Energy Transition Case Study

Cultural change: cultivating a Growth Mindset in the energy sector

Growth Mindset in the Energy Transition

We are working with a leading energy provider in the Netherlands. One of their top priorities is the energy transition, which calls for structural changes and a global shift towards renewable energy. This case is anonymized according to our client’s policy.

In their position as market leader, this transition requires their people to prepare for rapid change, disruption, and new challenges. They decided to nurture and strengthen the Growth Mindset of their people and asked us (Neurofied) to help them with the change management.

Growth Mindset fixed mindset neurofied energy transition

“In designing sessions with employees about a growth mindset, Neurofied has shown that they can quickly switch and deliver, think along and adapt their approach based on what is needed and asked, and also with knowledge and sharp insights from behavioral psychology and neuroscience.

– Project lead Growth Mindset

Situation

As our client ventures into a period of continuous change, having the right mindset is key for all their stakeholders. This is why they decided to help their people cultivate Growth Mindset: The belief that skills and abilities can be developed, and that effort is central in this process.

Growth Mindset is an essential ingredient that helps professionals embrace uncertainty, dare to make mistakes, and improve rapidly through trial and error. The benefits of Growth Mindset have been proven in education and business but how can you instill the mindset, habits, and behaviors that it produces in thousands of employees?

Approach

The only way to embed and implement Growth Mindset across a large organization, is by creating the conditions that promote it, and optimizing them as we learn what works and what doesn’t. Growth Mindset is a cultural thing, and as with any cultural change, success depends on constant alignment between priorities, behaviors, and processes.

Together, we set out to help leadership prioritize Growth Mindset initiatives, promote beneficial habits and behaviors, and redesign systems and processes to enable a lasting change in mindset and behavior.

This is not a top-down, but a bottom-up process. The project group set up deep dives in which we co-explored with different business units what was needed for an effective and tailored implementation of Growth Mindset through open dialogue and discussion.

We challenged them to think outside of the box, played devil’s advocate, and kept the end-users in mind at all times while leveraging brain and behavior insights.

Results

To uncover the hidden psychological or behavior barriers and opportunities for Growth Mindset, the Neurofied team analyzes the output of the deep dives, looking for patterns and cognitive biases. Using these insights, we design systemic interventions and nudges to promote Growth Mindset that will be implemented in organizational processes to promote a lasting adoption of Growth Mindset.

Employees can, for example, be encouraged to engage in innovative projects or initiatives. However, multiple layers of approval can be detrimental to this process (inertia bias). By giving these projects a conditional green light after the first layer of sign-off by default, the approval process is sped up systematically.

Reducing the amount of layering is a typical example of a small nudge that can lead to big improvements. As the project progresses, we will focus on designing solutions that will be implemented in our client’s organizational processes to promote a lasting adoption of Growth Mindset in a human-centric way that empowers all stakeholders.