The day I discovered that mindsets are not purely fixed or growth - Part One

I didn’t start out to create an alternate logic to the idea of the fixed and growth mindset. In fact, I began with the same assumption that people were in fact either fixed or growth in their mindset. But, like all research, you allow the data to take you to your final assertion, and you do not bend it to conform to your hypothesis. That happened one day in 2014.

I remember that day very well. I was in the midst of verifying my growth mindset assessment using the ipsative model. An ipsative assessment is one which asks you to rate yourself on a scale of “Least like you” to “Most like you.” We used a 7-point scale, with a neutral response (that is, “Neither like nor unlike me”) at 4, and then 3 responses to the “less-like-me” scale, and 3 responses to the “more-like-me” scale. This was still very early in my research on the measurements of mindset, and my hypothesis then was the same as the dominant logic; that is, people are either fixed or growth. I created a set of 30 work-related thoughts and behaviours that respondents would answer on that ipsative scale. Each response would have a score (higher score for a growth response and lower score for a fixed response) and from there, I could obtain the average of all the scores of the assessment. That average score would determine if the respondent was fixed or growth minded.

We started by inviting about 100 people whom we knew personally to take the assessment. We had to work with those we knew well because we could already tell if they were growth or fixed by their words, behaviour and actions, and by them taking the assessment, we could verify its output and then calibrate it by asking more behavioural questions. By the time we had completed the work with these 100 respondents, we had completely remodelled our understanding of the primary concept of the growth and fixed mindset and created ideas that were not aligned with the dominant logic!

Now, the thing about an ipsative model is that it is not reliable when it comes to self-rating. For example, how do you know if a behaviour statement is “somewhat like you” or “more like you”? We also exhorted respondents to stay away from the neutral response because, let’s be honest, how can a behaviour statement like “I am not afraid of being wrong” be “Neither like nor unlike me”? So, there is a lot of “wiggle-room” when it comes to using an ipsative scale.

With all the uncertainties surrounding each response, we had to take a two-step validation process. Step One was where the respondent took the assessment and we collected that data; and Step Two was where we interviewed every respondent to verify their response and adjust them, if required. In the end, we arrived at two sets of data for each person; their initial response to the assessment and the interview-adjusted response. Yet, even the interview-adjusted response was not without bias, but at least we tried to keep that to a minimum.

The results were interesting, to say the least. Those whom we identified as growth did indeed return growth scores in most of their responses, as was to be expected. However, this does not validate our assessment. We needed to ensure that those whom we identified to be fixed also returned fixed responses. But that didn’t happen. We received very mixed responses.  Most of their Step One responses were in the higher scores, depicting growth tendencies. So, during the interview sessions, we had to go through sometimes deep, and sometimes heated, discussions. Several of them refused to accept a lower adjusted score for a few of their behaviour statements, even when we had shown that their words and behaviours had demonstrated the opposite. Others openly declared themselves to be fixed minded, yet their interview-adjusted responses were growth in several statements.

This left us with a huge quandary; how could one person be fixed AND growth at the same time, since the dominant logic stated that we were EITHER fixed or growth minded? (Note: This was in 2014 where the dominant logic was a binary concept. Today, the dominant logic has changed, stating that you can be fixed in one situation and growth in another. Hence, they have accepted that it is contextual after we had published our findings.)

There was also another problem with the measurement. Recall that our hypothesis was to return an average score for all the responses to which this score would determine if one was growth or fixed. When we tabulated all the average scores, the LOWEST average score was 4.45. On a scale of 1 to 7 (Least like me = 1 and Most like me = 7), the cut-off score should be 4.0. Hence, any score above 4.0 makes you growth minded, and anything below 4.0 made you fixed minded. (We shall not discuss what happens when a person had a score of exactly 4.0!) But, if the lowest average score was 4.45, there had to be a problem with the scoring because EVERYONE was growth minded, even though we KNEW that is not the case!

It turned out that the problem was not the scoring; it was the concept. The fact of the matter is that there is no “cut-off” in our mind that makes us fixed or growth. Mindsets are tendencies, and so some people may have predominantly fixed tendencies and some may have predominantly growth tendencies. Yet, those are rare. In our initial dataset, only 13.7% of all respondents had predominantly fixed or predominantly growth scores for all their behaviour statements. If this number is anything to go by, then we can say that being able to predict if you were growth minded or fixed minded works only about 14 out of 100 times! So how does that gel with the dominant logic?

But, more importantly is, what can we say of the 86.3% who were not predominant? What can we say of their mindset? With a myriad of combinations of fixed and growth responses in their assessment, there was no way to definitively say one person was fixed and another was growth. This led me to realise that I was looking at what we now term as the Transitional Mindset. This is a zone of scores where one person could be growth minded or fixed minded, depending on the context! And THIS created harmony in our numbers!

That was the day when the binary fixed-growth concept died in my mind.

But our discoveries were only JUST beginning…

End of Part One.

In Part Two, I shall share how we uncovered the 5 Dimensions of the Growth Mindset that will blow the dominant logic totally out of the water.