Lessons from Climbing: Growth Mindset

The Information Technology field is constantly moving, with individuals and companies requiring constant learning to compete successfully. Fostering a Growth Mindset in an organization is becoming a necessity to catch opportunities provided by new tools, skills, and processes.

But what's exactly a Growth Mindset? Could it become yet another Corporate mantra that everyone talks about, but nobody really knows?

I'll look into it with a different perspective, inspired by some of my mountain-going experiences.

Rock Climbing Technical Skills

As an IT Architect, I'm quite fascinated by technology and activities that require complex skills, to be mastered until eventually achieving competency and enabling flow state execution.

Among sports, for these same reasons, I particularly like mountain-related activities such as Hiking, Skiing, Mountain Biking, and especially Rock Climbing.

As a kid, I was more book-reading than sport focused, so getting into it in my 20ies was a significant challenge. To safely learn I joined a mountaineering training course organized by the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), and here I had several initial setbacks by being unable to handle any but the easiest of climbing routes. However, out of the 20 participants, I was one of the few persisting with the activity and started a long journey of self-improvement and learning that allowed me to do interesting and satisfying climbs, with a responsible and safety-conscious approach.

While doing this I drew support from my local climbing circle, both from more experienced climbers, that provided criticism and suggestions for improvement, and from my regular climbing peers for continuously learning together.  While Rock Climbing for me remains a non-professional activity, I am particularly inspired by the fact that one of my regular climbing partners has been able to become a certified Mountain Guide, filling his technical gaps (e.g. initially not a good skier) to do that.

Growth Mindset Explained - Formal

In some way, my experience maps to the Growth Mindset theory, as defined by Carol Dweck's studies:

First, a mindset is an established set of attitudes of a person or group concerning culture, values, philosophy, frame of mind, outlook, and disposition. A person can have multiple mindsets, whilst the two most common ones are often cited as the Growth and Fixed mindset,

According to Dweck, individuals can be placed on a continuum according to their implicit views of where ability comes from; those believing their success to be based on innate ability are said to have a Fixed mindset, and those believing their success is based on hard work, learning, training, and sheer persistence are said to have a Growth mindset. In Dweck's words:

In a fixed mindset students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that's that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don't necessarily think everyone's the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.^[13]

Growth Mindset Explained - Climbing Fun!

But this is still very much theory, so to keep the Climbing theme I am sharing a very good video explanation provided by a Psychologist that is also a Climbing Coach. Have fun!

Summing it up

Growth Mindset particularly resonates with my extensive experience with Agile and DevOps approaches. Continuous Improvement cycles and Agile retrospectives are habits that showcase this mindset.  

In the end adopting this same approach to build company-specific habits (e.g. for consulting, manufacturing, etc...) is the way to build an adaptable and competitive organization.