To keep
on growing in life you have to keep on learning from things that happen around
you. Many people are of the opinion that learning stops after you complete your
education. But it is not so! You are learning and growing every moment. 

Carol
Dweck, a professor at Stanford University coined the theory of growth mindset.
This theory categorizes human learning and intelligence patterns into two
categories – fixed mindset and growth mindset.

Fixed
mindset is when individuals consider that their abilities and talents are
constrained to a fixed set. On the other hand, when individuals believe that
they can improve their abilities, intelligence and talents through their
efforts, it is termed as growth mindset.

How to
Deliberately Create a Growth Mindset Culture

Establish
Trust

Firstly,
you need to establish trust through open and honest communication within your
team. Speak openly about every success and failure in a blameless way. Trust
allows a team to communicate freely and respond to change more easily in a
blameless manner.

Make it
Safe to Fail

As a
team you should collectively agree to expose your ideas and reasoning to
scrutiny, despite the risk to yourselves. Egos must be left at the door.
Recognize that your knowledge isn’t perfect and that things may not go as
planned. With each success or failure recognize that progress has been made and
then focus on the learning outcomes. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not
failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He viewed every mistake
and setback as a learning opportunity.

Take an
Experimental Approach to Information Discovery

The
“Build-Measure-Learn” loop is a core component of the Lean StartUp methodology.
It encourages a feedback focused approach to building a product by testing
assumptions and measuring the results in a systematic way with users.

By
taking an experimental approach to information discovery you don’t simply build
features in priority order from your product backlog and chuck them at users to
see if they stick. Instead we shift focus from a feature factory to a
laboratory.

It’s
important to define what will be measured as part of each experiment and what
success looks like before a line of code is written. Figure out the proper
“exposed population” before you get going and once an experiment is
underway avoid the temptation to change it in any way as this will skew the
results.

Regularly
Brainstorm for New Experiments

Run
regular brainstorming sessions to encourage new ideas for experiments within
the team. Run some risky experiments that you think are stupid—these may yield
interesting results.

Scrutinize
Every Failure for Its Learnings

Each
failed experiment uncovers new learnings. These need to be scrutinized and
shared freely with everyone. Analyze what happened, what can be learned from
each experiment and figure out what impact this new learning has on the backlog
and the underlying the assumptions for the product.

Since our childhood days
we’ve been programmed to perceive failure in a negative light. In many
organizations failure in the workplace is unforgivable and a culture of
deflecting and concealing mistakes pervades. In order to innovate and build
better products we must try new things and experiment with the expectation that
some will fail. In a growth mindset team failure is most definitely a result to
be proud of, and the quicker we can fail and learn from our failings the faster
we innovate.