316 - Cultures of Growth - Mary C. Murphy (rebroadcast)
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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, Episode 316. Music

When Mary C. Murphy was in graduate school at Stanford, earning her degree in social psychology, she attended one of these end-of-the-year review seminar things to support one of her friends. It's one of these events where students earning their degrees are

will present their work so far to professors. And when Mary attended one of these, she noticed something that seemed peculiar. ♪

This review ritual, this tradition, it's an event where students in different areas of study, like cognitive psychology or neuroscience, or in Mary C. Murphy's case, social psychology, gather by area of research and present their work on their dissertations. It's kind of like a science fair, but also kind of like a TED Talk. Lots of slides, lots of

diagrams and graphs and things, except the professors ask questions and make remarks and then convene to make more remarks among themselves and then offer revisions, major and minor, to the work. And it's a big deal for people in grad school trying to earn their PhDs. And the stakes are very high and so are the stress levels involved.

among the students. And, you know, every psychology seminar has their own presentation schedule. And I was in one visiting a friend who was giving his talk at the end of his fourth year in the PhD program. And he's up there and all of a sudden he's interrupted by a faculty member sitting over on the right. And the faculty member just doesn't even raise his hand, of course, just yells out, well, it's clear the fatal flaw is X, Y, Z.

And then another professor over on the left, he says, no, it's not XYZ. It's clearly ABC. I mean, if he solved ABC, then the XYZ wouldn't even matter. They started fighting about how this idea was totally wrong.

Mary C. Murphy, she noticed that in this particular seminar, the professors were mostly eminent, well-known, prestigious, and were vying for attention in some way. They seemed to be in competition with one another to be the first among them to pinpoint the mistakes in the PhD students' work. They wanted to add to their prestige, it seemed, by demonstrating how well they could obliterate

this presentation. And Murphy, a soon-to-be social psychologist, couldn't help but notice

how this social environment was affecting her friend. He suddenly couldn't answer questions. He had all kinds of speech dis- you know, getting, he basically choked, right? And I saw that what was happening here was later what I ended up calling a culture of genius, where these individuals are really fighting amongst each other. Who's the star in the room, right? How can I find the fatal flaw the fastest? How can I take down other people's ideas to show how smart I am in the context?

And I saw what it was doing to students too there, not just in that moment, but then weeks later, my friend didn't even want to pick up that project again because it was so painful to do. So you just kind of avoid it, right? You stay away. And that has completely the opposite impact of what you'd want in such a seminar, right? Murphy couldn't shake what she had witnessed. There seemed to be something here, something worth exploring here.

But it wasn't until weeks later, when she attended another seminar, that it really started to come into focus as something that would eventually become her grand obsession as a scientist. Something she wanted to make sense of, to explore, to understand.

And it would lead to 15 years of incredible research, lots of papers, lots of data collected in schools, companies, and organizations of all kinds. So a few weeks later, two weeks later, I was in a different seminar, different set of students presenting.

equally eminent faculty members, you know, in the room. And instead of this, like fighting amongst each other to see who's smartest, they still are finding the problems in the student's work. But instead, they're now fighting amongst each other to see who can come up with the most creative and best ideas to improve the work. Oh, this person needs to add this measure. Oh, this person needs a different manipulation. Oh, da, da, da, da, da, da.

And suddenly the students are able to participate in the brainstorming. They're getting motivated. They can see how their work is going to improve. And when they leave there, they're ready to pick it up. And they actually have very specific concrete strategies to try in the next week and the week after that because of the feedback they received during the session.

And so as I was thinking about this, I was thinking, you know, these are really two very different environments that have at their core some aspect of what sounds like mindset, right?

And when we think about it, there are these environments that we think we have this lay idea. We think both of these environments are motivating the harsh proven perform and also the like developmental focus. Here's the problems and here's how we can fix them together. Right. Kind of focus. And so I went down the hallway. Carol Dweck had just arrived at Stanford from Columbia and I knocked on her door and I said, Carol,

I know that everyone's thought about this idea of mindset really as a quality of our minds. What's your mindset? How does it affect you? What's my mindset? How does it affect me? But I really think that this could actually be very cultural around how we interact, what we say and do, and how it affects everyone else in the context. And if that were so...

Maybe there are mindset cultures and maybe those cultures affect motivation, engagement, performance, and our willingness to be there over time and the performance in those environments. And so she was like, you know, Mary, no one's ever thought about that and we should do it together. And that's just what they did. Mary C. Murphy and Carol Dweck, they went on and did this work. They did lots of work.

There are so many incredible research papers that came out of all of this. And I love that it started with this, oh wait, something's going on here moment that Mary Murphy witnessed among the social environments at these end of the year review things that happen when people are trying to get their PhDs. Today, Mary Murphy is a professor of psychology who is still exploring these topics. No.

My name is Mary Murphy. I am a professor at Indiana University and at Stanford University. And I also run an organization called Equity Accelerator. And now I am an author of Cultures of Growth. We'll get into the book in a moment. It's a collection of all of this work that she's done over the last 15 years. But to set the stage for that, to lay a foundation, you should know a little bit about Carol Dweck's work.

The scientist whose office Murphy visited, the one who had just arrived from Columbia University, she wrote a massive bestseller in 2006 titled Mindset, The New Psychology of Success. And if you've ever heard of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, that entered the public consciousness thanks to her research and then her book detailing that research and its application to daily life.

Today, this idea of fixed mindset versus growth mindset

People have a general understanding of what's going on there, but it's hard to understate how big of a deal it was when it really started to push out the concept of self-esteem. This concept that was very popular in the 1990s into the 2000s, that everything hinged on everyone keeping their self-esteem as high as possible. To think about that a lot, to consider it a lot. Well,

Fixed mindset versus growth mindset, the whole mindset concept in psychology, it had a lot to say about that idea. And here's Dweck giving a talk at Google in 2015 addressing that. In the 1990s, the self-esteem movement took over the world. We were told to tell everyone how fabulous, brilliant, talented, special they were all the time. This was going to motivate them.

and boost their achievement. Instead, it was a complete disaster. It didn't challenge people to fulfill their potential.

And our research showed telling people they're smart actually backfires. It makes them afraid of challenges. It makes them fold in the face of obstacles because they're worried. Oh, does this not look smart? Am I not smart? The whole currency is built around smart.

So given that this was the prevailing social norm at the time, Dweck wanted to make sense of something that seemed mysterious to her. In particular, she wanted to understand why some people seemed to thrive in challenging environments in which others who are equally talented or equally skilled or even more talented and more skilled seem to, as she put it, wilt.

And her research into this found that a huge factor underlying all of these things seemed to be a sensibility that some people have about themselves that amounts to a belief in the idea that talents and abilities are fixed traits. Whichever ones that we have, that's the only ones we'll ever have. And whatever magnitude we have of them, that's the most we'll ever have of those things. And so,

Though there are many people who feel that way, there are others who believe no matter their starting point, all talents and abilities can be developed. If you were to have access to the right strategies and proper mentoring to develop your talents and abilities, and you worked very hard to improve them, you could do so. Through years of work, we found that having a fixed mindset...

led you to be afraid of challenges that might unmask your deficiencies, made you withdraw in the face of difficulty because you felt stupid. You didn't want to feel stupid. You didn't want other people to think you were stupid. Whereas having this growth mindset, the idea that your abilities could be developed

Made you think, why waste my time looking smart when I can be getting smarter? Why waste my time looking smart when I can be getting smarter? And when Dweck says years of work in that little bit of audio there, she really means it. Over lots of years, she has collected lots of evidence.

Tens of thousands of subjects have contributed to this work, particularly students at all ages and within all sorts of institutions. So this whole concept of mindset, it really is backed by science. And there are many incredible findings within it. Like, for instance, in one study, when prompted to pursue a growth mindset, teenagers were able to increase their IQ scores over time. Even IQ isn't necessarily fixed.

But there's another side of that coin because teenagers who were prompted to pursue a fixed mindset lowered their IQs over time. In fact, her work reveals a lot of hidden negative effects, a variety of hidden negative outcomes that will impact everyone within a culture that

that maintains a belief in fixed talents and fixed abilities. I think it's created a nation that thinks when they see someone displaying talent or incredible performance, they were born that way. And they've had this inevitable rise to great success. I teach a freshman seminar at Stanford every year, and I have my students do an assignment where they do research on their hero.

And almost invariably, they think that hero just catapulted to success because of this amazing inborn talent. But every single time they find that the hero put in inordinate amounts of work,

met with obstacles and really powered through them. So I don't rule out the idea, the fact that some people are born with passions and talents and build those, but

Many people who never achieve anything are also born with talents and passions that they don't see through. And what's there, what we come with, that's the raw material that you've got to develop. Michael Jordan, it turns out, wasn't particularly talented until he went at it so ferociously, more ferociously than anyone else.

Okay, back to Mary C. Murphy, who, as a PhD student in social psychology, was well-versed in the work of Carol Dweck, and who, while attending dissertation reviews, noticed that some situations seemed to trigger people to behave as though they had fixed mindsets, while other situations seemed to trigger people to behave as though they had growth mindsets.

The research at the time already showed that no one is just one or the other. We may have a sort of resting tendency, but given different kinds of challenges, we will engage with those challenges from a mindset that is more fixed or more growth in nature, depending on that specific challenge.

But Murphy was thinking in terms of cultures, groups of other human beings watching you, considering what you're doing, commenting on it, maybe some of them with power or influence over you. How would a social environment that itself seemed to value and encourage one mindset or the other affect your natural tendencies?

Well, Carol Dweck arrives at Stanford. Mary Murphy visits her office to share what she has noticed. And Dweck suggests they enter a new phase of mindset research together.

So that was the beginning. And I was in my last year of the PhD program when that happened. And so really, I kind of took this idea past after graduate school for the last 15 years or so. My students and I and Carol and many other collaborators have really been looking at when these fixed mindset ideas, this what I call this culture of genius, which has its its

core. Edgar Schein talks about culture in an organization as being part of the basic core assumptions or core ideas that then have espoused values built on top and that have artifacts like what people actually say and do on the ground at the very top of the triangle.

And there are actually very few of these core ideas that have been identified in the organizational culture or culture more broadly, literature. But what we have been developing is this notion and finding evidence that

the fixed and growth mindset idea, whether you have it or whether you don't, whether intelligence and talent is something that's static that you are just going to have or you're not, or whether it's something that can be developed. This is one of those core ideas that shapes everything about the values we espouse to the ways we interact with each other, to the way we give each other feedback, to how we actually select people for our environments and whether we invest in their training and development or not.

And so that's where the idea came from. And then, you know, I started doing this work in schools and looking at how classrooms and particularly teachers who said, oh, yeah, I got training on growth mindset. I teach with a growth mindset. But at the same time, they were saying, oh, yeah, that kid, he just has such a fixed mindset. There's nothing I can do about it, which is the most ironic thing you can say, right? Yeah.

It's very meta because that's a fixed mindset, right? It's a fixed mindset about teaching with a growth mindset, right? Exactly. So we saw this kind of problem in education. And at the same time, Satya Nadella and others are saying, calling Microsoft the first growth-mindseted company in the world and talked about how when he first arrived, he showed that New Yorker cartoon where the executives are sitting around the conference table and they all have guns pointing to each other. And he said, this was what Microsoft was like when I first arrived.

Well, when he declared Microsoft as the first growth mindset company, he said, what happened? Now the weapons were loaded with mindset. Now it's like that guy has a fixed mindset. You should be listening to me. My strategy is more growth minded and here's why. And so we

We were seeing the ways in which mindset was actually not being applied appropriately, not really considered in this cultural way, in this deep cultural way, really imbued with everything we say, we do, our policies, our practices, our interactions with each other. And that if we could do that, we actually could create environments that would support collaboration, innovation, performance, and people's well-being over time. So we started studying how to do that.

How to create environments that support collaboration, innovation, performance, and well-being over time.

and how, even if you know a good bit about mindset and value the idea and want to create a growth mindset culture in your business, in your institution, in your educational program, the research suggests you may not be applying the previous research that gave us mindsets appropriately or not.

You may not be applying it in a way that deeply affects the culture that deeply affects everyone within it. All that with psychologist Mary C. Murphy, who, by the way, wrote a whole book about this called Cultures of Growth, which we will talk about after this break.

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This is the You're Not So Smart Podcast. I'm David McCraney, and in this episode, we are talking about cultures of growth as opposed to cultures of genius. That's what psychologist Mary C. Murphy calls cultures that deeply value and encourage and sustain fixed mindsets among the members of that culture.

That's a culture of genius as opposed to cultures of growth. And Mary C. Murphy just released a book about all of this titled Cultures of Growth. And that's extremely fortunate for both of us because I found Mary C. Murphy while doing research for my next book, which is all about what the word genius means.

And toward the end of the show, I'll put some audio in there of our conversation about that. But it all led me to this mindset research, which led me to Murphy's research paper, A Culture of Genius.

How an Organization's Lay Theory Shapes People's Cognition, Affect, and Behavior. That's the title of the paper. And it was co-authored with Carol Dweck. And it just so happened that Murphy was about to release her new book on all her research before and after that paper and how it can help businesses and institutions and education programs and families and everyone really.

And here we are. So let's start with a detailed recap in Mary C. Murphy's words of what we touched on in the beginning of this episode. Psychologically, scientifically, what is mindset? A lot of times we think about them as these two mindsets, the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. The

And the fixed mindset really holds this idea that some people just have it. They're inherently more capable, more intelligent. They have more talent and ability. You hear this in the way people talk when they say, I'm just a math person. I've always been a math person. I'm just good at it. Or I'm not a math person. I've never been a math person. I'm a creative person, right? I'm just into art. And I never, never wanted to figure out how to balance my textbook. That's too mathy. Yeah.

That's the fixed mindset, right? That idea you either have it or you don't. It's a strength or it's not. And this is often juxtaposed against the idea of the growth mindset, which holds that given the right supports with the right mentoring, the right strategies, anyone can develop talent, ability, potential, and they can contribute in a meaningful way, right? So the growth mindset is the idea that we all have this potential within us and with the right supports and the right effort, right?

and strategies we can improve from wherever we start. So the truth is though, of course, that one of the biggest myths we see with the fixed and growth mindset, if we go to Google as our cultural prototype to tell us what society thinks about this, if you put in fixed mindset or growth mindset into Google and you look at Google images, you're going to see this picture of two heads.

And usually one is red and one is green. And the green one is the good one, obviously, the growth mindset, everything good that comes with it. And the red is the fixed mindset, everything bad that comes with the fixed mindset, right? Like we don't, we shirk from mistakes. We want to hide those mistakes. We don't really want to be challenged. You know, I just want to do the things that I'm good at, right? That kind of thing.

And so usually the title over these heads is something like, which mindset do you have, David? And it's so ironic, right? To think about mindset in this dichotomous fixed way. You either have the growth mindset or you have the fixed mindset, right? And this is one of the most important myths that we have seen as mindset has been taken from the research literature and actually applied in education and in business contexts.

that we really start to think about people as either having a fixed or a growth mindset. And in fact, what we know if we go back to the way that mindset has always been studied and the way that we've known mindset to operate through experimental context, randomized control trials, studying people over time, we all have both the fixed and the growth mindset within us. And if we reflect on our own behavior, we know

there's some times where we're operating in our growth mindset, right? I'm open to trying new things in this area. I'm really excited about a new idea and all I want to do is learn everything about it. So I go down the rabbit hole of learning, learning, learning, right? There's other times like when I'm loading the dishwasher in the

fixed mindset idea about this, right? There's other times when I'm operating in my fixed mindset and that's true, right? We all have this mindset continuum. Sometimes we're in growth, sometimes we're in fixed. So then the question becomes, do we know anything about those situations that move us between our fixed and our growth mindset? And in fact, we do. Those are the mindset triggers.

We will dig into this a bit more later in the conversation, but I wanted to drop in here and let you know what these mindset triggers are all about right now. In Murphy's book, she goes into all of this, and her book is based off of her research. And in her research, her team isolated four situations that seemed most likely to move people along the fixed-to-growth continuum, one way or the other, toward fixed-toward-growth continuum.

In a culture that has become very encouraging of fixed mindsets, you'll get one outcome. In a culture that is very encouraging of growth mindsets, you get the other. And the evidence for this comes from thousands of subjects in all sorts of situations and institutions, all sorts of people from students to bank tellers to teachers to Fortune 500 executives.

Here they are. Number one, evaluative situations. These are situations in which we expect to be judged and compared to others. And depending on the culture, the context, they can push us into prove and perform mode or they can flip us into learning mode.

Number two, high effort situations. In these situations, people can become so worried about failing that they refuse promotions or cheat or abandon projects in fixed cultures. However, in a growth mindset culture, it can encourage people to put forth the effort required to challenge themselves. Number three, critical feedback. In a fixed mindset culture, we can see it as a pronouncement about who we are as an individual, which can stunt our growth.

In a growth mindset culture, we tend to seek critical feedback and embrace the opportunity to learn and improve from it. And number four, success of others. In a fixed mindset culture, when a peer achieves a success, people become demotivated around them. Why even try?

But in a growth mindset culture, people tend to become inspired when another person achieves any sort of success. They see it as an opportunity to learn new strategies from that person. Okay, back to the conversation.

You give us a thousand different ways to see both these. One of the ones I love was growth, you know, progress is its own reward. And in fixed, you would think like, and progress is not its own reward, but that's not what you say. You say it's, I'm really concerned about what others think of me, how I will be perceived and,

as either being smart or competent or whatever. And this might be an opportunity to showcase that for others. I love that it's not a clean, like, you know, a mirror image of what another is as far as concepts go. Mm-hmm.

To bounce off that, we're on that continuum. We do sort of have a sort of a little bit of a resting state where we are comfy, but we can move along that spectrum from context to context. Am I hearing you correctly? That's right. That's right. That's right. The second biggest issue, of course, with that prototype image that comes up in Google Images is that, of course, it shows mindset as just in the mind, right? Mindset is only a characteristic in our mind, and it's one or the other, right? These are two major problems. And so, like you said,

We have the mindset continuum inside us, but situations, contexts move us between our fixed and growth mindset. Mindset is not just in the mind. In fact, mindset is in the culture and mindset is in the groups and the interactions and the people that we talk to on a daily basis.

I'm imagining like someone walks up to you on the street and hands you a banjo and they take out a camera and say, hey, play this. And they're like, I can't. And then, but you're at a party, you've had a couple of drinks and your friends are all around. One of them is quite good at the banjo and they're like, you ever, you want to give us a go? And you're like, ah, they're like, come on. And then they're

Yes. Yes.

Okay, given all this is true, that we have these things called mindsets, and we can be in groups, as you say in the book, an institution or a culture is, you know, it's just two or more people paying attention to one another. And that, that creates a social environment that will deeply influence your behavior, and they can be sorted into one of two categories through this model that we're, that we're exploring. Okay.

Cultures of genius, cultures of growth. What are these two things? How do they compare? A culture of genius is a fixed mindset culture. Its focus is really on the star performers with this core belief at the center that these are the people who are most inherently capable, have some kind of superior intelligence, talent, or ability.

And everything in this organization is really, or in this group is really meant to praise and give power and resources to those stars. We got to find those stars. We've got to bring them in and then we've got to let them do their thing, do their star thing, be a genius in this context. We, um, did a survey of, uh, we used some, um,

algorithm that we created. And we gathered all of the mission statements and websites of the fortune 1000. And we looked at the extent to which some in these publicly available materials, the extent to which this culture of genius was really seen. And you could see it in the way that companies talked about offering their highest performance, uh,

opportunities, emphasizing people's talents and abilities is the most important thing. Focusing on results and results only. Results are the only thing that matters. My favorite one was it's an atmosphere of best, the best people, the best ideas, the best instincts, right? But that's a culture of genius. A culture of growth, conversely, is the idea it has it as its core belief inside the group

That given the right supports, everyone can develop and contribute. Everyone has potential. And if we invest in that potential together, or if they invest in that potential as individuals, they can grow, develop and improve. Right. And that's,

And what we know is that most cultures, most groups are not just one or the other. We don't want to falsely dichotomize also mindset culture in the way that we have done individual mindset. There's also a mindset culture continuum and most contexts are some mixture of a culture of growth and a culture of genius.

I've worked with huge multinational companies and I have seen organizations where yes, they might have an overall organizational mindset and a mindset culture. But if we look inside that organization, there are going to be some bright spots of cultures of growth, particularly oftentimes around R&D, where you have to be really innovative. You can't be tied to your initial idea. You have to prototype and you have to kill your darlings every day, right? In order to make progress, right?

And then there's other parts of an organization that might have very strong cultures of genius. And so really understanding those cultures and those microcultures inside of our groups and the organizations that we care most about is really important for being able to understand how we get motivated, how we do our best work, and how people can be who they're meant to be in those environments.

To put this in like, really like, let's get psychology nerd about this in that I love you describe these mindset cultures as meaning making systems. So I'm one of the things I'm most obsessed with is, you know, you're facing a moment of novelty and ambiguity, and you're falling back on your priors and all sorts of things that you're trying to assimilate and accommodate and all these things.

This culture that you found yourself within, you're working at Apple in 1992 or you're at pets.com. They have this way of approaching problems and they have this way of praising employees and your bosses. Maybe you're at WeWork where, as you note in the book, the bottom 20% of performers just get fired. Stack ranking. You're out. Yeah.

Weird. Yes, but also making a big comeback in Silicon Valley right now. So basically what happens is when you face this meaning-making system, I love this. Before I just go ahead and say it because I like it so much, what do you mean by this? What do you mean by meaning-making systems today?

How can my culture be such a thing? I make sense of things. I don't need, what's going on with that? Yeah. So an organization's mindset or a group's mindset, a team's mindset, it's really this shared belief about what's possible for people.

Right. How how do you get smarter? How do you get better? How do you become more talented? And it has a cascade of effects on people's core beliefs about themselves and about others, where they fit in the hierarchy with regard to talent and ability.

in a culture of genius, I'm going to be comparing myself to others and I'm going to see whether or not whatever level of ability and talent I have, how does it stack up to others, fixed levels of ability and talent. Right. And I'm going to be thinking about myself in that way. Um,

with everything I do, how I set up a presentation, how I think about pitching a client, how I think about asking for a raise or promotion, right? I'm always going to have to be talking about my own inherent talents and abilities and making the argument for why they're better than other people's because it's all fixed, right? And there's a hierarchy and, you know, I want to be recognized for my place within it. It also affects our goals. It affects our behavior, how we interact with each other. You know, what we see in these cultures of genius is that

Because there can only be a certain number of geniuses in this organization. Though everyone is told when they come into the organization, you're the genius. That's why we picked you. You know, you're going to be great. Once you come in, a new star is born every single day. And so in these cultures of genius, what you find is a lot of this internal competition, backbiting, information hoarding, because people are trying to maintain their advantage. They know that the

Coin of the realm is their genius status. And so they're going to do everything they can to protect it, including putting others down, hiding information from them. We also see effects on risk-taking and mistakes, the extent to which people are willing to cop to mistakes that they're made or to learn from those mistakes. Because in the culture of genius, if you have it or you don't, then making any level of mistake is

is a sign that maybe you don't have it. Maybe we made a mistake when we chose you to come into this organization. And so you see a lot of people hiding mistakes, not wanting to take a lot of risks, not wanting to put forward new ideas that may or may not work, that's a little bit risky. Instead, we'd rather go with something that's proven in the past because we know that'll work and that it'll show me to be smart because the outcome will be guaranteed. But in a culture of growth,

The meaning making system is still affecting beliefs, goals, and behavior, but it's affecting them in different ways. Now, the whole thing, the way to be smart in this organization is to grow, learn, and develop. So now the competition is really about how much we can grow, learn, and develop, and

individually and as a collective. And so here, collaboration is encouraged because we know that not every individual, not every single individual person can possibly have all of the skills, all of the talents, all of the abilities that we're going to need. So collaboration is necessary, especially if we are going to innovate and be creative, which the culture of growth really wants people to do. They want

want people to be making mistakes. They oftentimes have systems built in to identify those mistakes and to actually put supports around people. So those mistakes are, people are supported in making them. And also the learning of them is really mined and then shared broadly across the organization. So you see these structural differences in these companies that really affect the way people set their own goals and

their willingness to take risks in the company, their willingness to be creative. And we also see big differences in these companies around risk-taking. I mentioned how in the culture of genius, people don't want to take risks. That's if you're a regular person in the culture of genius. We also see it in a culture of genius that the geniuses

are given carte blanche to just go crazy with their risks, right? Because they're the genius. So you see these wild, you know, risk-taking that happens also within culture of genius at the highest level, at the elite level. And regardless of whether they fail, right, they can basically say, well, it was you all who didn't implement my genius idea well enough, right? Right.

And they live another day. We see a lot of these geniuses failing upwards, right? Because they're able to maintain their genius status in these contexts. So yeah, how does it affect meaning making? It affects everything from our core beliefs about ourselves and others, to our goals that we set for ourselves, to our interpersonal behavior, and how we actually interact with each other on a day-to-day basis. That's so wild. Like, every problem that comes along, you're going to

apply that cultural like because people are going to praise one another for being a good member of their group and adhering to the norms and being an example of the norms that's right and it's going to affect how you solve a problem it's going to affect how you deal with issues interpersonal issues how you talk to your boss or the boss talks to you

It's going to affect every little aspect of it. And one of the things I love about your research is how often these organizations had no idea there even was a culture happening like that. How often people inside of it didn't know that that's the kind of culture they were creating or they were harboring. Even people who were aware of growth stuff, like I love the great, they look at that picture and go, I'm a growth person. Didn't realize that all the stuff they were doing, the levers that they were pulling,

were causing them to, they were together, working together to create a terrible place to work and they had no idea they were doing it. That's right. That's right. All the things we've been saying so far, I can feel the heat of some people listening to this thinking, especially people who may be in management thinking, well, yeah, I get all this, but like, what's the point? Like, what is the benefit of being in the growth culture? Like other than it feeling nice and I feel like I'm a good person. Are there actual quantifiable benefits

positive results for having a growth mindset culture at my organization. What does your research say?

Yeah. So we have found that working internally in a growth mindset culture, a culture of growth, you get more collaboration, more innovation and creativity. If we can actually judge the innovation and creativity of ideas, products, and services being put forward, we can see more of those coming from cultures of growth and cultures of genius. We see...

that actually more risk-taking happening in cultures of growth, but also those risks end up being more productive risks. You might make some mistakes along the way. In fact, you should, right? There's this like classic study, this neuroscience study that has been replicated in animal models and with algorithms and others that 15% is the optimal amount of mistake-making that should happen if we're going to actually learn and develop and innovate and

And so you do see in cultures of growth more mistake making, but you also see that mistake making actually leading to more innovation and better outcomes for the organization. We did a study with over 300 Silicon Valley startup entrepreneurs and their early stage organizations. These are early stage, like series A, series B kind of organizations. And

What we found is that when the founder had more of a growth mindset and imbued more growth-minded practices and policies in their own organization at the get-go, at the very beginning, not only did they have better outcomes in terms of being able to produce services and products more quickly with more innovation and creativity, they also were more likely to reach their fundraising goal.

at the end of each year. So the bottom line is impacted. And then in the larger studies we've done with, you know, Fortune 1000 companies and larger, we have seen also that we get bottom line performance outcomes in cultures of growth than cultures of genius.

I will say that like these cultures of genius, they're not even that good for the geniuses. They actually put a straitjacket on the geniuses in these environments, right? There's not room for those individuals to learn, grow, develop, or make mistakes. And if you're dethroned in a culture of genius, you're nothing, right? You're nothing. There's not, it's a black and white. You either are or you aren't.

And so it's a very precarious place for everybody, including the geniuses. Then how come there's so many of these damn things? If this is often the thing that employees report they don't like being in, people don't enjoy going to work there, there's a lot of turnover, people burn out.

And even the people at the top, even if it's turned into one of these cultures of like cult-like cultures where there's one person saying, I don't care what the data says. I know you say this in the book. I don't care what the numbers say. My gut tells me blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Then why are these even, why is this a thing? How do they persist? Why is this a thing? It's a great question. I think that there, this goes back to something we spoke about earlier where, you know, in the 1700s, we didn't used to think about genius in this way. We used to think about genius, there were two types of genius that were very popular. One was genius that was learned.

And one was genius that was natural, just kind of imbued kind of this fixed mindset idea. And they were equally popular, equally used in regular everyday vernacular. And we kind of have doubled down over time since the 1700s into that more fixed minded view of genius. You either have it or you don't. That's what a real genius is, right? As someone that just naturally has superior talent, ability and performance. And I think

One of the reasons we've done that is because our society has become much more hierarchical and there's been much more inequality that has happened over time. And so what happens when we have these kinds of societies is that we often feel the need to justify

why certain people are on top and why others are not on top, right? Why others are kind of in the lower tiers of the hierarchy. And we love that idea. We also have this American mythology of being self-made, that we should just play to our strengths, right? We should identify our strengths. This is StrengthsFinders 101 used in every company in America.

certainly in the US oftentimes, and many times around the world, such a fixed-minded idea. Just find your strengths and then only do the things that are going to build on those strengths. Don't ever learn something new. Don't ever stretch beyond those strengths. That's not where your genius is.

Your genius is in your strengths, right? And so I think we have created this idea of genius and we want to invest in that because it helps us explain the hierarchy and the social status. And it gives some laundering to this power privilege dynamic that we have that goes on in American society. That's the deep answer, David. That's the only answer I want. Thank you.

You have a prescriptive part of the book, a whole section that's like, all right, given all of this, how can you apply this? How can you shift your culture if that's what you want to do after learning all these things? And they have these two great sections, these behavioral effects. Here are things that are definitely going to be influenced by

these cultural aspects. Five common ways, and I'll run through this very quickly, about collaboration, innovation, risk-taking, resilience, integrity, and ethical behavior, and diversity, equity, inclusion. So these are things that these cultural mindsets are going to affect deeply

I was going to ask you about collaboration, but we already talked a lot about it. What I want to talk about is in the trigger section. I love these so much. This part, there's evaluative situations, high effort situations, critical feedback and success of others. So they'll want to stick with one of these critical feedback. I like this a lot.

Just by way of introduction to what we're talking about, what do you mean? What is critical feedback? Yeah. So critical feedback is one of these four mindset triggers. These are common and predictable situations that are going to happen on a routine basis. They're not something weird or that's like, you know, rare for people to experience. But it's one of those situations that can move us either towards our fixed or our growth mindset. So when we think about how we actually, to your point, how you actually create these cultures is

It's really important for everyone to understand that we are all culture creators, regardless of our role. We're just an individual contributor. There's a lot we can do. And one of the first things we can do is identify our own mindset triggers, these situations, which ones are really more likely to move me towards my fix relative to my growth mindset, and then figuring out ways to shape those situations for myself, right?

in the way that I asked for feedback, for example. So critical feedback is when we have had some form of feedback. Oftentimes it's negative, right? Oh, we thought we did a great job. Turns out, no, not so much. If this is our fixed mindset trigger,

A lot of times that feedback can be heard through the lens of a pronouncement on how good I am, how good I am at my job, how good I am as a person. How good I am. Yeah, how good you are, right, as an individual. My identity, my personality. That's right. Okay. That's right. That's right. Because in the fixed mindset, you either are or you aren't. You have it or you don't. And if I get this critical feedback that's telling me not yet, not quite right, what you're telling me really is that you don't have it.

And so that threatens my very core of my idea of how good I am, how competent I am as an individual. And we're not doomed, though, in that situation. We're not doomed to always be moved to our fixed mindset when critical feedback comes. A lot of times critical feedback is a growth mindset trigger for many people. And we can actually learn to shift our mindset triggers from fixed to growth. So this is malleable, too. It's not fair.

fixed, right? So a growth mindset approach, or if this is your growth mindset trigger, when critical feedback comes, you can actually hear it, the whole thing. That's another effect that we see. If this is your fixed mindset trigger, a lot of times we go literally deaf, right?

because it's such a threat on our own personhood, on how good we are as an individual, that we can't literally remember the things that our boss or our partner is telling us about how we have not lived up to the standard that we were trying to live up to, right? So we, you know, when you ask people,

Can you tell me what I said here? A lot of times people cannot because it's literally affecting systems, our brain and our auditory system and our visual systems because we're in such a threat state, right? You're telling me that we have research that shows that when people receive negative feedback,

Yes. Their sensory modalities have their volume turned down? That's right. That's right. If this is their fixed mindset trigger. If it's their growth mindset trigger, if this is something that moves people to their growth mindset, they actually not only can hear and see the feedback that's being given to them, they're actually thinking a couple steps

ahead to be asking the right questions to figure out whether or not this feedback is something that's actionable, whether this is feedback that has merit to it. And if so, how can I learn from this? And they're asking questions about strategies. They're figuring out, okay, if you said I didn't do this quite well,

Enough. Okay. How can I do this better? What if I did this? What if I did that? In the moment, I have enough executive capacity, executive function to actually be able to engage in asking questions and brainstorming solutions in the moment. That's at the very far end of the mindset continuum if this is your true growth-minded mindset.

trigger. Again, we oftentimes are somewhere in the middle and the goal is to move more towards growth more of the time. And so there's lots of strategies in the book about how we can do that. Lots of stories of people who've been able to shift from fixed to growth in these contexts. How do we identify that in others? If you're a person giving feedback, if

If you're a parent giving feedback to a kid, if you're a partner giving feedback to your spouse or to a friend, and you need to deliver some critical feedback, how do you do that in a way that doesn't move people immediately to their fixed mindset where they think this is a pronouncement on myself and my abilities and my competence? How do you actually do it in a way towards growth? Well, there's strategies in the book like being very specific about the pronouncement

particular thing that someone did that was not up to standard. Also providing some ideas and some strategies, trying to understand and help and support them moving forward rather than just leaving it up to them. It's some kind of magic. You just have to figure out how to be better, right? We can, in the same moment that we are giving critical feedback, we can actually be helping to support them to learn, grow, and develop by providing strategies that we might help to support them over time.

There's a study that I wanted to... This study kills me. It's one of Carol's study. David Nussbaum and Carol Dweck's study. Oh, I love this study. If you remember this off the top of your head, I'd love you to tell us about it. This is one of those kind of psychology studies that is so good that in and of itself, it could start or end a lecture. It's so killer.

Whatever you remember of it, I'll help if you don't remember anything because I've got notes over here. Go ahead. Full disclosure, Dave was my little sib in graduate school. I was his big sister in the program. He was in my same lab. So I know Dave and I remember him doing this study in graduate school. So, all right. So here we go. So Dave and Carol had this idea that if you are triggered towards your fixed mindset, it would affect you.

Everything about how you feel, but in particular, it would affect the way you seek out additional information. So this is a powerful thing, right? Because if you're making a mistake and you get feedback that, you know, here you have these Stanford students, they expect to always be getting A's, but you give them feedback now that they've gotten a C or a D, this is the end of the world.

If this is their fixed mindset trigger, it moves them all the way into this is a pronouncement on me, how smart I am, how good I am, whether I'm going to be able to graduate from this place, whether I'm able to get a job, right? All of these things start to come online.

And in this study, what was really smart about this study was that they then gave people an opportunity to redo the test that they had just taken, redo the task. Before you got to redo the task, though, you got to look at other people's solutions, right? Other people's work. And the question was, are you going to look at people who performed even worse than you?

Because why? That makes you feel really good about yourself, right? Yeah, I might've gotten a C or D, but I didn't get an F like that loser, right? Let's see what they did, right? That makes me feel really good about myself, right?

Or do you choose to look at people who did way better than you? The people in the A and B zone, right? I got a C or D. I want to figure out, I'm going to have this chance, this next test to actually give it another go. Where am I actually going to learn the most? Yeah, it might hurt. I'm going to see some places that I really messed up when I was doing this the first time, but I'm actually going to learn some strategies that are going to help me when I retake the test.

And so that's exactly what they found. When this performance, this critical feedback, this negative performance was somebody's fixed mindset trigger, they looked to preserve their self-esteem. They looked at the people who were lower than them and it made them feel good, but they did just as bad, if not worse, on the next task because they had no new strategies. In fact, they learned other ways to get it wrong. Yes. I know.

And those for whom this critical feedback, this CRD was a growth mindset trigger, were willing to put the self-esteem on the shelf for a little while and actually look at people who had better performance, A's or B's on this. They learned new strategies and lo and behold, their second performance, they were way higher, way better, right? On the outcome. And I just love this study because it shows how much

motivated we are based on our mindset triggers right and again these mindset triggers are not fixed let's like underscore that for people right you can become a growth minded person in the face of critical feedback that's possible to do if this isn't doesn't come naturally right that's possible and

But the consequences of that, the learning that is unleashed when we're able to do that is so critical. And then if you multiply that by individuals into teams, into whole organizations and how we do that, how would we look? How would we actually gather information differently? We weren't worried about protecting the self-esteem of ourselves and our leaders. We actually could have quite innovative and successful outcomes, way more than what we likely have now. ♪

Who do you hope reads this book and what do you hope they get out of it? Oh, I hope everyone reads this book. I think anytime two people are together, there's a mindset culture. We are all culture creators. Everybody needs to understand this. This is affecting your most important relationships. It's affecting work, but it's also affecting your closest and most important relationships.

that we have with each other. And it's affecting the way we think about ourselves and the situations we're willing to put ourselves in or that we will shirk over and over and over again in our lives. So I think that this is one of the core fundamental ideas, this idea of mindset and understanding how it plays out outside of our mind is so critical. I hope everyone understands it and is able to benefit from it.

♪♪♪

Before we go to the credits one last thing I got this chance to talk to Mary C Murphy who is an expert on all things genius especially how groups can generate ideas and discoveries and solutions to problems that we would later refer to historically as moments of genius or the people who did that as geniuses and I asked Mary C Murphy

Just what is your definition of genius? That's a great answer. So here it is. Let me ask as a two-parter. Does it mean anything at all in current vernacular? Is it useful to have the word genius and genius?

Do you have a definition? Do you have a personal definition as a scientist who knows all about this kind of stuff? That's good. So, I mean, what does it mean to me right now? I think the word genius, to me, I don't necessarily think we need to get rid of the word genius. I think that we need to describe the actual way genius unfolds and is developed over time. And what are the affordances that allow genius to actually take root in different contexts for different people and for different groups?

I think that one of the issues that we see, I mean, this is sociological, it's historical, it's psychological. You know, one of the things we see is that we have a certain prototype of genius today. That is different from the prototype or the way that we thought about genius historically, right? In the 1700s, we thought about two different kinds of genius, one that is learned and one that is developed. And they were both equally acceptable when talking about genius today.

And we kind of moved over time. And I think a lot of it has to do with this like power privilege sustaining ideology of trying to justify there's a whole like self system justification, self justification theory and psychology. We try to justify the status quo and the

power hierarchies that have been created and exist and continue to exist. And we kind of want to give people at the top some reason to be there. And so a lot of times we'll afford this idea of genius onto them, um,

Because everyone has some situation for which they had a spark, an idea. That's really what we think of when we think of genius is, you know, the light bulb going on, the tree hitting, you know, the apple falling from the tree. And suddenly I have this insight that I didn't have before. And genius.

Almost everyone has an example of when that has been true for them, but we only remember and reify and tell stories about the ones that happen at the very top of the hierarchy. And so what do I think about genius today? I think that you can tell a lot about genius today when you Google genius and you look at the images and

and you see who is described and who is seen there because Google tells us what our cultural prototype is at the moment. And of course that does change over time and it's possible to change. In fact, it has changed already since I started doing this work, you know, about 20 years ago. That prototype has shifted a little bit, but there are these deep historical and cultural roots to it that make that shift more difficult.

And so rather than getting rid of this idea of genius altogether, when we know that that genius is sort of has a particular embodiment, it's going to be white, it's going to be male, it's going to be older, it's going to be from a certain educational and social class. You know, when we start to think about how you build a culture of

genius that has growth mindset embedded in it rather than just having this innate fixed ability idea, this fixed mindset idea being the core idea in a culture of genius. What we know is that a culture of growth actually produces more genius if what we're talking about when we say genius is innovation, creativity, better performance across the board for individuals and for groups and for teams and for organizations.

then what we know is that the real genius lies in growth and not necessarily in this fixed idea. Damn, that was good stuff. This makes me happy because I'm zeroing in on something. I'm in your space with this. Yeah. I guess I was very floored at how much the things you're talking about were in there. These people who are...

trying to post-talk rationalize why they are what they are. Because I'm a genius. Why they have what they have. Yeah. Because I had an aha moment. In your book, you talk about how it's a way to justify, as you were saying, oftentimes they're born in the privilege. They went to a very nice school. They got a lot of money around them and a lot of support. And

It was like Stephen Jay Gould's famous quote. He's like, I'm less interested in folds of Einstein's brain than I am people who lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops with the same exact brain structures.

By the way, I think there's deep questions as to why genius persists if the very large populace around us is not necessarily imbued with this idea of genius. Why do we allow this genius mythology to persist? Why do we want it to be there? And I also think there's a function for why that is. I think that there's a lot to be said that if...

I don't have to wear the crown of genius takes a lot of pressure off of me. I can choose to do certain things at the level that I want to do it. And I don't have to, you know, be so ambitious and grind all the time and, you know, all that kind of thing, because, you know, I, I,

I'm just doing what I'm doing. I'm not really trying to go for the genius label. I'm not trying to go to be seen as a genius. And that's for someone else to do. And it kind of takes the pressure off. So I think there's system justification happening at the top end. And I also think system justification is happening for the larger population that allows that genius to be seen.

reified and continue over time. That's a really great point that we're all justifying this together because it serves all of us. That's a lot to think about. Thanks for freaking me out.

That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything that we talked about in this episode, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there

inside your podcast player. Mary C. Murphy's book is Cultures of Growth. My book is How Minds Change. You can find details about both of those things in the podcast player right there in your notes area.

and the details about how minds change are at davidmcgraney.com. On my homepage, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, and more. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to stitcher, soundcloud, applepodcasts, amazonmusic.com,

Thank you.

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