Few ideas have reshaped how we think about achievement and success as profoundly as Carol Dweck’s groundbreaking work on the power of a growth mindset. While Dweck’s work started with schoolchildren, the concept of a growth mindset as a determinant of achievement has had broad application in the world of leadership development. Now, in the ongoing rollout of the digital revolution, the importance of a growth mindset is playing a meaningful role in another domain—the successful adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).
A growth mindset invites experimentation. It encourages us to try, fail, and try again, confident that trying and failing are part of the learning process. AI, at this moment, is a massive experiment in growth mindset. Today, AI technology is in the growing phase because the technology itself is failing and learning—getting better with each iteration. The way we, as humans, interact with these tools requires a similar approach.
The Macro Perspective on AI
To leverage AI’s full potential, leaders must understand the broader implications of how this technology works to encourage continuous learning, adaptability, and innovation.
At the macro level, AI is:
A Powerful Yet Imperfect Tool
When dealing with AI, input sources are sometimes incomplete, output information can be unreliable, and the technology doesn’t always get things exactly right. This isn’t a reason to stop using AI, but rather a reason to adopt a mindset of learning through trial and error—both in relation to the technology itself and its role in enhancing our work. Leaders who embrace this mindset will be better equipped to use AI effectively and model this approach for their teams.
Rapidly Evolving
Generative AI’s capacity to “learn” and the immense investments being made in AI are driving rapid advancements at a staggering pace. What AI struggles to do today, it will likely excel at tomorrow. This is not an exaggeration, but a reflection of how quickly AI is advancing. As the technology evolves, AI users must also adapt, embracing an agility that may seem daunting but is essential for success. Leaders who stay in a fixed place—with their skills or mindset—will inevitably be left behind.
A Cause for Experimentation
Effective use of AI requires experimentation. Leaders who take a bit of risk in using AI are in a better position than those taking a cautious approach. Not only will experimentation enhance a leader’s technical skills and critical thinking, but it gives that leader an opportunity to shape how AI will be used within the organization. It’s hard to engage in discourse about AI if you aren’t using it, and it’s even harder to gain the benefits of it if you aren’t experimenting.
Applying a Growth Mindset to AI on a Micro Level
At the micro or individual level, a growth mindset is about seeing skills, challenges, efforts, feedback, and setbacks as opportunities. Let’s look at each component of a growth mindset and consider how AI presents opportunities to enhance each one.
Skills
With a growth mindset, we believe that skills can be strengthened as we try new things. It can be tempting to look at AI as the anti-growth mindset engine when it comes to skills. After all, how much are you growing and developing when the technology provides the answers? While it is true that AI provides some answers, it still requires a human in the loop to make sense of the information it provides. The head start provided by AI gives individuals the opportunity to refine higher-order thinking, apply advanced skills, and bring their own unique feelings, context, and insight into the learning process. Used properly, AI is a skill-augmentation tool, not an answer machine.
Challenges
AI presents considerable challenges, such as incorrect data, unreliable sources, and bias. However, these are not reasons to abandon AI, but rather opportunities to become smarter about how we, as humans, interact with the technology. Using AI effectively—refining prompts, critically consuming the data, staying alert to bias—are just a few of the ways we can overcome the challenges posed by AI.
Imagine an employee using ChatGPT to draft a project report. The AI creates a decent draft, but it includes outdated or irrelevant information. Should they discard the entire report? No! Instead, they should refine the prompt, asking for more current data or more specific insights, until they get the content that meets their needs. This iterative process is just one of the many ways humans and AI collaborate to obtain better results.
Efforts
A growth mindset posits that effort is a path to mastery, not a source of embarrassment or an indication of a lack of capability. A leader with a growth mindset sees AI as an opportunity to augment their efforts. They use AI transparently because they are not ashamed or afraid to acknowledge that they can benefit from additional support.
A writer might use AI to polish their writing—helping them improve word choice or identify redundancies. They don’t hide the fact that they use AI to help them improve because they are confident in their contributions, while recognizing that this additional help enables them to produce a better product. Help, regardless of where it comes from, is a good thing. We rarely if ever judge or question the support writers get from proofreaders and editors. In fact, a writer will likely be judged as less professional if they don’t seek out that support. If we think about AI in the same way, we are adopting a growth mindset about something from which we can gain tremendous benefit.
Feedback
AI data is a powerful tool for providing feedback. It provides real-time performance monitoring and AI-enabled tools help leaders practice difficult conversations in a safe environment, while offering real-time feedback that can be applied on the job. In medical training, AI-generated virtual models allow students to practice risky procedures and gain feedback on their skills before performing them on real patients. Unlike human guidance, which can introduce bias and subjectivity, AI feedback can be more objective and less judgmental.
A leader with a growth mindset thrives on feedback because they recognize that it identifies areas where they need to improve. With the personalized and adaptive aspects of generative AI, this feedback can be targeted to the individual and their particular opportunities for growth.
Setbacks/Failures
Finally, an individual with a growth mindset sees setbacks and failures as an inevitable part of the process. Have you ever seen an AI apologize for getting something wrong? Of course not! In fact, the algorithms behind AI feed on failure because it helps these programs understand how to get a better, stronger answer the next time. Likewise, an individual with a growth mindset should continue to experiment with AI, confident that each data point and keystroke is contributing to their continued learning and growth.
The Essential Role of a Growth Mindset in an AI-Driven Future
AI is poised to restructure how work gets done, how information is shared, how innovation and creativity are defined, and how humans learn. But here’s the secret: AI can’t do this without human involvement, and humans need the right mindset to overcome challenges in these early days—they need a growth mindset. Carol Dweck and the schoolchildren she studied might not have imagined a future driven by algorithms and large language models. But they understood something more important, a lesson that transcends digital literacy: The belief that all human beings are capable of improvement if they maintain a growth mindset.
About the Authors
