I recently wrote about the growing fear produced by the mounting performance pressure of the Big Shift. As fear grows we have a natural human reaction to hold onto what we have. While very understandable, that reaction can also be very dangerous and lead us to miss the expanding opportunities created by the Big Shift.
The two most prominent images – walls and safety nets - dominating much of our conversation these days are manifestations of our fear and desire to hold onto what we have. I would suggest that we would benefit from shifting to two other images – bridges and launch pads – that can cultivate hope and excitement and motivate us to pursue expanding opportunity.
Walls and safety nets
One side of our political spectrum has become obsessed with walls. These walls – either physical or virtual - are designed to protect us from a range of perceived threats that may vary depending on what part of the world we are in – immigrants, foreign competition and subversive ideas. There’s an understandable desire to create barriers that will insulate us and help us hold onto what we have.
On the other side of the political spectrum, there’s growing discussion about the need for safety nets that will help people who lose their jobs or suffer some other kind of adversity to recover. It’s interesting that the discussion of safety nets often uses the term “bounce back” – the key goal is to help people to return to their previous state. Once again, the goal is help us to hold onto what we have and, if we lose anything, to recover what we’ve lost as quickly as possible.
Here’s the irony – while both sides of the spectrum are becoming increasingly polarized and hostile to the other side, at some fundamental level, they’re both driven by the same fear, and the same desire to hold on to what we already have. Their view of who the enemy is and what the threat might be clearly differs, but they share a feeling of fear and the same protective urge to help people address the threats ahead.
But, here’s the problem with both sides – they hold a very static view of the world in terms of the resources that can be deployed and the opportunities that can be created. It’s all about protecting what we have in the face of growing threats.
Fixed versus growth mindsets
In this context, I’m reminded of the wonderful writing of Carol Dweck in her pathbreaking book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that book, she made an important distinction between two mindsets that appear to shape most of our behavior – a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. As she describes it, “in a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits.” In contrast, “in a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point.”
While her focus was on the mindset of the individual and their beliefs about themselves, I suspect these beliefs in turn shape broader beliefs about society. If we hold a fixed mindset about ourselves, we’re likely to hold a fixed mindset about society and the resources that are available to it. On the other hand, if we hold a growth mindset, we’re more likely to see the opportunity to create more and more impact and value as we cultivate the resources available to us and find ways to expand them.
But, what shapes these mindsets? There are many factors at work, but this is where there’s an opportunity to refer to my earlier perspectives on mindset and heartset. I suggested there that we don’t pay enough attention to the role of emotions in shaping our beliefs and perceptions.
In this context, I would suggest that fear tends to shift us to a fixed mindset and a focus on protecting the fixed resources and capabilities that we believe we have. This is all understandable and a natural human reaction to perceived threats.
Bridges and launch pads
But, what can we do to overcome the fear and shift our focus from threat to opportunity? Here’s where images matter. Walls and safety nets focus on the threat and the need to protect what we already have. What’s the alternative? I suggested above that perhaps we should shift our attention to bridges and launch pads.
What do these images suggest? Bridges are about connecting areas that were previously separated – they’re about bringing people together. The underlying belief in building bridges is that we’ll benefit from connecting with others that we couldn’t previously reach. They focus on the opportunity created by connecting people.
If you’ve been following our work on scalable learning, you’ll know that I am a strong believer that there are powerful network effects to learning. The more of us who come together with a shared goal of learning, the faster we’ll all learn. Opportunity to develop more of our potential is unlimited but to address that opportunity more fully more of us need to come together. That’s where bridges come in. And, like walls, these bridges can take on both a physical or virtual form – the key is finding ways to connect more people more effectively at scale so that they can achieve more of their potential together.
That brings me to my other image – the launch pad. I find this image much more intriguing than the safety net image because the key is to launch people into new arenas that are very distant and full of potential to learn. Rather than bouncing people back to where they were, the goal with a launch pad is to take them to much higher terrain and to accomplish things that were never accomplished before. The goal is to move forward rather than bounce back. The mindset when confronting adversity should be how to use it as a growth opportunity to accomplish even more, rather than simply going back to where one was. Imagine what we could accomplish if our programs and initiatives to help people in trouble were designed to help them get to even higher ground rather than just returning them to where they were.
Another benefit of the launch pad image is that it doesn’t just wait for people to fall and then catch them. Launch pads could be for everyone, especially the marginalized people in our population who never had the opportunity to begin with. They haven’t fallen – they never had the opportunity to get up in the first place. What would happen if we were committed to create launchpads for everyone?
If we focus on bridges and launch pads, we begin to see the opportunity that can surface if we come together with the goal of helping each other to achieve more of our potential. There still may be fear (after all, bridges have been known to collapse and rockets have exploded on launchpads), but we’re inspired by the opportunity that awaits on the other side and more willing to overcome the fear and take some risk in order to achieve far more for ourselves and for others.
The bottom line
Images matter. We need to look beyond the images to find out why we picked them in the first place and what kinds of emotions they foster. We also need to challenge ourselves to find images that can motivate us to achieve more of our potential. The story of human progress is the quest to achieve more, not just for ourselves but those who matter to us. If we abandon that quest and give in to fear, we’ll accomplish less and less as we isolate ourselves and settle for bouncing back to what we had in the past.
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