Being future-ready requires … an Optimisation Mindset culture

Today, more than ever before, we are seeing clients wanting to foster adaptability and resilience among their leaders or workforce.  Some describe it as wanting a “Learning” or “Growth” culture. Others want to establish a workplace where employees feel at ease discussing mistakes, or having difficult conversations with each other, or they are seeking to reduce the avoidance of accountability. Others can see that their silos and lack of trust among teams, are holding them back from getting real value out of the intelligent technology they are implementing.

In essence, what they seek is assistance in fostering a culture where employees embrace and appreciate the imperfect and incomplete nature of their work. They aim to transform their workforce into one that is comfortable with and embraces the uncertainty of ongoing change and can progress even when circumstances are less than perfect. Recognizing that there's no ultimate finish-line, they understand the continuous process of refining and enhancing what they release into the world. This may entail encountering mistakes and flaws, but they acknowledge that they are not alone in this endeavour; they collaboratively address and improve challenges as a unified team.

This quest aligns with what we call an "Optimization Mindset" culture.

This has never been more important than now. As organizations integrate machine learning into their work processes, it's crucial for employees to accept that AI will be deployed based on an initial set of data. Over time, its performance improves as it learns and expands its dataset. It will never be perfect. It will require constant optimisation.

What does this look like?

Employees with an Optimisation Mindset are comfortable with imperfection. They have an understanding that there is no finish-line in their work. It is always incomplete and they are in a constant process of updating and refining. They acknowledge that there will always be “another version” and changes are always just around the corner.

This means they can go live/send something while accepting the fact that there is still more to do. They start small, get that right, then build on it to get better and closer to “great”. They test, refine and grow step-by-step. They receive outputs and changes with the same mindset – knowing that the sender is continuing to optimise where they can.  They understand that when something is released out into the world, although capable of delivering what it needs to, it is technically at its worst state. It will only get better over time, with refinement.

This thinking is the opposite of perfectionism. Perfectionistic employees struggle to start small and feel a level of discomfort with launching something that still needs work. They feel self-pressure to start big and get everything right, so they can “wow” the customer/stakeholders right from the start. Did you know, the first iPhone was actually an Ipod phone in 2005 that was unsuccessful (Roos, 2018). It took refinement and optimisation for the Apple team to develop the first “official” iPhone with a touchscreen in 2007, and even then, reviews of the first iPhone referred to it as “amazing” but “not perfect” (Caron, 2017).

Employees with an Optimisation Mindset seek first to understand. They are intuitively curious. They are constantly on the look-out for opportunities to refine and improve their work – and this requires different opinions and perspectives. This is often one of the hardest characteristics to find (and build) in an organisation. The reason for this is, throughout our work-life history, we have existed in a world of scarcity. There aren’t enough resources to go around, so we need to compete for them – for budget, for people, for access. There are limited opportunities for promotion – so we need to prove that we deserve it more than everyone else. Competition kills curiosity. When we compete in the workplace, we get into a mindset of “proving we are worthy”. We seek first to be understood. This is often accompanied with trying to convince others to our point of view. And this is the opposite of curiosity, and if we remain too long in a workplace culture such as this, we don’t develop the ability to ask great questions, challenge assumptions and develop deeper level of understanding.

Employees with an Optimisation Mindset are focused on moving forward. “Rather than sitting on the sidelines and hurling judgment and advice” (Brene Brown), they step up and pitch in to keep making progress – however small. They don’t want to stall things. They don’t get stuck when something doesn’t meet their high expectations. They appreciate when there are small steps forward, even if there are also some steps backwards.

Employees with an Optimisation Mindset build people up. Recognizing the significance of collaboration in achieving exceptional results, they actively seek diverse opinions and perspectives, willingly asking for help and involving others in their work. They appreciate the effort and time invested by others in their work processes, and they don’t take this for granted.

In environments characterised by perfectionism and competition, we often observe leadership teams and employees exhibiting behaviors contrary to this ethos. Instead of fostering collaboration, we encounter tendencies toward fault-finding and cutting-people-down. We see rosy-reporting and the manipulation of information to make oneself look good. 

Why is this important, and why now? 

In the past, the threat of job loss was linked to incompetence or poor performance. It was seen as representing a “dramatic vote of no confidence” and brought with it shame and a sense of betrayal (Gabriel et al, 2013).  Today, the threat of job loss has expanded to include the risk of replacement by AI. Performing a Google search on the topic "AI replacing humans" yields 12,300 results (if we limit it to all the news articles published in the last year). With 365 days in a year, that’s around 33 news articles a day! No wonder employees are fearful of AI taking over and replacing them. Employees are being bombarded by the threat that they are going to lose our job, and they feel they have little control over it.

This threat of job loss, is triggering a resurgence of perfectionism in the workplace, despite attempts to build a culture of learning and growth, and the need for an Optimisation Mindset Culture. The result of which, is holding back business performance and wasting resources.

In our work with small to large organisations, we are seeing multiple areas of wasted energy and resources from a culture of perfectionism: from avoidance of difficult conversations and accountability, to delays, duplication and rework. 

Without intervention and the adoption of an Optimisation Mindset, senior leadership teams face impediments such as biased or “rosy” reporting, distorted impressions, and a lack of genuine visibility into their organization. This hampers their capacity to make informed, strategic decisions.  Additionally, capital investments are likely to consistently fall short of delivering the promised value and benefits and the workplace will become increasingly more difficult for employees to navigate.

References

Caron, C. (2017). The Times Review of the First iPhone: ‘Amazing’ but ‘Not Perfect’. Article on https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/12/technology/personaltech/first-iphone-review.html Accessed 28/12/2023. 

Roos, D. (2018). Steve Jobs Originally Envisioned the iPhone as Mostly a Phone. Blog on History.com. https://www.history.com/news/iphone-original-size-invention-steve-jobs Accessed 28/12/2023.