Chapter 8: Growing and experimenting
When talking about their organizations or how the organization should look like in the future, one thing that stands out is the ability to keep learning and growing. Sam Spurlin mentions the growth mindset, a theory developed by Carol Dweck, and says that every good organization runs an experiment on itself. According to Tess the business has to have some kind of social experiment going on since it’s made up of a group of people trying to figure out how to work better together. Having a hypothesis and testing it out can be one way of cultivating this approach according to Sam.
People with a growth mindset see their skills and qualities as something that can be developed through dedication and effort, instead of seeing themselves as naturally talented at certain things, something that is referred to as a fixed mindset (Dweck, 2007). These two mindsets can be developed through the organizational culture and self development initiatives from the employees in an organization (Keating and Heslin, 2015). The growth mindset is all about learning, improving and growing (Dweck, 2007), which could be why it’s strongly correlated to creativity (Karwowski, 2013). It could therefore be relevant and beneficial to prime organizational members for a growth mindset through culture that allows people to experiment on themselves.
At 30 Weeks, an accelerator program for designers, the founders/designers set up their culture at the beginning of the program. As time goes along Marianne Aerni, former co-director, notices that the culture fades and prompts the designers to revisit their culture and asks them what’s actually happening and if it’s part of the culture. Joe Hollier also states that culture is a work in progress and something that needs to be top of mind. As with their products and/or services, it’s about constantly trying to figure out how the make the process better says Collin Cummings and designing their organizations to be in constant evolution when it comes to roles and systems according to Dara Blumenthal.
This evolutionary approach is somewhat rare in traditional organizational literature. For example Kurt Lewin’s theory (Eriksson-Zetterquist, Müllern and Styhre, 2011) for change management includes the stages unfreeze, change, and freeze, which is a rigid approach to organizational development. It’s also a very inefficient one since 70% of all change initiatives fail (Leonard and Coltea, 2013) and if you have to change, meaning unfreezing and freezing, in order to keep up with the world it doesn’t look good for your organization. Aiken and Keller (2009) propose that organizations put role modeling, reinforcing mechanisms and capability building at the core of the organization in order to enable it to make the changes necessary. This is with traditional glasses on, meaning the leaders and a hierarchical structure are the main drivers, but could be adapted to be more collaborative and flat to better suit startups and their work in building their cultures.
Insight 20: A growth mindset should be cultivated in the members of the organization
Insight 21: Setting up a habit of revisiting your culture and building skills in communication allows for fluidity
The learning organization
Dara mentions that their consulting approach at Nature of Work is based on creating opportunities for learning and repels the notion of “culture design” as a concept as her interpretation of it reads as on of dictation and not as enabling a system of questioning. And as the teams grow, Collin is concerned with how his organization can change and learn from it’s new members, but for this to happen there needs to be low risk involved along with a safe space to test out new behavior, says Deborah. As Dara states, people need to learn how to ask questions differently in order to make a change and learn, something that Marianne agrees with saying that a good learning experience comes out of challenging people to question their surroundings.
Hanson and Hoyos (2015) mentions three processes that are vital for learning to happen.
- Collaboration — opportunities to come together to discuss learning through a relationship-based approach
- Inquiry — being curious which starts with information that sparks a questions or dilemma that’s analyzed in order to become more strategic
- Reflection — being introspective in order to possibly reconsider the organizational practice
Strategic learning interventions has also been shown to improve performance in the long-term by fostering the knowledge, motivation, and potential of the organization’s members (Kim, 2015). It’s therefore vital to invest in these types of processes by using collaboration to learn from new (and “old”) team members through an inquisitive state of mind that allows for growth and reflection.
So how can we design for optimal learning? Mathias Jakobsen mentions you can approach it as a designer and look at the outcomes you’d like to achieve and design around that. Setting the outcomes and working backwards is the most common approach (Allison; Joe Hollier; Lisa Pertoso). Lisa also mentions that you have to take the goals and challenges of the group into consideration, along with what they’re working on at the moment, to be truly successful. It’s also important to take Hansons and Hoyos (2015) three processes into consideration and make sure that collaboration can happen in a productive way, along with reflection and priming individuals to be more curious.
The goal-setting approach, along with staying fluid, is present in Keller and Kusko’s (2015) work where they describe a model that teachers use to enhance their teaching. The teacher’s start with analyzing assessment data, setting goals and creating a plan for achieving these goals, along with 2–3 strategies. After a couple of weeks they reassess their strategy and plan to determine if they’re on the right path of achieving their goal and make adjustments accordingly. This shows a high level of experimentation and awareness around actions and behavior. It’s possible that this approach also could be applied to culture building since it’s based on a reflection and behavior.
Most startups work under the framework Lean Startup where prototyping and minimum viable product (MVP) are two main concepts. Sam suggests that that same mindset should go into the organization itself and not just the product. By developing a prototyping mindset nothing is ever fixed and you can go back to a decision or part of the organization at any time due to its flexible nature. This coincides with the approach from Keller and Kusko (mentioned above) and could also be linked to the Double Diamond framework, a design process model with divergent and convergent stages and grounded in human-centered design, which could be translated to culture building initiatives through the insights and theory presented so far in this project.
The Double Diamond consists of these stages (Design Council, n.d.):
- Discover — Identify user needs
- Define — Interpret and align needs to business objectives
- Develop — Develop, iterate, and test solutions
- Deliver — Launch to market & feedback loops
Insight 22: Strategic learning interventions should happen with a foundation in collaboration
Insight 23: An experimental mindset should be cultivated through supporting organizational members to be more curious and data-driven
Insight 24: In order to work backwards from a goal, needs of the organizational members and the business objectives need to be explored and understood
Next: Chapter 9: Overall discussion
Previous: Chapter 7: The human side of organizations
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Hyper Island — MA Digital Media Management
Industry Research Project
