Demystifying Mindsets
Cognitive stance in the creation of organisational culture
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.” — Thomas Sowell. 1
I first got involved in helping clients create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness in the late 1980’s whilst working for one of the world’s leading open innovation labs — itself an exemplary model of such a culture.2
One day, a longstanding client said to me: “Geoff — we like working with your people more than with our own people. You couldn’t come and help our people behave more like your people, could you?”
That invitation launched the career path I’ve been on ever since. 3
Over the three decades since then, I’ve repeatedly seen that the biggest obstacle to organisations creating a future-fit culture is a widely accepted, seemingly plausible, largely unexamined, and ultimately disastrous belief about what an organisational culture actually is.
This turns out to be yet another area, alongside those listed in Thomas Sowell’s famous quote above, where what works has been replaced by what sounds good.
And what sounds good, but doesn’t work, is the myth that an organisation’s culture is its shared values.
In a previous in-depth article, I’ve described how the toxic myth of culture as shared values came into existence more than 40 years ago, why it took such a stranglehold on the organisational discourse, why it doesn’t work in practice, and worst of all, why and how it actively prevents organisations from creating future-fit cultures. 4
So let’s take a look at what does work instead, building on what the founders of the innovation lab realised about the pivotal role of mindsets in cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, and what I’ve repeatedly seen in the dozens of organisations I’ve worked with throughout Europe, Asia, and the US over the past 35 years.
Getting to grips with mindsets
When an individual steps into an organisational context they bring with them a set of beliefs, skills, and experience grounded in their sense of self at work. 5
This set of beliefs, skills, experience and underlying sense of self reflect four systemically intertwined and inextricably interdependent modes of explicit and tacit knowing forming and informing their mindset. 6
Knowing is not just about explicit thinking — it also encompasses three deeper, progressively more tacit layers: doing, seeing, and being.
All four layers feature in an individual’s mindset — which is the cognitive stance they operate from in the context.
Understanding mindset as cognitive stance reflects recent developments in cognitive science, which recognises that cognition is inherently embodied (i.e. not just inside the head), embedded (i.e. causally dependent on the world outside the body), extended (i.e. essentially involving other people/processes), and enacted (i.e. involving active engagement with the world). 7
Mindsets and organisational culture
Reflect back on your own embodied experience of stepping into a new organisational context and the process of finding your feet over the first few weeks or months.
As you get to grips with the culture of the place you gradually pick up an embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted understanding of the way we do things round here.
You’ve brought with you into this new context a set of beliefs, skills, experience, and an underlying sense of your self at work.
As you become familiar with the new context, you notice where your beliefs fit in, or don’t fit in, with the prevailing culture.
You get a sense of which of your existing skills will be of use, new skills you may need to develop, and how comfortably or uncomfortably these sit with your sense of self.
You start to see where your experience is relevant, what future experience you might develop, where this feels worth pursuing, and what you might prefer to avoid.
All the above depends on how your embodied experience of the culture in the new context sits with your identity at work.
As you continue to work within the new context, over time you may:
modify your beliefs — adapting existing ones, adding new ones, dropping old ones
develop your skills — cultivating new ones, deepening existing ones, allowing some old ones to fade
gain experience — building on existing, adding new, subsuming old
develop an evolved and evolving identity at work — amplifying some aspects, fine tuning others, allowing some aspects to fall away in the identities you adopt and the identities you assign to others.
All the time your mindset is being shaped by, and simultaneously shaping, the evolving culture.
But where does that culture actually exist?
It’s in the mindsets of you and the other people that form the organisational community.
Does this mean that everyone who works together has the same mindset?
Far from it.
That’s the old shared values myth trying to poke its nose in again…
What it does mean is that each person has their own individual mindset — their cognitive stance, their state of being, seeing, doing, and thinking — that systemically interfaces, interacts, and intertwines with the individual mindsets of others in the organisational community to form and inform the culture.
The vast, and frankly unfathomable complexity of the interactions between the mindsets of the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people within an organisation are not just randomly interconnected in some haphazard, higgledy-piggledy arrangement.
There’s always a systemic pattern to how these mindsets hang together.
The organisation’s culture is this system of mindsets — forming and informing people’s awareness of “the way we do things round here”.
Equipped with this understanding, it becomes possible to decode the unique way the culture hangs together, finding exactly where to focus efforts to change the system of mindsets — the culture — with maximum leverage and therefore minimum wasted effort.
The way the system of mindsets hangs together is unique to each organisation.
This is why the one-size-fits-all, so-called “best practices” of mainstream consulting firms not only fail, but also perpetuate the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently prevented organisations from creating future-fit cultures for decades. 8
The bottom line: whilst the idea of culture as shared values may sound good, what actually works in practice is understanding culture as system of mindsets.
An example
Today we’re used to China being a global economic force — the world’s second largest economy — but this wasn’t always the case.
In the late 1990’s a global consumer goods company asked me to help them shift their culture to develop new, more competitive products, with reduced time to market.
One of the first people I met was the Kurt — the European Product Manager responsible for one of the main product lines crucial to their future success.
Kurt was based at the company’s central R&D facility in Western Europe, whilst manufacturing and marketing were both based in China.
At our first meeting, Kurt told me straight that their inability to reduce time to market had nothing to do with him and his local colleagues, but because — in his most memorable soundbite — “the Chinese are thirty years behind the West”.
At a project progress meeting in China a few weeks later, Kurt refused a request by JJ — the Chinese Production Manager — to cut a two week shipping delay from the programme because it would incur additional air freight costs of $10,000. 9
I turned to JJ and asked him how much revenue the organisation would lose due to the two week delay in production start caused by Kurt’s refusal.
Now, remember this was the era before smartphones, and very few people had even seen a handheld computer — let alone used one.
Silence fell as JJ pulled a small handheld computer from his pocket and tapped a few figures into the business model he’d programmed.
Kurt was gobsmacked when his supposedly 30 years behind the West colleague pointed out that the two week delay would cost the organisation more than $3,000,000 in lost production…
Before this ‘wake-up’ moment, what was Kurt’s mindset?
He believed, that Chinese colleagues like JJ were unable to add value to sense making and decision making until this new experience shifted his beliefs.
He now understood that:
His $10,000 “saving” came at a cost of $3,000,000
This cost was well known and understood by JJ — his better informed and better equipped Chinese colleague
By working with his Chinese colleagues, their collective sense making, decision making, and action taking could identify further reductions in time to market.
How did I know that by asking JJ about the cost, Kurt would have this mindset-shifting realisation?
I didn’t — not with complete certainty.
But I had previously spoken to JJ, knew how much the delay to production start would cost, that he had his handheld device, and clearly wasn’t 30 years behind the West.
I also knew — from bitter experience — that if I’d simply tried to tell Kurt this was the case, it would not have changed his beliefs, because it didn’t fit with his current mindset, deeply anchored in his past experience and identity in the work context.
The question was how to create the conditions for Kurt to have a new experience that was sufficiently powerful to shift his mindset.
JJs presence at the meeting in China provided the perfect opportunity.
When he returned to Europe at the end of a highly productive week, Kurt took three new things with him:
A project plan with a significantly reduced time to market worth more than $10,000,000 in additional revenues.
His very own shiny new handheld computer that JJ had personally taken him out to buy.
A new mindset with a deeper appreciation for the benefits of working with his international colleagues as members of a single global project team.
Not only had his understanding of, and appreciation for, his colleagues improved significantly, his mindset shift led to a systemic shift in the culture as system of mindsets, unlocking greater innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
For him and his colleagues, the culture had transformed in an instant.
The secret, as always, lay in focusing precisely and deeply on finding the leverage within the system of mindsets that would unblock, unlock, and unleash the collective capacity of the organisational community to shape its future. 10
Questions for reflection
Which prevalent mindsets in your organisation systemically smother, stifle, or strangle innovation, agility, and adaptiveness?
Who are the most influential people whose mindsets, attitudes, and behaviours systemically perpetuate the current culture as system of mindsets? 11
Where do you and your colleagues need to focus in order to create a future-fit culture?
Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional? (1993) on Goodreads. Thomas Sowell (b 1930) is an economist who has taught at Cornell, UCLA, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. The extended version of the quote is “Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area — crime, education, housing, race relations — the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”
Cambridge Consultants: “A future unconstrained by current thinking”.
That career path is set out in my LinkedIn profile here. If you’d like to connect, just drop me a request mentioning this post.
For more on how the myth of culture as shared values came about, and why it prevents organisations from creating future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness, see this previous article: The toxic myth of 'culture as shared values'.
Actually, when an individual steps into a specific context in any aspect of their life they bring with them beliefs, skills, and experience all rooted in a sense of self in that context, but here we’ll focus specifically on the work context.
For more on how the nature of tacit knowledge and its relationship to explicit knowledge, see this previous article.
Third generation “4E” Cognitive Science is a significant evolution from previous notions of cognition as wholly brain-based, either as local computation (1st Gen) or as neural networks (2nd Gen). For more on these developments see The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition — Oxford University Press (2018) and Phenomenology and the Third Generation of Cognitive Science: Towards a Cognitive Phenomenology of the Body (2007).
To understand the Five Fatal Habits that have consistently killed organisational efforts to create future-fit cultures — and how to overcome them — download my free 22 page report.
The shipping policy, a legacy from a long-departed financial controller, was that such items were to be surface shipped to reduce costs on the financial controller’s P&L account.
For more on where and how to focus in this way, see this previous article: Leverage for systemic change.
For more on finding this focus, see this previous article: Focus on key influencers.