Mindsets, Learning Loops, and The Big Problem
In the world of agile and organizational coaching, we spend a lot of time blaming mindsets for organizational problems, and almost none on what a mindset is or how to change it. Let's change that.
“You need to have ______ mindset.”
“You don’t have the right mindset.”
“The transformation failed because leadership didn’t have the right mindset.”
I’ve heard those phrases countless times in speaking with agile coaches. It’s a catch-all reason for explaining why agile isn’t ‘working’ for a particular person, team, or organization. It is great for the person saying those words - no one can refute them! Because mindsets are vague, mysterious things that are easy to talk about and hard to prove.
Definition of a Mindset
Gil Broza, in my opinion, has done the best job of defining what a mindset is in his book The Agile Mind-Set. He breaks down mindsets into three categories (the following is a short compilation of definitions from his book):
Values are what you consider most important in the current situation.
Beliefs are what you hold to be true in that type of situation.
Principles are which standards guide your choices, decisions, and actions.
Principles support and satisfy values and beliefs, while values and beliefs guide the choice of principles.
Gil does a fantastic job of relating this to agile processes, thinking, etc. If you haven’t read his work, I recommend that you do so.
For some time, I was satisfied with this definition. But a question kept nagging at me. Where do mindsets come from? Gil posits that they come from needs and objectives, and while that’s certainly a part of it - I’ve met a lot of people who recognize that they have a need and objective that their existing mindset is not satisfying, but yet cannot transition easily to a new mindset. Agile is certainly one example, but, if you’ve ever tried to lose weight unsuccessfully you’ve experienced this same difficulty.
The question of what a mindset is, where it comes from, and how to change it is something that far transcends whether or not you are customer focused or not. It goes to the heart of a whole host of issues with scopes ranging from the individual all the way up to our global society.
In 2019, I was in China doing some agile training, and something about mindsets was bothering me. I had a series of conversations with people leading up to that which essentially ended with declarations that some people just do not learn anymore, because they either aren’t capable of it, or choose not to. In Carol Dweck’s work on the growth mindset, she defines this as a fixed mindset. It’s a powerful piece of work that has defined a lot of how we think about mindsets and inspired many companies to try and promote growth mindsets in their employees - but, something wasn’t sitting right with me.
Single, Double, and Triple Loop Learning
In 2016 and 2017, I did a deep dive into learning theory. I was trying to solve a problem that I saw in my church and in the school I volunteered to teach programming at. The staff did not seem to desire, or at least have the knowledge to continue learning new things. It bothered me deeply. I believed at the time that the school and church were in a long slow decline where the people involved were so wrapped up in what they had to do short term that they weren’t seeing what they had to do long term to be sustainable.
This included digitally transforming how they worked - and everything I tried just did not seem to take. People were willing to allow me to do all things digital but were not willing to learn it themselves even if it made their day to day lives easier. So, I hypothesized that they had lost the knowledge of how to learn new things somewhere along the way. This was the only reasonable hypothesis at the time, given that I did not want to confront the possibility that they were choosing not to.
So, I designed a workshop - even an entire company with three of my friends to attempt to solve this problem. I dug deep into learning theory, discovered Heutagogy - which again is one of those things I’m going to highly recommend digging into and learning about. I thought I had figured it out!
Of course, it got some tepidly positive feedback from the few people who gave it a whirl, but never really took off. Why? Because at its core, I had built a system on the premise of telling people they stopped learning new things and that they should start again. Can you imagine someone walking up to you and telling you that you aren’t capable of learning new things and need help (in so many words)? No wonder it took off like a lead balloon. Before long, I was back in Corporate America, but, not without some really great knowledge about learning theory.
So lets talk about loop learning. The ideas stem from work Chris Argyris did in the 1970’s, and the Tamarak Institute has a neat pdf that does a great job of summarizing it. To quote them:
Single Loop Learning is about making adjustments to correct a mistake or a problem. It is focused on doing the things right. Causality might be observed but typically is not addressed.
Double Loop Learning is identifying and understanding causality and then taking action to fix the problem. It is about doing the right things.
Triple Loop Learning goes even deeper to explore our values and the reasons why we even have our systems, processes and desired results in the first place. It is about trying to ascertain an understanding of how we make decisions that frame our work.
In single loop learning, we engage in this every time we burn a piece of toast and make sure we do not burn the next one. At work, we engage in this often when we get a list of edits for an email or PowerPoint draft we asked a coworker to review. We might even engage in this when we fill out our timesheet correctly after making a mistake to be compliant with corporate policy. If you’re an agile practitioner, you’ve likely seen teams engage in this in how user stories are written - have you ever asked or been asked how to correctly write a user story? It is almost always phrased in such a way that there is a right answer and they’ve been doing it wrong.
Double Loop Learning is, essentially, your six sigma problem solving. Let’s identify the root cause of a problem and fix it so that it never happens again. Countless projects, processes, and ‘guardrails’ have been set up to engage in double loop learning. If we go back to the toast example, we analyze why we keep burning a piece of toast (we get distracted by catching up on our emails) and so we add a timer to our phone to make sure we don’t burn the toast.
Finally with Triple Loop Learning, we ask why are we even making toast to begin with? Is that even healthy for us with regards to the high blood sugar lab results we got back last month from the doctor? At work, this is the type of organizational learning necessary for team/organization transformations. Why do we have that timekeeping system (a question employees ask far more often than you probably are aware of)? Is it still working for us?
This is all good and fascinating, but despite this, I somehow left the 2017 era believing that people had lost the ability to learn new things or even engage in any of the learning loops.
Cognitive Dissonance
Back to 2019, the idea of mindsets and loop learning came crashing into each other. It became clear to me that the answer to changing a mindset had something to do with triple loop learning, but obviously people had stopped or were not capable of triple loop learning. Then it hit me, and I wrote it up the side of my first page of notes.
We Are Always Triple Loop Learning
In the context of mindsets, I would posit that we never stop changing our values and beliefs. We never stop selecting and acting upon principles. We never stop learning and changing. With everything that happens to us, every piece of information we take in, we either reinforce our existing values and beliefs, or we weaken and shift them. At its core, we are always examining our values and beliefs and asking ‘is this still working for me?’
But, learning and growing is so core to our being that we do not always do this consciously or intentionally. And somehow along the way, we’ve collectively decided that unless something is being done consciously or intentionally, it must not be happening at all.
Capping it Off
If you take away anything from this piece today, think about the following:
How has your values and beliefs shifted over the last 10 years? What lead to that?
Were those shifts intentional? Most likely some were, and some weren’t.
What’s the impact of unintentional value/belief shifting?
Next week I’m going to walk through this idea that we are always triple loop learning a little bit more - and maybe even get to my own model of how this works.
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