Category: Social Science

How you can build skills and grow using your mindset: Mindset part 4

August 31, 2020 / / 1 Comment

This is the last part in a four-part series of blogposts on mindset. In part 1 (Mindset – The book) Nicole and I summarized the book “Mindset”. In part 2 (Looking Back on Perfection and Burnout), we talked about how we suffered from our fixed mindsets. In part 3 (Dealing with mindsets), we shared stories on how we dealt with our mindsets. In this last blogpost we want to help others deal with their own mindset. We share how you can find out what mindset you have and how can you change a fixed mindset into a growth mindset.

We know that mindset is important. A growth mindset is the key to success and more happiness. Or as learner lab taught us “Skills are built, not born.” People are designed to continuously improve! Absolutely everyone has the capacity to be better at virtually everything!

Growth mindset makes you a better and happier person

Research shows that if you have a growth mindset you will be more self-confident, you will allow yourself to make mistakes, you will ask for help more and you will believe it’s okay not to know something. This helps you to be a better learner because you will actually be learning from the feedback and criticism you receive. You also learn to deal with setbacks and you will not give up as easily. This makes you more resilient, will reduce stress and will help to improve relationships because contact is deeper. All of this will make you a better and happier person.

So, what about you? We advise you to learn about mindset. After that, do an introspection to learn about your own mindset. With this knowledge you can deal with your mindset and take steps to change it.

Learn about mindset

First and most important: read the book (or our summary here). The book is easy to read and contains many examples that will give insight in how fixed and growth mindsets work. These visuals also give a bit of understanding about how fixed and growth mindsets work:

Graph by Nigel Holmes (http://nigelholmes.com/)

Graph by Learner Lab (https://thelearnerlab.com/growth-mindset/)

There are also many videos you can watch. On the website of Mindset Works you will find a page full of links to amazing videos.

One of the most important things to take away while learning about mindset is simply the fact that traits are not fixed and that you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks! We are not born with a finite amount of intelligence, a fixed personality, or a certain amount of artistic talent. Everyone can change and grow – and that opens up a world of possibilities.

Determine Your Mindset

After learning about mindset, it’s time to determine your own mindset. Which mindset do you have? Remember that mindset can differ in different situations. It is perfectly possible that you have a growth mindset in one situation and have a fixed one in other situations. Our mindsets are constantly shifting and changing. There are several tests online you can take to help you gain insight. On the website of Mindset Works, you can find this one. In the book you will find a test too:

Answer these questions about intelligence. Read each statement and decide whether you mostly agree with it or disagree with it.

  1. Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
  2. You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
  3. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
  4. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

Questions 1 and 2 are the fixed-mindset questions. Questions 3 and 4 reflect the growth mindset. Which mindset did you agree with more? You can be a mixture, but most people lean toward one or the other. Now look at these statements about personality and character and decide whether you mostly agree or mostly disagree with each one.

  1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
  2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
  3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can’t really be changed.
  4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.”

Here, questions 1 and 3 are the fixed-mindset questions and questions 2 and 4 reflect the growth mindset. Which did you agree with more?

(Source: Carol Dweck. “Mindset – Updated Edition: Changing The Way You think To Fulfil Your Potential)

Changing your mindset

“The key to changing your mindset lies first and foremost in self-awareness”, says Scott Jeffrey of CEOsage, who published a great self-help guide called “A Complete Guide to Changing Your Fixed Mindset into a Growth Mindset“. And we totally agree. We suggest you to begin writing things down on a regular basis, a process called journaling. In this blogpost written by Huib you find more information about reflection and journaling. How do you react in certain situations? What do you feel? What is the inner dialog going on inside your head when a particular situation arises? Write down your observations. It helped us to recognize patterns and feelings.

In our experience after finding out about the importance and influence of mindset, we dealt with our mindsets better. Also learning about neuroplasticity made us see that there is a way to change our mindsets. It is important to do an introspective to find out in which situations your mindset is fixed and not helping you. It opens up possibilities to change and grow.

Step 1: in the book Dweck advises us to accept that we all have both mindsets. The first step is to recognize and embrace your fixed mindset.

Dweck suggests to give the persona a name. And we think it is actually a good idea we had never thought of. Huib named his fixed mindset “Randall Flagg” after the villain from Stephen King’s book. Also as a pun to flag when his fixed mindset pops up. Nicole named hers “Marie”, which is her middle name. It helps remind her that her fixed mindset is always there, waiting to appear.

Step 2 is to learn what triggers our fixed mindset. Failures? Criticism? Deadlines? Disagreements? When is your fixed mindset a problem? Understand what happens to you when your persona shows up. Learn about yourself, your feelings and the fears that activate it. As you come to understand your triggers and get to know your fixed mindset persona, don’t judge it. Just observe it.

Step 3 is to recognize that you have a choice. Remind yourself that it is “just” fear. Your beliefs and your thinking are sabotaging your growth and giving you stress. When you recognize your fixed mindset, remember it is just a mindset. And mindsets can change. Accepting your fear will make it easier to deal with it.

Your brain can change due to neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to undergo changes. Research shows that many aspects of the brain can be altered (plasticity means changeable) even through adulthood! Actually, our brain is built to change. By practicing, you can change the pathways in your brain. Watch this video or read this article to learn more.

 Step 4: the last step is to switch to a growth mindset when those triggers occur. Here it is key to understand that it is all about how you think. Your belief is the most important factor. Focus on what you learned about mindsets. Hold the belief that you can change your mindset. Learner lab taught us: to build a growth mindset, focus on the belief, and the actions will follow. Challenge the fixed mindset persona by asking questions to guide your thoughts. Open yourself up to growth. Take small steps. Don’t expect too much and realize it will take time and effort to change your mindset. Experiment and try different approaches. Find a way that suits you.

Scott Jeffrey made a great list of questions that might help you activate a growth mindset:

  • What can I learn from this?
  • What steps can I take to help me succeed?
  • Do I know the outcome or goal I’m after?
  • What information can I gather? And from where?
  • Where can I get constructive feedback?
  • If I had a plan to be successful at [blank], what might it look like?
  • When will I follow through on my plan?
  • Where will I follow through on my plan?
  • How will I follow through on my plan?
  • What did I learn today?
  • What mistake did I make that taught me something?
  • Is my current learning strategy working? If not, how can I change it?
  • What did I try hard at today?
  • What habits must I develop to continue the gains I’ve achieved?

When you are facing a problem or situation that you are trying to apply a growth mindset solution to, Dweck suggests to make a concrete plan: “These concrete plans (plans you can visualize about when, where, and how you are going to do something) lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success.” Once you have that plan, stick to it.

Change is hard

Remember that change is hard. We make changing your mindset sound easy on paper but like any other change, it is a journey. It doesn’t happen overnight. You will have setbacks. The key is to approach these setbacks using your growth mindset: what can you learn from them? What will you change the next time you are in the same situation? Adjust your growth plan as needed. You will also have successes. Learn from them as well! What can you take away from them to continue to grow? Keeping setting goals for growth. If one approach doesn’t seem to work, readjust and try another.

Keep at it. As Dweck says, “Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way.” Keep taking the growth-oriented action. Eventually with time and repetition, it becomes habit. Changing your mindset takes effort, but it will open up all sorts of doors to new opportunities.

We love to hear from you

Good luck working on your mindset. We are curious to learn how it goes for you. If you want to share your stories, need some help or just want to talk, let us know. We are happy to talk to you! Find us on Twitter (Huib and Nicole) or LinkedIn (Huib and Nicole). Start today, don’t think it will get better by itself. Because it won’t. It requires work. A lot of work. But it will make your life a whole lot easier. If you need some support in your journey, just reach out.

Resources:

Dealing with mindsets: Mindset – part 3

August 11, 2020 / / 1 Comment

In our first blog post in this series on mindset Nicole and I summarized the book “Mindset” by Carol Dweck. In the second blog post “Looking Back on Perfection and Burnout” we shared our personal history with growth and fixed mindsets. This blog post we talk about how we dealt and currently deal with our mindsets. We also talk about how we changed the way we think. 

Nicole’s story:
When Huib suggested that in the third part of our blog post that we talk about how we started to change our mindset, I knew that it was going to take a bit of work and a lot of reflection. The shift in mindset for me was not necessarily a conscious effort until, of course, I read the book. For me, the shift started with a burnout…and with therapy.

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I used to work in a forensic crime lab. The training I went through was intense – they make it harder than it really is because then you are prepared for everything that might come your way. But looking back, I think that training exacerbated my already perfectionistic tendencies. I had to do everything right or a case might get thrown out. I put a lot of pressure on myself to not make any mistakes. As you might imagine, this caused an intense amount of anxiety in my life. There were days I had to go down to my car in the parking lot to just get away from work for a bit. While I was in the car, I would break down and cry. At some point, I realized that this wasn’t healthy – I couldn’t go on living my life like this. I needed to make a change.

At the same time, I had started going to therapy. This was not the first time I had been in therapy – I had been in it in the past to deal with some issues with relationships in my life. But this time I was in to try to deal with my anxiety – I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and started medication in addition to the therapy. One of the most important things I discovered during therapy was my need for people’s approval. I held the belief that everyone should like me. The most profound insight and driver in the change in the way I thought was a simple question posed to me by my therapist: “Do you like everyone?” And of course, I said no. To which she said, “Of course not. And not everyone is going to like you.” That message struck a chord and has stuck with me. There’s no need to try to prove myself to people, or even to myself. Trying my best and doing the right things in life were all I needed to do. I won’t say that I don’t still think about people’s approval – as with anything, it is a life-long learning curve. But I sure care less about it now than I did back then. I think that was the first step on my journey of shifting away from a fixed mindset.

The second step goes back to that change I said I needed to make in my life. I decided to go back to what I originally wanted to do in life, my true passion: work with animals in some capacity. So, with the help and support of my partner, I changed my hours at the lab to part-time and spent the other half of my time volunteering at the local zoo. Soon that transitioned into a part-time zookeeping job that eventually led to the job I’m in now – a combination of computers and animals, two of my favorite things. I love my job. And I think part of the reason I am not afraid to fail and take on challenges in this job is because of how much I love it. I know I have room to grow and I want to continue learning. Instead of worrying about negative feedback, I seek out feedback so that I can learn what I need to improve upon. I think finding something I truly enjoy was instrumental in starting to move towards a growth mindset and leaving the negative parts of perfectionism behind.

The “last” step of course was reading the book Mindset. Learning about mindset – putting meaning to what it is, what it drives, where it comes from – brought everything together. This lead to the awareness of having a fixed mindset in certain situations, but a growth mindset in others. My mindset change is still very much a work in progress. But now I have the advantage of knowing that it exists and am learning what things tend to trigger my fixed mindset so I can work on taking on those situations with a growth mindset instead. I think at one point in time I would have said that there are certain things you can’t change about yourself – perfectionism being one of those things. But now I think while my perfectionism may never go away, I can change how it drives and affects me. I think you can strive to be your best, and even strive for perfection, as long as you realize perfection is impossible to achieve. But it can motivate you to work hard and aim high, as long as you can use your setbacks and failures as learning experiences on the path to get better. I think that is what having a growth mindset is all about – being willing to take risks and embracing challenges in order to learn, grow, and become better. I look forward to seeing where my growth mindset can take me. 

Huib’s Story:
Changing your mindset is hard! But it starts with recognizing that your mindset is getting you into trouble in the first place.

My journey in dealing with my fixed mindset started when I was 27. Before that, and especially in my teens, I had many depressions caused by low self-esteem and making myself crazy with thoughts. My father and his partner took me in their house when I had my burn-out in 1997. I stayed with them for 3 months and took my first steps in adult therapy and dealing with my mental issues. I got therapy from a nice psychologist who helped me recover from my burn-out. I didn’t let him too close because I was afraid of what would surface and thus, nothing really changed. After a while gradually my old thoughts and behavior came back.

When I grew in my career into lead roles and later into management positions, I ran into more problems. I became responsible for the work of more people and my perfectionism made me feel bad if they underperformed or did not succeed. I wanted others to not make mistakes and by mentoring and coaching them, I tried to help them – sometimes literally inflicting help upon others. I struggled with self-esteem and my mind was always busy. As a pretty emotional person, I had to deal with my emotions. But I felt that emotions were stupid: I told myself I shouldn’t be influenced by them. So I was hiding my emotions constantly. I fooled myself that it’ll go away on its own when I knew it wouldn’t. I’m good at making others believe that I’m okay.

Because I knew how to recognize my dips, I didn’t become as depressed as I used to before my burn-out; a sign that I was learning. I had a sort of periodic cycle of being too busy, stressed, and taking on too much work that caused me to not sleep very well. Because of not getting enough sleep, I wasn’t able to control my negative thoughts, which made it worse and got me even less sleep. After a couple of weeks, I would be drained. I often would call my doctor to get some sleeping pills. This would help me sleep well for a week or two and that was just enough to get my thoughts under control before sliding into another burn-out or depression.

This went on until I became manager at a bank, where I ran into trouble when things would get difficult. I couldn’t deal very well with resistance or situations where things didn’t go the way I wanted them. I had trouble dealing with feedback and I became defensive quite fast. If people would ask a lot of questions about my proposals, it felt like I wasn’t clear enough and I blamed myself for this. My manager recognized this was happening and he suggested coaching. My coach helped me a lot with dealing with resistance, reaching goals, dealing with emotions, being okay with not knowing stuff, and acting less defensive, amongst other things. My coach recommended me to take therapy and deal with my underlying problems. He was right, deep inside I knew that, but I got scared and stepped away. I told myself I didn’t need to work on my myself anymore since things at work had improved quite a lot.

In 2015, I got an assignment as an interim manager at a financial service company. I had a huge team of 100+ people with too many direct reports. It was a challenging organization with a toxic management culture. I worked extremely long days because I wanted to prove myself and at home, I was preparing meetings for the next day. After a two-week holiday, I came back to work with my battery not fully charged and a new burn-out was approaching fast. I hit the brakes just in time, so I recovered in a couple of weeks instead of months. In my recovery, I went to see a haptonomist. She helped me recover from the burnout and after that, I stopped seeing her. A year later I went back to her because I needed to get rest in my head. I was getting sick and tired of always being busy and not being able to turn my head off. I tried mindfulness, and of course people recommended things like meditation and yoga, but that didn’t feel like it was something for me. I told myself it was too vague and wooly for me. My haptonomist taught me to sit still and do nothing for a while. After working with her, I was able to just sit and not react to anything happening around me.

Being able to do that helped a lot and I felt strong. Until a while later the cycle started again: too much stress, bad sleep, etc. So finally in 2019, I took a big step in dealing with my issues (see: blogpost “mastering my mindset“). I finally was done with my mental issues and ready to face the underlying problem. So I decided to go for therapy. I wanted to learn how to deal with my insecurity, my fear of failing and to get rest in my head. Looking for a therapist, I wrote down my issues and the things I wanted to change. I also wrote my “mental resume” with the issues I dealt with in my life and what I had done to overcome them. This gave me a lot of insight into myself. I saw a pattern of dealing with symptoms instead of dealing with the real problems, running away when things got too hard, and a lot of fighting. Fighting with myself, but also fighting and pushing other people, which had brought me problems several times in my career.

My therapist made me work hard and I reflected on many things. I learned that mainly it was my (negative) thoughts that were getting me into trouble. Reading the mindset book helped me understand where my fear of failing came from. In therapy I learned where my problems come from and I got enough insight to work on them. I learned to accept myself as I am and to let go of the past. I know what I still have to work on in myself in the future to reduce my fear of failure.The most important lessons for me are: being authentic is important. It saves a lot of energy if you can just be yourself. Emotional intelligence is key to dealing with your mindset. It helps understanding, expressing and managing emotions. I had to change my thinking and behaviour and in doing this, I ultimately changed my mindset. I am working on being vulnerable more often and showing empathy to build trust and relations which helps me to be a better teacher and coach but also a better person.

These positive emotions help me to think more clearly and be more present. I became a better listener, showing more interest in others, asking better questions and being more open to learning about others’ experiences. I am more self-aware and that is a good starting point.

“You have to name things in so many words. Something must be allowed to exist first and then leave it behind.”
(Griet op de Beeck in Dreamschool)

How do you find out what mindset you have and how can you deal with a fixed mindset? In our next blog post we will talk about that.

Looking Back on Perfection and Burnout: Mindset – part 2

August 3, 2020 / / 3 Comments

In our last blog post Nicole and I summarized the book “Mindset – Changing the way you think to fulfill your potential” by professor Dr. Carol Dweck. In this blog post we share our personal history with growth and fixed mindsets. How we currently deal with our mindset and how we changed the way we think, is the topic for our next blog post.

Nicole’s story:
Looking back to my school days, probably from early primary school all the way through undergraduate college, when it came to my education, I had a very fixed mindset. I think the same was true when I played sports, which was mainly in secondary school. It was about getting good grades and winning the game. While reading Mindset, I reflected on this and where my mindset might have come from. Was it my parents? Teachers? Coaches? Dweck talks about the types of praise we give children – she says “Praising children’s intelligence harms their motivation and it harms their performance.” Instead, we should praise effort, persistence, and good strategies.

I don’t know how my mindset exactly got formed, to be honest. My parents never pushed me to be perfect in school or sports, and if anything, they were constantly telling me to not be hard on myself. If I was upset at losing a game, they were the first to remind me how hard I played and that I gave it my best effort. Was it my teachers? Maybe some of them. Our educational system (speaking in my case about the United States) definitely rewards good grades and test scores. Want to get into a prestigious college program? Better get a high GPA and test score on your ACT/SAT. So I pushed, and I did it. And then I got to college and I thought, now you can’t expect to get straight A’s because it is so much harder. But then I got straight A’s my first semester, and the same mindset of “you have to keep doing that” set in. Only it WAS harder in college and took much more effort to keep it up. This lead to a large amount of stress and anxiety so bad that my stomach would flop as soon I came back into my college town after a break. Looking back, there was so much more I could have actually learned in college and certainly had more fun doing so had I not been so focused on perfection. 

I think my fixed mindset continued into my first job. Not to get straight A’s of course, but to maintain perfect. To make no mistakes. I worried about making the slightest mistake because I worked in a crime lab – a mistake could mean that a criminal might get away. It wasn’t until I burned out (surprise) and switched careers to something I loved that my mindset began to change. I finally realized that striving for perfection was not only impossible, it was causing me more harm than good. Now, I truly love both learning and my job. I don’t expect myself to know everything or to never make a mistake. I crave problems and figuring them out – I think I always did, but now there is only joy with no anxiety mixed in. Of course my fixed mindset is still here, lurking, and pops up in certain situations. Reading the book helped me realize that and now that I’m more aware of it, I want to embrace it and lean into those situations to encourage my growth mindset to take over. I still have a lot of growing left to do but I’m confident that embracing the growth mindset I have found will help me get there.

Huib’s story:
As a kid, I grew up in a pretty competitive environment. Both of my parents were very competitive and my brother and I were also always competing with each other. I was a smart kid and in school I was one of the top performers. I was also a very curious kid and I had a broad interest and read a lot. Unfortunately, I had too much energy and got distracted pretty fast. That made me not one of the most popular people in elementary school. I guess I had to prove myself in another way. Being the smartest or the best in class was important to me. I wanted to prove that I was smart all the time. It made me unhappy and it made that I was a sort of geek. I am not sure how I was praised back then. All I can remember is that I was a bad loser and I was focused on results and wanted to be seen.

I also developed a big “defensive” wall around me. Scaring away from things that I felt I could fail and over-shouting myself to show the world how invulnerable I was. I became good at talking myself out of dangerous situations where I could fail making a fool out of myself. I made other people believe I had it all under control. As said in my earlier blog post “mastering my mindset“, people perceive me as extremely confident and fearless and it started right after elementary school were I developed this incongruent behaviour. The results were that I got seriously depressed once or twice a year, dropping out of school for sometimes two or three weeks.

I remember doing central exams in High School. They made me super nervous and literally made me sick. Those weeks were horrible for me. Each morning I woke up not being able to eat or drink and anything that I would eat or drink would come out not long after. My fear of failing in combination with a fixed mindset telling me I had to get good grades was killing me. I graduated without taking any re-exams, but only because my grades were very good before taking the central exams.

In sports, I had the same mindset. I had to be the best in everything I did. My father taught me and my brother to play chess. But after a few years, my brother became way better than me and I quit playing because it was not fun anymore. I was a keeper at (field) hockey and here my “not wanting to lose mentality” kicked in driving me to be better. I became keeper in the first place because that way I could not be compared to other people on the field, a safe choice. I remember standing in the goal with tears in my eyes because the opposing party scored a goal. I told myself that I had to be perfect. No ball should pass me, which of course is a crazy thought.

Asking for help has often been a thing for me during my career. When I started working, I had to be good at what I did. Asking for help I considered to be a sign of weakness. This caused a severe burn-out when I was 27. I was developing software and I was responsible for everything: design, coding and testing. There was no team, I was the team, and the customer wanted a lot of new things. In stead of asking for help, I started doing overtime. This resulted in a lot stress, which made me sleep worse. After a couple of months, I couldn’t go on anymore and I collapsed.

Even recently when I took guitar lessons for a year in 2018/2019, my fixed mindset kept showing up. I kept asking questions to my teacher to keep him talking and playing instead me playing for him. I used excuses not to record my playing (which was a regular part of what he did with other students) and I didn’t really enjoyed practicing. Playing a musical instrument makes mistakes very easy to spot, you hear them instantly. My perfectionism and fixed mindset concerning playing guitar made me eventually stop playing. I will pick it up later, because I like playing music, but back then it just didn’t really work for me.

Currently I think I have a combination of a growth and a fixed mindset. My growth mindset is getting more and more dominant and I like that. I worked hard on my mindset and it’s paying off now. Because of my learning about mindset, I am able to recognise when my fixed mindset shows itself. When that happens I take a step back and reflect on why this mindset is there and what caused it. Often it is system 1 (ref: Daniel Kahneman  Thinking Fast vs. Thinking Slow), a learned habit possibly linked to a fear deep inside myself. But eventually I am learning how to deal with it.

In our next blog post we will talk about how we currently deal with our mindset and how we changed the way we think.

Mindset – The book: Mindset – part 1

July 26, 2020 / / 4 Comments

I am fascinated by mindset. As a lifelong learner I have read piles of books, done many courses and been to over a 100 conferences. When I started coaching people I learned about the power of thoughts. I took a learning pathway in coaching that consisted of 15 days training in a two year period and I learned about how to be a good coach. But I learned even more about myself. In 2019 I started working with bureau Idee and learned how to work on my own mindset. Until then I never fully realised the impact of my thoughts and inner beliefs on my behaviour and mental health. You can read more about that journey here on my blog.

One of the most interesting books I have read is “Mindset – Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential” by Professor dr. Carol Dweck. Me and my learning buddy Nicole Errante read the book together as part of our learning pact. This blog post is our summary of the book. In our next blog post we will discuss our personal experiences with growth and fixed mindsets.

Summary Mindset

Mindset is a way of thinking, a mental attitude and self-conception that you carry with you through your life. People are all born with a love of learning, but somehow, somewhere in our lives it gets undone for some. Some people love challenges, others hate them. This is caused by their mindset. Carol Dweck researched human motivation. Why do people succeed? She found out that mindset plays a big role in creating the love for learning and resilience. Our conscious and unconscious thoughts and beliefs affect how we perform. Changing our beliefs can have a powerful impact.

Dweck talks about mindset being a belief about yourself. Through her research, she discovered there are two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In the fixed mindset, people believe that the qualities they possess (such as intelligence or personality) are set in stone. But in the growth mindset, people believe that their qualities are capable of changing through effort, strategy, and help from others. Why is this important? Your mindset affects how you deal with life and the challenges that come along with it. When you are in a fixed mindset, you want to look smart, you are trying to prove yourself over and over. Taking on risks means being vulnerable to failure, and that is not acceptable. Any perceived deficiencies in yourself must be hidden. So you simply avoid risks and stick to easy tasks you know that you can accomplish. You give up easy and get defensive often. But with a growth mindset, you welcome challenges as an opportunity to grow and learn, even if you fail. Inadequacies are seen as something that you can work on and overcome. Even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience. But it doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from, which makes you more anti-fragile.

In business, leaders with a fixed mindset don’t listen to others and they make subordinates feel bad. They want to feel powerful by highlighting their own superiority. So instead of trying to make good products or services, employees want to please the leader. This can result in the whole company having a fixed mindset. This kills creativity and innovation. It will cause groupthink; group members conforming to group values. Everyone in a group starts thinking alike. Nobody disagrees with the leader. In personal relations, mindset is also important. People with a fixed mindset think that good relations do not need work; they expect their partners to know what they need without talking or asking. They perceive feedback or rejections as proof of their bad personality, where people with a growth mindset work on the relation based on the feedback they get. When people in a growth mindset have a fight, no partner gets full blame in the dispute. They work together to solve the problem.

The beautiful part is that you can change your mindset. It is, after all, just a belief and beliefs can be changed. Dweck does remind us that changing your mindset is not like a knee replacement – you don’t just swap the bad knee (fixed mindset) for the good one (growth mindset). “Instead, the new beliefs take their place alongside the old ones, and as they become stronger, they give you a different way to think, feel, and act.”

How do you build a growth mindset? It starts with accepting that we all have both mindsets! Learn to recognise what triggers our fixed mindset. Failures? Criticism? Deadlines? Disagreements? As you come to understand your triggers and get to know your fixed mindset persona, don’t judge it. Just observe it. Give the persona a name. Then understand what happens to us when our fixed mindset persona is triggered. This will provide insight in the feelings the fixed mindset triggers and the fears that activate it. The next step is to learn to remain in a growth mindset when those triggers occur. Then continue to find opportunities to learn and grow.

Also her TED talk “The power of believing that you can improve” is very inspiring:

How do you build a growth mindset? This video “Developing a Growth Mindset with Carol Dweck” gives some clues:

In our next blog post we will discuss our personal experiences with growth and fixed mindsets.

What testing can learn from social science – Part 5

April 12, 2013 / / 2 Comments

What can testing learn from social science?
Why is this important to testers? My conclusion is that testing and the social sciences are very much interconnected and there are many lessons that we could learn from this area. We should see what we can apply to our daily testing jobs. We should be more aware of what we do in testing: for example social research, making observations, doing critical thinking and most importantly continuing to learn. We should start learning from what people have done and are still doing in the social sciences. Testers should not only focus on quantitative analysis like bug counts or test case pass or fail, but also do qualitative research. Test reports should be stories about the product and the testing we did (see Michael Bolton’s article on test reporting and the telling of the story). We should use the numbers to support or backup our story. I often see it the wrong way around: lots of tables full of counts that do not tell us anything without the context. Managers do tend to draw their own conclusions and make decisions based upon this data, if we do not help them by telling the story. Again, testing is about collecting information for people who matter to enable them to make informed decisions.

Coverage?
If a manager comes up to you and asks you:

“So what is the coverage?”
or
“How many test cases do you have?“

What do you say? It is really hard to talk to managers who are obsessed by numbers and think that testing is about the number of test cases, right and wrong, green and red.

Consider this next time you talk to them. Make a simple calculation of all the possible tests you could do for the project you are working on regardless of how simple or complex it is. Think of all the possible combination both positive and negative.

What number have you ended up with?

  • 1 thousand?
  • 1 million?
  • 1 billion?
  • More?

The number of possible things that you can test are endless, exhaustive testing is futile. Even a simple requirement has infinite possibilities to test.

So what is the coverage if we do 1,000,000 test cases?

  • Coverage: 1,000,000 divided by infinite is very close to zero!
  • Coverage: 10,000.000 divided by infinite is still very close to zero!

So no matter how many test cases you have the coverage of all possible test cases you could have done is close to zero. This is why risk, priority and making choices become important for testing but that is a different topic.

Be a scientist
Science is important. It gave us critical thinking and that helps us proving the theories we have about the product. Try to prove yourself wrong instead of proving yourself right.

Ask critical questions:

  • Could it be something else?
  • Is this what I expected?
  • What did I do differently?
  • What else can I do?
  • How can I explain what I did?

While testing we should practice critical thinking: question things we encounter, make sure that what we see, is true (or not). While thinking we should be aware of fast conclusions, biases and fallacies. We often do it the wrong way around. If we focus too much on the numbers and the averages we miss the outliers: the unique random events that can do the most damage.

Qualitative research
The grounded theory method is a research method that operates almost in a reverse fashion from traditional social science research. You start with a view, theory or expectation before you start. However as you gather more data when testing, your theory/expectation becomes more ‘grounded’ upon the information you uncover or discover. Basically as you experience and gather more and more data you change your perspective and viewpoint. This is what social scientist do when they go and live with social groups. They have something they want to find out – an assumption or otherwise – and find out if it is right or not by taking part (compare missions in Exploratory testing).

In qualitative research done by anthropologists for example the context of the research is very important. Here they accept and deal with ambiguity, situational specific results and partial answers. Qualitative data deals with meanings. Use it when you want to understand the underlying thoughts and intentions.

Observation
Testers should not observe from the side-line. We should act like anthropologists do: become part of the group you are observing. Let me give you an example from my own experience.

A couple of years ago I worked as a test coordinator for a Media Company selling newspapers and magazines. We were implementing a new CRM system and my assignment was to organize the user acceptance testing. For some days I worked with the people selling the newspapers to learn how they were selling subscriptions and while doing that I learned what was important to them. First I was observing, but after a day I was selling newspapers myself and really learned how the users were working and what it took to make the department successful. We had requirements and designs, but the stuff I found out on processes and user sentiments was also very valuable to do testing. There were important steps not documented. I saw the people use the software in ways I didn’t expect and that wasn’t written down anywhere. I asked them what they did and why and they answered me “that is normally how we do this”. I learned that these people took short cuts to do their work. The team who were designing and building the software had no idea what I was talking about when I told them about my observations.

Humans will always take the shortest quickest route and the one that requires the least amount of thinking. This made clear how important it is to find out what people are thinking. And more important: the reasoning why they do the things they do. The product is a solution. If the problem isn’t solved, the product doesn’t work (5th basic principle of context-driven testing).

Now I know it is called qualitative research and I think every team developing software should do something similar. Try to really understand the users and the environment in which the product will be used. IT is often way to focussed on technical stuff. Testers go out there and meet the people who are using the product. Be part of their world for a while and start asking those critical questions.

Humans
Software is build by humans for humans. Social science is about people. Software should solve problems and help humans. To really solve a problem, we need to know more about how the users work, what they think, how they feel, their emptions, their desires. Too often I hear development teams say things like: “The user should not do that”. Or the all time classic: “no real user would ever do that!”. IT is way too technical focussed.

Read John’s blog titled “The Human Element”. It is an awesome story about his wife, a nurse, who explains why the human element is very important in her work. You see the parallel with our work?

Now it is your turn!?
Use the reading list to learn more about what social sciences, biases and other relevant topics. I am curious and I want to learn from you too. So please share your thoughts and experiences with social science.

“Great software is not produced or tested in factories, but in studios
and rehearsal halls.” (Michael Bolton)

I owe John Stevenson and Michael Bolton many thanks for their inspiration, great discussions and reviewing these blogs.

Reading List

What testing can learn from social science – Part 4

April 11, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Social science: three presentations
Social science is about society, human nature and human interaction. It is an umbrella term to refer to sciences like anthropology, economics, education, linguistics, communication studies, sociology and psychology.

Anthropology teaches us about how people life, interact and something about culture. Education and didactic helps acquire new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, or preferences. It helps us understand how we learn and how we can teach others. Sociology teaches us empirical investigation and critical analysis and gives insight in human social activity. Psychology is the study of the mind and behaviour and helps testers understand individuals and groups. Now how is this useful in testing? I’ll try to answer that question later. Let me first tell you about three awesome presentations on the subject of social science and testing.

Testing as a social science
Cem Kaner did a talk titled “Testing as a social science first” time in 2006 (slides are here). I haven’t had the pleasure to see the talk myself but the slides drew my interest. Cem made me aware that to test effectively, our theories of error have to be theories about the mistakes people make and when and why they make them. We design and run tests in order to gain useful information about the product’s quality.

Testing is always a search for information. Cem talks about measurement and metrics and the dangers of using metrics wrongly to measure test completeness (new updated article on this can be found here). He argues that bad models are counter productive. Cem also touched the topic of inattentional blindness in which humans often don’t see what they don’t pay attention to. He reminded us that programs never see what they haven’t been told to pay attention to. This is especially valuable when thinking about test automation. When testing we can’t pay attention to all the conditions. The systems under test are simply to complex and there are to many factors that are variable (and uncontrollable). He concludes that thinking in terms of human issues leads us into interesting questions:

  • What tests we are running and why?
  • What risks are we anticipating and how?
  • Why are these risks important?
  • What we can do to help our clients gather the information they need?

At EuroStar 2012 in Amsterdam I track chaired two excellent talks, which inspired me to study the subject of social science and qualitative research more.

Curing Our Binary Disease
Rikard Edgren talked about the getting cured from the Binary Disease (slides are here, video is here). The binary disease is when testers don’t provide useful information, because they aren’t allowed by (project) managers. They demand counting passes & fails and insist everything must be verifiable. The binary disease limits our thinking. Testers are addicted to counting passes and fails and don‘t communicate what is most important. When addicted there is no attention to serendipity moments. A model can help testers find important things, but a percentage number might not include things that are important. Therefore a coverage model is useful to get ideas but is not useful as a metric of completion. In his talk he introduces the testing potato to show that there are more things important besides written requirements. More about the potato can be found in his fabulous must read free eBook “The Little Black Book on Test Design”.

Testing Through The Qualitative Lens
Michael Bolton’s (slides of the StarEast version are here) talk elaborated differences between physical and social sciences. In physics, humans are ideally irrelevant and mostly get in the way of the experiment. Use quantitative and qualitative research methods and accept high tolerance for ambiguity, context-specific results and be aware of biases while doing research. We should value “partial answers that might be useful”. You do qualitative research when you want to understand something. You do quantitative research to inform that understanding. Quantitative research put human values first; use participant observation and practice storytelling and narration. Software testing is the investigation of systems composed of people, computer programs, products, and the relationships between them. Excellent testing is more like anthropology: interdisciplinary, systems-focused, investigative, and uses storytelling.

To be continued… part 5: So what can we learn from social science?

What testing can learn from social science – Part 3

April 10, 2013 / / 2 Comments

People are predictably irrational
You think you are rational, but you are not. People fail to realize the irrationality of their actions and believe they are acting perfectly rational, possibly due to flaws in their reasoning. People’s actual interests differ from what they believe to be their interests. We have mechanisms that have evolved to give optimal behaviour in normal conditions lead to irrational behaviour in abnormal conditions. Many people put on one “mask” for one group of people and another for a different group of people. Many will become confused as to which they really are or which they wish to become (source: wikipedia). The subject of irrational behaviour is huge. I recommend you to read more about it. We can predict irrational behaviour to a degree due to lots of studies and work done in this field.

John gave me two book tips by Dan Ariel on this topic that I haven’t checked myself yet:

Or check this website also by Dan Ariel: Predictably Irrational – Investigating the Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions

You are not so smart
A great collection of examples that show people are easily fooled can be found in the book called “You are not so smart” by David McRaney. This book is a dose of psychology research served in tasty anecdotes that will make you better understand both yourself and others. The author describes cognitive biases, logical fallacies and heuristics. For example there is the well known “confirmation bias” where you tend to look for information that confirms your beliefs and ignore the information that challenges them. Another interesting phenomenon is the availability heuristic: a mental short cut that occurs when people make judgements about the probability of events by how easy it is to think of examples. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that, “if you can think of it, it must be important.” Examples are lotteries where you only see the winners so you might think it is easy to win. Or school shootings in the USA. People believe that since Columbine there are more and more school shootings but the opposite is true! Before Columbine there where more, but we don’t know about them. After reading this book an interesting thinking exercise can be to recognize the biases and fallacies in your thinking and testing.

Thinking fast and slow
Daniel Kahneman wrote a fascinating book about how our brain works “Thinking, fast and slow” which has been a bestseller for some time now. This book changed the way I think about thinking. Although it was sometimes hard to read for my as a non native English speaker, I almost read the book in one go. The book is about two different ways our brain works: System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional. System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. I encourage testers to read the book and watch this video. In the video the author explains the main points from his book. You also might want to have a look at this shorter video where the same stuff is made more visual. The book will help you understand how your brain works and it will also make you aware how people make judgements and come to conclusions. Read what software tester Andy Patterson writes about on his thoughts of the book here.

There is a great video with Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) in which they talk at the New York Public library about how individuals and humans make decisions – a fascinating video to watch – details and access to video can be found here.

Dancing gorillas
An interesting source the read to learn more about inattentional blindness and other illusions of memory and knowledge is the book “the invisible Gorilla” by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. It makes you aware of how you can be fooled by your illusions and perception. More reading on gorillas and inattentional blindness is this article. Alan Page loves the gorilla! Especially the video. Check what he has to say about the gorilla here.

To be continued… part 4: social science

What testing can learn from social science – Part 2

April 8, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Testers need to do a lot of thinking. To me testing is an investigation, gathering and providing information about things that are important. I like the definition by Jerry Weinberg: “testing is gathering information with the intention of informing a decision”. Rikard Edgren recently wrote an excellent “open letter” to define testing. Testing is much more than finding bugs or checking if requirements are met.

Systems thinking
We should not only investigate the “system under test” but also take related products in mind. What about the people using all these products or the organisations and processes in which the products are used? Testers should know more about systems thinking: the process of understanding how things, regarded as systems, influence one another within a whole (source: wikipedia).

A system is not just a collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. It must consist of three things; elements, interconnection and a function or purpose (source: “thinking in systems: a primer – Donnella Meadows”). If you want to learn more about systems thinking, you might want to watch this youtube movie by Russel Ackhoff and read this post by Aleksis Tulonen about what you can learn form Ackhoff.

In one of my projects my client was moving a hospital from several old locations to a huge new building. It was logical that the location codes changed since it was a new building with a very different layout. But initially they forgot to oversee that this location code was actually used as department code in several information systems. And these systems used the codes to book costs (finance), plan staff (HR) and distribution of food and medicine (logistics). Moving to the new building without overseeing the full impact would have paralysed the whole information landscape. Defining a temporary coding and making minor changes to several systems solved the problem.

Critical thinking
Testing can be seen as a form of research: investigating the system and finding information about it. In research critical thinking is important. Collecting, analysing and interpreting information requires critical thinking skills. Critical thinking to me is about thinking (critically) about your own personal thinking. Framing your own assumptions and using this to try to remove bias and hopefully clarifying your thoughts with reasoning.

In this video James Bach helps to gain quick understanding of critical thinking by asking three simple questions:

  • Huh? What does this mean? What is the point?
  • Really? Are you absolutely certain? How can I know?
  • So? Where does this lead? So what?

These questions are very helpful for understanding and to think critical about anything. This picture (click to enlarge) is taken from the book “Critical Thinking: a user’s manual” by Debra Jackson and Paul Newberry. This book is a helpful source to learn about critical thinking.

Rule of Three

“If I can’t think of at least three different interpretations of what
I received, I haven’t thought enough about what it might mean.”
 (Jerry Weinberg)

Creative thinking
At EuroStar in Amsterdam I met John Stevenson who has an excellent blog with the intriguing title: “The expected result was 42. Now what was the test?”. We talked about what testing can learn from social sciences and early this year we had some fantastic conversations via skype. John pointed me to some very interesting readings about qualitative research: “Qualitative Data Analysis: a user-friendly guide for social scientists“ by Ian Dey. On his blog he wrote some very interesting posts related to testing and social science you might want to read:

John is currently writing an awesome series of articles about creative and critical thinking. Part 1 of “Creative and Critical Thinking and Testing” can be found here. From there you can find the other parts about the different styles of thinking.

So why is this important?
Systems thinking reminds us to look at the big picture and see systems as a whole. What is the purpose of the organisation we work for? And is the project we are doing contributing to that? Creative thinking helps us to solve problems in a creative way or come up with more things to test and how to do it effectively. Critical thinking helps you to really understand what you are doing. Like in research we have to process large amounts of data and make sense of it. But we also have to recognize, analyse and evaluate (see critical thinking diagram above) information, arguments and problems.

Thinking is an under appreciated subject. Thinking is very important for testers and we should learn from science: doing research, learn to design and perform experiments, collect, organize and analyse data and use the results to decide on the next steps in our work. Critical thinking helps us ask better questions in our projects and identify problems faster. It also helps avoid traps: biases and assumptions. More about that in my next post.

To be continued… part 3: irrationality and biases

What testing can learn from social science – Part 1

April 7, 2013 / / 13 Comments

Last February and March I have had the privilege to talk at Belgium Testing Days in Brussel and TestBash in Brighton about what testing can learn from social science. In a series of daily blog posts I am going to write about this subject: why I choose this topic, what sources I studied and finally how I have applied this stuff to my work.

Rapid Software Testing
In the Rapid Software Testing Class I took in 2011 Michael Bolton talked about being empirical and a critical thinker as a tester. About collecting data from experiments using a heuristic and exploratory approach. About reporting by telling stories in testing instead of only reporting figures and numbers. Testing is about providing valuable information to inform management decisions. This awesome class empowered me to connect the dots of stuff I had been thinking about for years. It also pointed me towards a lot of books and information “outside” the IT and testing domain. It also triggered me to learn more about social science.

Test reports
Do you recognize test reports like this? (click the report the enlarge).

I used to write test reports like that. I was counting test cases and issues and advising my clients to take applications in production. But what do these numbers tell us? What if we didn’t test the most important functionality is the software? Numbers don’t mean anything without context!

Another example was an assignment I did at a telecom company years ago. Testing was estimated by numbers of test cases. We have 8 weeks to test so we can do 800 test cases, was a normal way to plan and estimate testing. Somewhere along the project my project manager told me his budget had been cut 10%. He asked me to drop 80 test cases from our 800 test cases scope. What was he thinking? As if all test cases take equally long to create, execute and report?

Exact or social science?
Testing and informatics (the science of information) are often seen as exact or physical science. People perceive that computers always do exactly the same. This gets reflected in the way they think about testing: a bunch of repeatable steps to see if the program is working and the requirements are met, but is that really what testing is all about? I like to think of testing more as a social science. Testing is not only about technical computer stuff, it is also about human aspects and social interaction.

Traditionally the focus in testing is on technical and analytical skills, however testing requires a lot more! Testing is also about communication, human behaviour, collaboration, culture, social interaction and (critical, creative and systems) thinking. The seven basic principles of the Context-Driven School tell us that people, working together, are the most important part of any project’s context. That good software testing is a challenging intellectual process and only through judgement and skill, exercised cooperatively throughout the entire project, are we able to do the right things at the right times to effectively test our products.

Quality
Can we measure the quality of software? And can we do that objectively? When I ask people about quality they often refer to requirements. “Quality is compliance to functional and non-functional requirements”. In my experience I have never seen a document that contained all requirements for a software product. We can argue that requirement engineers have to do a better job. Are they doing a bad job? Can we solve the problem by writing better requirements? When discussing quality I like to use coffee as example. I like strong, black coffee without any sugar or milk. But what if you do not like coffee? For somebody who doesn’t drink coffee, my cup of coffee has no value at all. But is still the same cup. How can that be? And how about the taste? Why does coffee from an average office machine doesn’t taste very well while it meets the “requirements” I just mentioned. And what if I change my mind? Not so long ago I drank lots of cappuccino, nowadays I don’t like that any more. That is why I like the definition by Jerry Weinberg and the additions made by James Bach and Michael Bolton.

Quality is value to some person (Jerry Weinberg)
Quality is value to some person who matters (James Bach) 
Quality is value to some person at some time (Michael Bolton)

I began to believe that there is much more to quality than requirements alone. I also believe that software quality is very subjective and will change over time. To better understand the subjective, human aspects of software quality I started to study social science in general and our thinking and qualitative research in particular.

Qualitative and quantitative research
Quantitative research is about quantities and numbers. The results are based on numeric analysis and statistics. There is nothing wrong with numbers, but we need to understand the story behind these numbers! Like the test report example: what is the story behind these numbers? What did we test? And how good was our testing? That is where the qualitative aspects come in. Qualitative research is focused on differences in quality and is usually for more exploratory purposes. It is more open to different interpretations. Qualitative research accepts and deals with ambiguity, situational specific results and partial answers. When doing this, testers may be more prone to bias and personal subjectivity.

To be continued… In part 2 I will discuss critical and systems thinking.

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