strategies and transformations evolve. Some mindshifts may be revisited more than once in a year if they are proving hard to shift but are important to the progress of the organisation.

The Head of Mindshifts may create concrete metrics to guide their work - for example, for each 1 mindshift, to create 10+ 'new' mindshift stories of people (through the programme above), build 100+ influencers, reach 1000+ actions, create a network of 10,000+ followers, and generate 1,000,000+ views.

It's all about creating the mindshift as the new default.

In summary

The job of Head of Mindshifts is to identify the current mindsets which inhibit organisation growth; qualify the new mindshifts that teams or departments within the organisation need to make to serve a purpose, values, or a transformation; identify and support people and processes to make these mindshifts more probable; and amplify and track the results to ensure it diffuses through the organisation.

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