Mindset shift #2: Learning mindset & the quest for better explanations

0:00David Deutsch, a British physicist, argued that in his book, Beginning of Infinity, that human progress is really the result of our unique ability to continually search for better explanations. And this is the spirit you really need to embrace in this course, and in your work if you want to push the limits on what you're capable of. Now in consulting, you're often asked to solve problems that haven't been solved before, or obvious solutions don't exist yet. This is a little crazy, and the default response is often to take shortcuts or figure out easy answers.

0:44And this is what I want you to avoid. I want you to embrace something I call the consulting learning mindset. The consulting learning mindset is a combination of four things. One is a hunger for new ideas. Two is an intellectual flexibility. Three is a comfort for uncertainty. And four is a slightly delusional belief that you can figure out problems that are really hard, complex, or simply haven't been solved before. So why is this so important? This is so important because our default response when we're presented with new information is to deny or reject it.

1:31This is called the status quo bias. And this is really an emotional response in our body that perceives any change, of course, in the direction of what we're trying to do, even new information as a loss from the current state. This type of response is not super helpful if we're trying to discover new possibilities. It's also really hard to avoid in the business world. In the business world, there's a certain spirit of copy paste thinking. And copy paste thinking is really just looking around at what other companies have done. You might be at a company that implemented OKRs because Google was really profitable and had a lot of buzz around it at the early stages of its company.

2:17Now companies have taken these OKRs and implemented them and they don't really quite fit, right? They never defined the problem they were solving first. OKRs may or may not have been a proper recommendation or solution to what they were trying to solve. And this tendency in the business world is best described by a really unique word, modishness. Modishness simply means conforming to the prevailing or fashionable norms in your environment. To bring this alive a little more. What I'm really talking about, picture yourself in a team room in which you've done multiple iterations on slides or report you're working on.

3:05And you have an impulse that's like, hmm, something's just missing. Now you might be the annoying person on the team that raises the question, hey, can we do a little more research? But it's that hunger I want you to listen to. It's that question inside that says there might be better explanations. There might be more information. Now you don't want to push this too far. There's definitely the challenge of analysis paralysis. But at first, most people are just used to doing one version of things. Really, if you can start pushing yourself in your own work to do two, three, four iterations of things, or even getting feedback from a teammate, that's often the best way to start embracing this consulting learning mindset.