Growth Mindset
The true impact of the Department of Government Efficiency might be to focus the national culture on rooting out bureaucratic sclerosis.
Psychology contrasts a growth mindset with a fixed mindset.
“Someone with a growth mindset views intelligence, abilities, and talents as learnable and capable of improvement through effort. On the other hand, someone with a fixed mindset views those same traits as inherently stable and unchangeable over time.”
This is a remarkable way of thinking about the world. I’m sure everyone can think of people who fit into either category. Children tend to have a growth mindset before it is bred out of them. They are curious about the world. They are willing to experiment and fail and try again, all the while learning and improving. It is natural. Until, at some point, some teacher or adult or malevolent peer tells them they’re not good at math or that girls don’t do science well, or whatever.
To have a growth mindset is to be a dangerous person. It requires the courage of independence from the opinions of others. You have to be willing to fail in front of the world, or at least your friends and families, possibly for years at a time. You may never succeed at a professional level. But you will grow.
One ironic example of the way a fixed mindset inhibits progress is technology. After all, technology is said to be a key driver of economic growth. Perhaps this explains why the productivity statistics have failed to show the predicted gains. The part of economic growth attributable to technological gains disappoints.
People who code software hold it as sacred that what they do is a special talent. They discourage people from different backgrounds who want to build apps independently. You should outsource the software development, they say. You need a technical co-founder, they argue. People also discourage themselves.
Technologists perpetuate the self-interested shibboleth that coding is exotic black magic to be practiced only by digital Brahmins. Yet, coding is writing. Coding is thought expressed as zeroes and ones. People can learn how to write. They can learn how to code, too. What’s distinctive about good software is not the syntax or the pretty form. Just as with writing, the interesting bit about code is the thought that underpins it: the way the software defines and then solves a problem.
Good writing is about important topics. Who wants to read about a twenty-something English major doodling in her notebook in a café? I don’t. I want to read something substantive, say a novel tackling a key theme like freedom. Software is no different. I want apps that solve important problems and do so with beauty and grace. So many apps seem to be fun projects for engineers, solutions in search of a problem.
When someone with a philosophy degree learns how to code, her output may be far more valuable than the output of a computer science graduate precisely because of the quality of her underlying thought, her perspective, and her depth of understanding of a significant underlying issue to be fixed.
Good code is art. I suspect that most code is function. This is why the productivity statistics lag. This is the explanation for Robert Gordon’s paradox. We don’t have enough of a growth mindset when it comes to technology for it to have the impact we extrapolate.
We need more art.
It's not just code. It could be anything. Cooking. Drawing. Investing. We are all capable of learning anything. For some people, it may take more effort than for others, depending on the topic. If it’s something similar to what they have learned before, then it might be easier. Someone with an econometrics background might find picking up deep learning to be intuitive. Someone with a background in engine repair may need more time. But anyone can learn anything, given enough effort and access to the right mix of didactic materials for their style of learning.
Anything is possible, especially today with the surfeit of online resources, many of them free. We live in an age in which it has never been easier to liberate oneself from circumstance. The growth mindset is fundamentally optimistic, living in an expanding universe of opportunities.
Imagine a world of polymaths constantly learning interesting combinations of skills. What could we be as an organization or a society of such people?
Yet, the fixed mindset is still pervasive.
The people who have a fixed mindset submit to the inertia of modern life.
Some people reach a certain level of comfort or professional achievement and they just stop learning. They figure that they have earned the right to coast. They convince themselves that life has two phases: an exploration phase and an exploitation phase. Without realizing it, it is as if they are managing their own decline into senescence, trying to preserve a glide path with the least disruption. They seek to enjoy the view for the longest, most comfortable period of time before they return to earth.
Others, born into penury or ignorance, abandon their potential, unaware or unwilling to emancipate themselves.
The problem with this, of course, is that life comes at you. Hard. It has always been so. Change is ineluctable. Assuming that things will be as they were is a poor choice. With a growth mindset, we prepare to take advantage of the storms, not to resign ourselves to our fate.
The interesting thing is that this principle of the growth vs. fixed mindset can be extended to the organization.
Imagine a company (or a country), called Acme. Acme has had some success. They are monetizing their previous investments. But competition is all around them. There are two warring forces within the company. The growth group wants to talk to customers. They want to find problems. They want to hone in on problems that they are capable of solving, perhaps with an extension of their current approach. New solutions become new products. Then, there is the fixed mindset group. They want to set up procedures that help the company milk its current position. They are indifferent to competition, ignorant of the turbulence of ever-swirling change. They are there to manage the decline of what they see as a liquidating trust, looking to stretch out the life of its assets for the longest, largest benefit.
The growth crowd are entrepreneurs. The fixed crowd are bureaucrats.
This is another expression of the dichotomy (what a pretentious Poindexter might call the “dualism”) of contemporary organizational life. There is a battle in the heart of any entity for control of resources. We alluded to this division in last week’s post, Chaotic Good.
“This leaves us with the fundamental divide: chaotic good vs. lawful good. Individualistic agents with a disdain for regulations who recognize the volatility of life and who are willing to move fast and break things face off against the metaphorical HR department, who enforce rules for their own sake, convinced of their personal moral superiority, without any real understanding of how the organization makes money, confident that there is always more where that came from.”
There are many organizations that exist in a petty, fragile equilibrium between these two opposite tribes. These entities sit vulnerable to disruption by external shock. In the United States, our perilous fiscal imbalance jeopardizes our capacity to respond vigorously to any future crisis.
Growth is the salve for what ails us. It is the only solution left. We can’t throw money at the problem. We can’t congratulate ourselves for how great we are. There’s nothing left in the bag. We need new tools. We’re going to have to invent them.
The only chance we have going forward is to hand the reins over to the growth mindset crowd and hope that it’s not too late. We need their bets to bear fruit before the next crisis comes. There’s always a crisis. It’s just a matter of when.
We need to extinguish the fixed mindset approach wherever we find it. We can automate the exploitation piece, freeing up our creative energies.
The fixed mindset crowd has written checks that the growth mindset people are going to have to figure out how to cash.
On its face, the Department of Government Efficiency is just a couple of billionaires making a show of attacking the bureaucracy scapegoat. It is, as our Poindexter friend might say, “performative.”
It is much, much more than that. It is an inspiration to action. It is being led by two men who believe that they can learn anything, can attack any problem. Capture a returning object from space with what appear to be giant chopsticks? Hold my beer.
It would be easy to be cynical and pooh pooh their ability to turn the ship. They will make mistakes. They will stumble. But these are dangerous, independent men with a track record of learning in a hurry. Do not underestimate their ambition or the political capital they have been given to move fast and fix things. They will be indifferent to the criticism from the elite. They welcome it. They feed on it.
No matter the level of their success (and I remain optimistic), they will inspire the nation with a second-order multiplier effect of their entrepreneurial spirit. That’s why their work is so vital. They will convert people to the growth mindset with their example. We will see more chaotic good energy. The Department of Government Efficiency may inspire a spirit of National Efficiency more seamlessly than people can imagine. In this second order effect, companies and non-profits would clean out their own houses when they see the government doing it in DC.
Spring is coming.