A story about learning, with a few arrows along the way.

I was mentored by Professor Carol Dweck and worked alongside the Institute’s research committee, service designers, and a small team. The programme looked promising. Through educational design research and context mapping, we sought to determine whether growth mindset messaging would hold up in real classrooms, whether teachers’ beliefs about ability would shape children’s experiences, and how to develop teachers’ skills, mindsets, and classroom practices.

We spent six months observing what happened when growth mindset language met grading policies, lesson structures, and the small daily moments that shape what children believe is possible for them.

Teachers were saying all the right things. Effort matters. Mistakes are learning opportunities. I believe in you. You can grow your brain, it can get stronger. The cues, practice, and support around the children were saying something else. The right answer was rewarded the first time. When children were struggling, the encouragement was “not yet” and a call to put in more effort. Mentoring, experimenting, and trying different strategies would have worked better. Challenge-seeking was still a risky move. The language used, the practices and teacher behaviours, despite the teachers’ positive intentions, were, in many ways, making things worse. What was needed was high standards with high support.

I shared the findings with the de Bono Institute board. The discovery was not well-received. I lost my role as CEO. The board chose to treat it as an inconvenience rather than a problem to solve.

I shared it with Carol. Imagine telling Professor Dweck there was a problem with the research. She was sceptical at first. The finding challenged a fundamental assumption about how the field was thinking about implementation. A cognitive scientist was telling them that growth mindset language, adopted without structural change, was causing the very harm it was meant to address.

If you are going to be a pioneer, you will collect some arrows along the way. I collected my share over the years that followed, and spent that time outside the research conversation. I have no horse in this race, and I tend to go where the evidence leads. The Science section of this site lists the high-quality studies and commentaries on growth mindset theory since 2020.

In 2015, Carol published “Carol Dweck Revisits the ‘Growth Mindset’” in Education Week.

It reopened the conversation. Growth mindset had become socially mandatory. People were claiming it to avoid the stigma of being fixed and burying their fixed mindsets. The result is image management instead of change. The false growth mindset, Carol wrote, is worse than a fixed mindset: at least with a fixed mindset, you know where you stand.

John Rives and I co-founded the Growth Mindset Institute in 2014 to research, design, and deliver mindset interventions and to reinvest earnings into ongoing research. The question we posed was simple: if telling people the facts produces a false growth mindset, what works?

What followed was a decade of research and design built on a single principle. Mindset moves along a continuum. We each have set points along the fixed-to-growth continuum, shaped by past experience and the context around us.

Carol and I worked with the senior finance executives of a large bank. We hypothesised that raising awareness of fixed mindsets could support the move toward a growth mindset.

There were sceptics. John was one of the first. He questioned whether naming a fixed mindset trigger would help people recognise what created the response, or whether anyone would acknowledge having a fixed mindset in the first place.

We introduced the concept of fixed mindset triggers to the executives: the moments that, when active, elicit a fixed mindset response. We asked them to identify the scenarios where their own fixed mindset showed up. They named the pressure to deliver results and avoid costly mistakes. Most believed feedback was criticism rather than advice. From that work, Carol and I drew two insights.

Once acknowledged, a fixed mindset trigger can be worked with through self-awareness, insight, and a different set of responses and supportive contextual cues.

For the bank executives, fixed mindset triggers produced a recurring pattern of avoidance. They would not admit mistakes or acknowledge their limits. Naming their fixed mindset triggers changed that. Hectic Harry runs around in panic at the first sign of a mistake. Julius (as in Caesar) goes into command-and-control mode as a deadline approaches. Naming the triggers and giving them characters allowed the executives to have more authentic discussions, laced with humour. Core issues that had been ignored surfaced and were addressed in a careful, caring way. The team became the most engaged group in the bank.

Professor Dweck cited this work as a case study in the updated edition of Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential (Robinson, 2017).

John and I began researching fixed mindset triggers with other teams. The work uncovered common triggers: beliefs about ability, effort, failure, negative feedback, others’ success, grit, challenges and comfort zone.

I designed a card game with statements about fixed and growth mindsets, each aligned with a trigger. The game went through many iterations and was played by thousands of people. Most could identify their triggers and the maladaptive behaviours linked to them: procrastination, perfectionism, avoiding feedback, and self-criticism. They also identified their growth mindset preferences. Understanding their trigger was a relief. It gave people hope as this normalised them and opened up the possibility of a conversation.

After several years of work classifying triggers through the card game, John and I wanted to validate them. We asked whether we could develop a research instrument to assess reliability, norms, and correlations with performance.

Working with another large bank that was using the card game widely, Carol and I had dinner with the CEO and raised the idea of a mindset assessment. The bank agreed to provide its employees with access for a validation study.

We worked with Carol, Professor Mary Murphy, and Associate Professor Katie Muenks to design the validation study and to validate the assessment. Dweck, Mackie, Murphy, Muenks, and Rives developed the working model for the fixed mindset triggers scales. Read more: Mindset Profiler™ →

After the Profiler work, Mary went on to research how organisations communicate mindset beliefs through their culture, and how those signals shape what individuals do. Her 2020 paper with Sarah Reeves identified four organisational triggers, (evaluative situations, high-effort situations, feedback, and the success of others) that correspond to the personal triggers we had been measuring but operate at the level of culture. Her 2024 book Cultures of Growth brings together the research on how organisations build or block the conditions for growth behaviours.

Twelve years on from the school study, the false growth mindset and fixed mindset triggers are the most cited concepts in our work. It explains why so many growth mindset interventions fail. It also explains why this work matters.

The people who have fixed mindset triggers are not the problem. The team, leadership, culture, and contextual cues play the most significant role in how our fixed mindset triggers respond.

Most of the time, both can change. That is what this Institute exists to do.