How Mindsets can Help or Hinder Learning (Book Review)

It was inevitable that I would read Mindset. Having recently read two books Give and Take by Adam Grant, and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough) which referenced this book, and having heard mention of it in other contexts as well. As promised on the cover, Mindset provides advice that you can apply whether you are a manager, worker, parent, teacher, or some combination. Carol Dweck does a great job of explaining an idea with a lot of research behind it in a popular book, without glossing over too many points. There were a few places where I thought the book dragged a bit, but those sections were brief and far between, and on net it was a quick enjoyable read.

The point of Mindset is that people have one or two mindsets: fixed mindset which is premised on the idea that you abilities and qualities are carved in stone, and the growth mindset which is based on the belief that your basic qualities are cultivated through effort. The 2 mindsets in Dweck’s model provide a powerful framework for understanding how people approach challenges. Those who approach situations with a fixed mindset are likely to see failure as a reflection of their value. Those with a growth mindset are more likely to see a set back as an opportunity to learn and improve.

People can have different mindsets in different aspects of their lives (work, relationships, artistic, technical). Dweck also explains that mindsets are “just beliefs” so you can change them if you want. Mindsets are not just a way people are. From the names you can guess that the growth mindset is the one that can lead you to better things. The most interesting parts of the book for me were the discussions about you can develop (in your self) and nurture (in others) a growth mindset.

While the fixed mindset v growth mindset concept seems simplistic at first glance, it is seems extremely powerful. While reading I found myself thinking “so maybe that is why I do that…” or “maybe I should consider the mindset model when dealing with a colleague.” Since the book wraps up with a focus on education, it led me to consider my approach to encouraging an motivating my (as I write this) third grader .

Since mindsets are not innate, one might ask why anyone would stay in a fixed mindset. The discusson of why that happens lie the most interesting lessons for self-improvement. Your mindset can be re-enforced early in life, and like all things that connect back to childhood experiences, the messages you get early in life are hard to get past, even if they are slowing you down. Dweck shares both data and anecdotes of how various mentors tried to help students ended up moving from a fixed to a growth mindset, with various degrees of success. That all of the stories are not “fairy tale” success stories grounds the concepts in reality. All change is hard, and not everyone can success absolutely. But you can benefit from trying.

Dweck discusses the application of mindsets in many realms, including business, relationships, and education. The book ends with an explanation of a program for elementary schools to help develop growth mindsets, which is appropriate given the focus of Dweck’s research and the value of improving mindset early on. The area that is most interesting to me professionally is how the mindset model relates to leadership approaches.

We often think of leaders in terms of raw ‘talent’ … and that “effort” is for those who don’t have talent. In reality it takes both effort and talent to be continually successful. Dweck explains that more often than not great leaders are the people who were constantly trying to improve, and who don’t have all the right answers starting out. What leads to success is willingness to make a effort to improve. Raw talent helps, to be sure, but it can’t sustain success.

One thing that the book didn’t address for me, though perhaps the answer is obvious, is the question of sustainability. If a growth mindset is good, and is all about meeting challenges, would a growth mindset lead to you overextend your self? Is what we might call “knowing your limits” a manifestation of a fixed mindset? I suspect that the answer is no. There’s a difference between having a perspective that obstacles can be overcome, and having the energy or bandwidth to meet all challenges head on.

There are number of lessons I felt that I could apply immediately to understanding my personal life, helping my (as I write this) third grader, and understanding how to work with teams and people at work. Mindset can inspire you to meet challenges with more confidence, and help you to better understand your interactions with others.

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Books mentioned in this article:

Team of Teams: An Unexpected Source of Agile Inspiration

One can find insight in unexpected places. Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal et al is a book about dealing with organizational complexity, written by a general, which uses the war against Al Queda as a common thread. I was somewhat skeptical that I could find information here about software teams that I'd find immediately useful, regardless of how interesting it was. I was wrong. In addition to the advice I was expecting to read about team dynamics, I gained some insights that I thought would be immediately applicable to scaling Scrum Teams.

Fairly early into Team of Teams the authors explain that this is not a war story. While it's true that the common thread in the book is how General McChrystal worked to get the army more able to adapt to a decentralized, agile enemy, there are are also stories from commercial aviation, NASA, and corporate America. While there is a fair amount of military history in this book, there is also a discussion of the history of manufacturing process improvement, office space, and even personal stories about gardening.

The message in this book is that command and control structures don't work in complicated, information rich environments that deal with complex problems. He defines complicated as "having many parts" and complex as having many interactions. To get things done in this kind of environment you many need to cast aside what you are used to thinking of an efficient approach.

McChrystal draws a contrast between being resilient and being robust: The more you optimize a complexy system for a specific goal, the less resilient it becomes. Likewise efficiency isn't always better than adaptabilty: you can build a system that is good at doing things right, but is too inflexible to do the right thing. Redundancy and overlap can enable adaptability; an efficient system that does the wrong thing doesn't add value.

Had McChrystal been delivering this message in the context of a corporate enviroment, you might dismiss this as another instance of someone who is in an environment suitable for agile singing the praises of agility. That he's talking about battle command situations, the canonical top-down environment, gets your attention. As with Turn the Ship Around this provides evidence that an "agile" approach can work in more circumstances than you might guess.

At the core of the book is the philosophy that too much control of information and decision making slows down a group's ability to react to situations. The situations described in the book were ones where the risks of acting too slowly are higher than the risks of competent peope making judgment calls. Automomous decisions are usually good as long as they are visible and shared. While most business decisions don't have the same life or death implications of those made in a war zone, slow decision making can have a business cost, and potentially a morale cost if people feel undervalued and micromanaged.

McChrystal advises us that it's not enough to "empower" people in name only. Automony and delegation only work with a clear understanding of a common purpose. Communication channels and shared information are important to both sharing the common purpose and giving people the tools to act in a manner consistent with that purpose. One technique he used was to provide for open office spaces. McChrystal acknowledges that open office space only improves team productivity when everyone is working on related problems, and that open office space as a way to be "space efficient" is productivity inefficient. Video conferencing for his troops was also important, as his teams needed to communicate with others in remote places. As someone who works in a company with people in multiple locations, the stories of the challenges of setting up video conferencing sounded all too familiar. That they were successful in a low bandwidth war zone situation was encouraging.

The book also had some insights about scaling teams that had an implication for scaling Scrum. While it's appealing to think of projects at scale as hierarchical, each level of hierarchy hides information. That can be fine when everyone knows what other teams need to know and not know. But that kind of knowledge is rare. McChrystal's approach to scaling is that everyone needs to know someone on every team so that information will flow organically.

I found both inspiration for seeking ways to improve, and practical advice about how to structure teams and be an effective manager in this book. While not about agile per-se, I think that there are lessons here that apply to those trying encourage agile adoption in a non-agile situation, and also for those looking to scale agile.

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How Children Succeed: Rethinking What's Important (Book Review)

When listening to news coverage of education reform, and talking with parents and teachers, one hears a variety of views about what “The Best” approach to education is. While I’ve spent a lot of team learning about teams (of adults), and I have some opinions about what seemed to work best for me when I went to school, I realized that I didn’t really know much about research into education. To that end, I started reading How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, and in the process started to reconsider many of my preconceptions about what’s best for kids, and along the way I learned a few things that I can use to help the people I work with succeed.

A lot of the discussion around elementary (and earlier) education is around what children learn and when. How Children Succeed reminded me that learning isn’t all about academics, and that not all learning happens in school.

Some of the concepts and principles that the books discusses, like Flow, Grit, and the ideas of Seligman in Learned Optimism, are ones that I’ve come across while reading about how adults work, so I felt that many of the concepts, if not the details, are excellent ones to have in mind while working with my teams.

Paul Tough starts out the book with a description of a pre-kindergarten class using the Tools of the Mind curriculum. This approach, which my son’s kindergarten class followed, is about teaching executive function, a set of skills that helps someone interact with other and learn. As the book progresses, Tough describes the other traits that are more related to “character” than “academics.” The argument is that these “non-cognitive” or “character skills” – things like grit, resilience, and resourcefulness, are often a better predictor of eventually success than mastery of academic disciplines. The data Tough presents are compelling, and the related anecdotes are quite motivating, and the challenges to putting these lessons into practice are somewhat daunting,

There are challenges to teaching children these kinds of skills. Using the word “character” can lead to political issues. If you get past those questions. Evaluating character and non-cognitive skills is hard, and teaching these skills is more work than simply correcting an incorrect fact or algorithm. A more concrete issue is how to get past a culture where academic testing is the norm. A recent NPR story on changes to the SAT mentioned that some states are considering using college entrance exams as an assessment mechanism at the same moment as colleges are making them optional.

Character traits are not all there is to success. Academics are important too. The character skills that the book describes are not enough to master a discipline; mastery takes practice too. The character skills do enable you to learn academic (and other) skills though. Academics and character are both important but it may make sense to change our priorities from focusing primarily on academics.

If I think back over the concepts I’ve learned in school, the most useful were the ones that gave me the tools to learn new things. To be successful in my day to day work I need to be able to work to learn new things all the time. It was nice to be reminded of this in the context of my child’s education.

While there are essential skills that children need to succeed (reading, writing, and math at some level), I wonder if I should focus less on whether or not my child is mastering specific subject, than whether he is getting an exposure to a range of topics so that he can find something that he is passionate about. Perhaps he can then use that passion as a way to practice overcoming roadblocks and frustration when things don’t come easily. Those persistence skills are then applicable to the tasks that are simply “necessary” even when they are not compelling.

How Children Succeed is easy to read, with many pointers to places to learn more about specific concepts, and it’s broken into sections that are easy to read during small bits of idle time, such as during a subway commute. This is a great book for parents to read, in particular if you are inclined to get into discussions about education policy with your peers. I won’t assert that this book will make you a expert, but it should lead to some interesting dialogs (internal and external) which will help you reconsider any idea you had that what worked for you in school was that right thing for your children. And in as much as adults and children are different in the details, I think that anyone who leads or works with teams can gain some insights that will help you become a better leader. If you are a parent who has such as role, all the better!

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Turn the Ship Around: Agile Lessons from a Submarine Captain

I was not expecting a book about working on a Navy submarine to provide insights I could use to help a team be more agile. Having heard recommendations for Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by David Marquet from both a colleague at work and people in the agile community who I respect, I decided to give the book a look anyway. I’m glad that I did.

I thought that this was be a quick, enjoyable read with many lessons I could quickly employ at work. The chapters are all short and focused, and the author repeats the key themes often enough that they stick. Each chapter is centered around a story, so it’s easy to see that the lessons in the book are based on experience and not just theory. My focus is on working with agile teams, so I found that the lessons applied to that context. Even if you are not doing "Agile, this book highlights the value of an agile, adpative, self-organizing approach can have in any organization, regardless of the overall process.

The book is easy to read, with one key point per chapter, and with chapters being short enough that one could almost always find time to read a complete chapter (and thus gather a coherent lesson). This wasn’t a perfect book. Certain aspects about the writing style I found a bit jarring. While some repetition of key points is helpful, there is a bit too much of it at times. And I found the author’s use of ALL CAPS as a mechanism for emphasis to be a bit jarring. Over these stylistics decisions don’t take away from the value of the book; they just made the reading experience less than ideal. But it’s not hard to get past that, and the engaging stories that the book uses to set the stage for its lessons keep you reading.

The ideas in the book should be familiar to anyone who has spent time studying agile teams. That the author talks about how bottom up, distributed decision making (an aspect of what the author calls a leader-leader approach) can lead to a more effective operation than the traditional (to the Navy) , top-down leader-follower approach that many military and other organizations follow. Processes and checklists have as place to simplify decision making, but only in the context of rational though about your goals. Command and Control has a place, in particular in a military organization, but a more limited one than you might think. Even in critical situations a leader-leader model, where people are applying their training to do what works, rather than working by the book, or blindly following authority, can solve the problem better.

What I particularly found compelling was that this book is full of stories of how a more botton-up, empowering model of leadership can be a better way to work. That this can be true even on a submarine – an environment that is both literally and figuratively high-pressure – , should be an excellent counter to those who argue that we can’t do (agile, self-organizing teams, etc) in my organization. An agile approach is not the best solution for all problems, but agile techiques are more widely applicable than many think.

This work does not exist in a vacuum. The author frequently cites Stephen Covey, the author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and the writer of the forward to the book, and also provides some pointers to other resources. Whether you are a manager, scrum master, or just someone involved on a team (agile or not) that doesn’t seem to be working well, reading this book will be a quick and enjoyable path towards finding help in identifying things that might be getting in the way to effectiveness, and also give you a sense of optimism that things can get better with the right approach.

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Brick By Brick: Lessons from Lego (Book Review)

There is no shortage of business books about companies that lose their way, and then do a dramatic turn around. Some are more relevant that others. Brick by Brick by David Robertson caught my attention because it is about an iconic toy that is, at the moment, popular with people of all ages. The book first came to my attention when we were stopping at a bookstore bookstore in Saratoga Springs, NY last summer. My then 7 year old, a big Lego fan, and avid reader handed the book to me suggesting that I might enjoy it. He was right; I enjoyed reading the book and also learned some useful things.

While I had heard stories about the reasons behind the recent surge in Lego’s popularity, I had not realized both the scope of the changes the company made, and the depth of the problems the company had. Lego’s story is one of a company losing track of it’s core vision while trying to diversify and create market opportunities. Robertson explains the rise and fall, and rise of Lego in an engaging style, while highlighting the key lessons are reader can apply to their orginization.
While much of the book was a great story, it was around the mid-way point that I found items that resonated with me as an Agile Software Development practitioner. One of the insights in the book was that more constraints can make for more creativity. In particular, Lego sets are constructed with many of the same bricks; new bricks are rare, so designers are encouraged to create new models with existing bricks. This isn’t necessarially surprising to someone used to working with constraints (or building with Legos), but it does contradict the sterotype that blank pages are best for creativity.

Also reminiscent of agile adoption is the idea that action that leads to forming new habits is essential to changing a culture. This is much like how agile practices, done well, can help the team form habits that further enable agility.

There were also some interesting lessons in the discussion of how Lego involved community members in the design of new toys. The community related acitivities were managed in a way where the final decisions rested with select people at Lego, rather than in concensus. Deciding how to make decisions is an important decision for every team to make, as Ellen Gottesdiener tells us, and concensus isn’t always best. The formerly top-down company also discovered the power of voluntary commitment. This is an example of how management skills that make sense in the context of volunteers (the community members) apply to workplace management as well. (Tom Demarco also discuses this in Slack ).

I enjoyed reading this book, mostly for the chance to hear the story of the company whose products appear to be even more popular than when I first encountered them as a child. It was an unexpected surprise to also learn a few things that I could apply to help the teams I work with be more innovatiove and productive.

Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Book Review)

I’ve often thought that the hardest part about building a software product was creating an environment where the people on the project can work together effectively. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team kept showing up on recommended book lists and I finally decided to get a copy. I’m glad I did. This quick to read book helped me to remember some simple, yet important, things about how great teams work.

Reminiscent of The Goal and The Deadline, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team spends most of its time teaching its lessons using the example of a fictionalized story of a new CEO joining company in trouble.

The CEO uses the model to help the executive “team” become a team in more than name. Even though the story itself isn’t great literature, since I’ve been in and around dynamics similar to those in the book, I really wanted to see what happened next. (Though a successful ending was never really in doubt.)

There is a brief summary of the 5 dysfunctions model at the end, but the story form really drives the point home better than the 37ish page summary of the model. You could just jump to the summary of the model, but the lessons might not stick, and the power of the simple model might be as clear. What the model description adds is the important point that the parts of the model work as a system, and can’t really be taken independently.

If you’re on an agile team you might want to think about how agile methods both rely on and encourage the elements of the model.

If you are on a team, (or even part of a family) you’ll find value in this book, either as a way to lead others to form a better team, or as a way to understand what’s happening around you so that you can do better on your own, and make the right choices to help you work on a good team.

Essential Scrum and Other Books to Help You be Agile

I’ve read a few books on Scrum over the years. I read Essential Scrum because others at my company who had not gone through Scrum training with Kenny Rubin, and I wanted to use the book aa a vehicle for refreshing my thinking and getting on the same page as everyone else in terms of terminology, best practice advice etc. The book helped with that and more.

Reading this book did more for me than give me a chance to synch up vocabulary. It helped me re-think some practices and consider ways to move beyond my current approach to Scrum and consider ways to do things better.

This book covers the whole spectrum of Scrum related issues from the usual Scrum mechanics, such as how to execute scrum meetings to questions that often leave those adopting Scrum for the first time puzzled such as how Scrum fits in the larger organization, the the role of Managers (yes, there is one), and how to deal with obstacles.

The book has an excellent discussion of the various Scrum roles, and how they work in real situations. (For example, what to do when you can’t have a dedicated Scrum Master). This is a book on process, but it does not let you forget that people and communication are at the core of Scrum.

This is a rather complete book on its own, as it covers the full spectrum and full lifecycle of Scrum from planning to retrospective, and from Portfolio to sprint. Rubin also provides a selection of good references throughout should you want to go deeper. In particular you might want to follow up by learning more about retrospectives by reading Agile Retrospectives or learn more about portfolio management by reading Johanna Rothman’s book.

What was especially interesting for me to see was the chapter on management. With the focus on self-organizing teams and mechanisms for team feedback and improvement, many people either neglect the role of managers, or overlay an approach that can stifle a scrum team. Rubin has an excellent chapter on this topic. You may also want to read Management 3.0 for a broader perspective on what a manager on an agile team is, and Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management for some excellent day to day advice on managing in any context, but especially an agile one.

This book is different from some other recent books on Scrum. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time is more about the principles of Scrum, and it’s a great book to inspire you to implement Scrum values, but a book like Essential Scrum is what you’ll need to actually execute. The Human Side of Agile adds to Essential Scrum by guiding you through the interplay between technical and people issues.

Essential Scrum is readable and useful by everyone on the team and in the business, and is a great book to read if you can read only one for now. Essential Scrum can help you adopt Scrum more effectively, or reenergize your Scrum thinking if you are Scrum veteran. There are other books that will want to read as you seek deeper knowledge, but you can’t go wrong with starting with Essential Scrum.