How can tarantulas help us be more productive?
Rick Orr, Winning Scotland
We all dream of a productive workplace, but have you ever seen one that looks like this? ChatGPT is great, isn’t it? I’m going to introduce you to some tips and tools as to how you can create a more productive workplace. And as you heard there, it comes from something called growth mindset. You may be familiar with it. It’s research that helps us understand the value of effort, instead of talent. Learning to struggle, and learning from struggle, and using failure positively. And it is proven to work. Companies that adopt a growth mindset are known to be more productive, more better at taking risks. Staff trust each other more, and there’s more loyalty and dedication, but something gets in the way. Two things. One, sorry guys, it’s a bad word, talent. Stop using it. At Enron, they were obsessed with talent, and they crashed and burned. We’re going to talk about that.
Also, fear can get in the way. And this is where the tarantula comes in, because when we find ourselves in over-pressurized situations at work, panic sets in, our brain stops working. It’s the same chemical reaction as a person with arachnophobia gets when they see one of these. So, how do you do it? Forget talent. It’s practice. Taylor Swift wrote 100 songs before she was 12. Lewis Capaldi performed in bars at age 11. The Beatles, as well as drugs, spent $5,000 practicing before they were successful. It was effort, it was commitment and practice. But you have to define it right. Acceptable practice is passing your driving test. Naive practice, driving to work the same way every day. Deliberate practice is trying to get better, looking for the flaws, practicing your reverse parking until you get it correct.
Struggle as well is really, really important. We have to embrace that. It allows our brain to work harder. The reason that iPhone exists is because a team was recruited who were willing to struggle to put themselves through the mill and come out stronger the other side. But we have to avoid that panic zone. So, use this scale to help you. Look for that sweet spot. Look for the opportunity to improve, and stretch, and learn without dropping into the panic zone. A few other things as well. Failure is amazing. WD-40 is called that because WD-39, or all the ones before it, didn’t work. The Dyson vacuum cleaner took 5,000 iterations before it went to market. These guys learned from failure. Netflix build it into their processes. Every new product goes through a process where all staff reviewed and feedback on the mistakes before it goes live. And even if it does fail, they hold it up as a shining example of what to avoid the next time.
But we have to avoid sloppy mistakes. They’re never okay. David Sowell will know that. You look for the stretch mistakes. You push yourself, you try hard, you find those eureka moments. That’s what we’re looking for here, the good mistakes that we can learn from and we treat them that way. And you have to believe. Just by getting this one extra line of feedback, a group of students performed better than their peers, just by showing belief. I know it sounds a bit Hollywood, but it’s true. We have to show belief in people and we also have to show that we are vulnerable. Talking about the time that you fluffed that interview five times to your team maybe doesn’t seem like how you want to present yourself, but it makes you more authentic. It makes you more credible. It allows them to open up to you as well.
So, let’s remind ourselves, effort, struggle, learning from failure, belief in yourself and others, being vulnerable. These are the tenets of a growth mindset organization. That’s what you want to build. How do you do it? The first thing is it has to be in with the bricks, rather than written on the wall as we see sometimes. It has to come from the top-down and from the bottom-up. It needs to be part of our culture, not just a thing we do. On top of that, we need to collaborate. Whenever Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he said he wanted to stop people feeling as if they have to be the single source of knowledge and instead cultivate diverse opinions, people having knowledge and sharing knowledge with each other and collaborating.
And most of all, it takes time. It’s hard. We help schools, and companies, and businesses to do this. You start small. Go back to work tomorrow and say, “Let’s have a talk about the mistakes we make and how we learn from them. Let’s build in struggling to our weekly conversations.” And this is our favorite. It’s the learning pit. It’s basically an illustration of the journey we all go on when we try to do something new. If it’s going for a run on New Year’s Day, we’ll hit that pit and we want to quit. But that’s when you have to keep going. So, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. We’d really love a conversation with you, if you’d want to learn more about growth mindset. Thank you.
