Mindset VS Toolset

I know it is a rather cliché title for a story, but stay with me.

I have worked with large corporates and am still working with one. Having spent almost a decade and a half in the profession, I have learnt many things and seen patterns repeating themselves in the years. One that comes closest and most relevant to the current story is that of technology and culture. Although most of the consulting companies, that are hired at a pricey hourly rate to advise big companies how to adapt large transformations, will tell you that a particular recipe is tailor made for your organization and would do wonders. I have often seem them back in the board rooms defining a new strategy every few years to keep the change going. Not a bad thing at all, after all change is inevitable and mostly for good. But the catch I want to talk about is that of choosing technologies, processes, frameworks and methods prescribed by the consultants to reach a disruptive change.

In today's world, when most of the organizations are going through a wave of change due to drive towards technological excellence. Most of the effort is planned in and around changing processes and providing new tools.

Traditionally the industries saw people as resources who were strictly following the processes and the tools/ process definition was the prime concern of the responsible Leaders in the organization. For example, a mill-worker will have to use a punch card as a new process to mark his attendance.

However in todays world people are addressing the concern of the mindset as well. For example, in your agile journey, just changing the tool for marking your daily tasks is not guaranteed to bring in efficiency if the mindset is still just to do paperwork for administration rather than taking ownership of working on things that matter to the team.

In earlier days the feedback loops were longer, and mindset of the workforce didn’t play a significant role in deciding the organizational changes. However in recent times process design and tooling has been designed keeping in mind the mindset and behavior of the workforce using them.

This makes the debate even more crucial, since making a choice becomes difficult. When the organization employ expensive consultants to come up with new processes / Tools / Way of working, I think the last and the biggest hurdle for disruptive Organization change is left to be addressed as part of the organic change which happens as after-effect of the disruptive changes to the processes/tooling.

However in my humble opinion mindset change is equally, if not more, important for any organization to see immediate impact of the disruptive change.
If the processes and toolset is there but the right mindset is missing, the tools and processes might not be used at all, or to their best capability, and thus the overall result is not disruptive enough.

Mindset changes do not necessarily have to happen in an organic way, there can be a big bang process change which impacts the mindset on a shorter run but in an accelerated fashion. For example changing a law will take effect from the very day, how people react/ adjust to the change is first process driven (abiding by the law) but eventually it becomes a mindset.

We have talked enough about mindset, so what is mindset and why is it important?
Mindset is a combination of belief system, rationale/logical reasoning, learnings from past experiences that influence your actions or decisions.
When faced with real life scenarios that need action/decision making capability, most of us would react naturally without going through a brainstorming. This happens because human’s have a tendency to use beliefs and experiences to make decisions/ actions.

If we want to change the mindset of a large workforce, we need to understand what drives their implicit decision making capability. It is very difficult to change the mindset of a large workforce just by applying traditional ways of communication.

Gamification and situation reaction tests might come to rescue in changing the mindset of a large workforce — as one of the many alternatives.
If we can let people experience situations which require changed mindset to be able to handle them, then we are creating experiences that have defined meaning to the conscious and subconscious mind of the person. You can let a person experience wide range of experiences in a short time by gamification of these situations.
In this way you might be able to accelerate the mindset change among your workforce.

Sharing the success stories of such impact is another way of relating the mindset change to tangible impact in an organization. This avoids the “I am not that person in the game” pushback while adopting the mindset change as part of a gamification approach.

We are humans after all, we learn from our social circles be it at work or elsewhere. Thus experience based learning can help accelerate the mindset change in bigger organization. Go Team !