Introduction

The Intentional Mindset

A large group of senior executives sought to guide more junior members of the business community in their skills and development toward success. They engaged in a mentor program focused on regional universities and small businesses that needed help with training young workforce candidates. The mentors defined the program with mindset awareness and control, project structures, and implementation work needed to achieve success. This intentional thinking structure supported the mentors and mentees as each had a goal for the work to be achieved. Mentors wanted to influence and enable mindsets for positive work, as well as learn about their mentee’s specific and individual needs. Mentees wanted to acquire skills to reach their work goals to contribute to their individual growth plans. The program was about ten weeks long, giving the mentors and mentees time to get acquainted, build trust and relationship, and ultimately develop some 21st century knowledge work skills and mindsets for autonomous goal achievement. The program was deemed a success as everyone learned from the experience and all met their goals.

You work to achieve some success. The way you think about your work, and, subsequently, your work will meet success or not. Is your goal the right one? Do you value the goal and work for relevant reasons? Will you derail yourself and your success or will you propel yourself toward that success? Your decisions lead to your destiny and your legacy. You can make optimal decisions or poor decisions. And very often these decisions are based on your mindset. Recognizing and using the power of your mindset is essential to defining and reaching success. What does that mindset include? It includes your goals, values, beliefs, and mode of work. It provides the framework for how you think, how you behave, and why you make certain decisions as opposed to others. Exploring these mindset components leads to a full understanding of why you decide what you decide and, perhaps, how to change your mindset to serve you better in your decision making. Further, these mindset components must be compatible with each other, as well as to those of your stakeholders for reaching success. This will create a common mindset to guide all work.

Mindsets are just facts of life. Everyone has goals, values, beliefs, and modes of work. As these mindsets guide decision making, awareness of them is essential to their management and alignment for best decision-making results. The 21st century work is collaborative, so mindset awareness is essential to increase the ability to work together. Matching mindset components with others is the challenge, not allowing yourself to be distracted with judging the good or bad aspects of another’s thinking. It is rather a task in understanding so that you can manage, adapt, and/or reinforce diverse mindsets to achieve the outcomes you desire. Exploring mindsets cannot be avoided if you want to be in control of your destiny.

Do you know how and what drives your decisions?

Data, Information, and Knowledge

The information age of late, providing volumes of data and information, has evolved into the knowledge economy of the 21st century. The evolution happens when data and information are converted to the knowledge that guides all of your work. Knowledge workers, those who make this conversion, are continuous decision makers. Your mindset provides the frame for making those decisions, as it determines what data and information you consider when building knowledge. If you value money and your goal is to be a millionaire before age 25, you may not be interested in data about the value of building a strong community or aligning to stakeholders and their needs. You instead would be researching financial models that double and triple investment in a short period of time. You would miss out on considering data regarding community programs to enhance the quality of life for its members, which, in turn, could create a market of another type to generate revenue.

Acceleration

Knowledge economy conditions also include the acceleration of technology, environment/energy issues, and globalization (Friedman 2016) to be navigated. These accelerations further create the need for autonomous thinking and work. In an accelerated world, decisions are made with lightning speed. Autonomous individuals and organizations are much more productive because everyone is responsible for thinking and not waiting for one person to make decisions. Fifty thinkers who are aligned with a common mindset are certainly more impactful than one who thinks for everyone. So the common mindset becomes essential to expedite decisions.

Decision makers must work autonomously as they consider data and information to create knowledge, which allows solid decisions. This autonomy includes both independent and dependent work. The independence of autonomy gives you control of your work and the dependence seeks other’s expertise to complement your own expertise. Knowledge workers make decisions but only after inquiry and learning have brought insight to the decision. Building autonomous mindsets that enable inquiry and learning for decision making, for yourself and with your stakeholders, is essential in the knowledge economy. It is essential that knowledge workers have mindsets that value inquiry and learning, allowing them to continuously evaluate their own thinking and that of their stakeholders to ensure clarity and overarching alignment for successful decisions.

Understanding and using mindset propels a project to success, your own or that of an organization. A community mindset can minimize challenges within project, customer, partner, and/or merged environments. It facilitates and clarifies work with an environment that motivates knowledge workers to inquire, learn, and build knowledge to guide decisions. This community mindset leads knowledge workers to highest performance. Figure I.1 represents the structure of a mindset.

Figure I.1 A mindset: self and stakeholders

Knowledge Worker Mindset

Autonomy and learning go together to create the knowledge worker mindset. The first priority of learning is to understand your own mindset and how it impacts decisions toward your success. Does your goal match your values and your beliefs, as demonstrated by your mode of work? If they are not aligned, you will work against yourself and fail to meet expected results. Then you can turn to evaluating your stakeholders’ mindsets for alignment, as well. Managers and workers both need awareness and control of their mindsets. Managers set the environment that enables workers to maximize their mindsets for highest productivity and performance, individually and as an organization.

Philosophers describe how mindsets impact society and the actions people take that preserve or change society. Conversely, this same society impacts individuals for good or for bad. It makes sense to understand this connection as best as you can through an understanding of mindset components, what created yours, and how you need to manage them. Ultimately, does your mindset need alternation to lead to better outcomes?

Philly Foodworks is a farm to table initiative that provides fresh vegetables from regional farms to local neighborhoods and families. The business model, although sound, needed to grow in order to sustain its value to its founder and the families that benefit from the company’s service. Dylan Baird, the founder, had to create an organizational infrastructure for his employees that would facilitate the collaborative effort to acquire like-minded businesses to expand his reach to customers and Philly Foodworks’ volume of vegetables. His team had to embrace and sort out the goals and values of each organization with which they would work, as well as make individual decisions on critical path actions to support company growth. The team identified the acquired businesses’ mindsets and needs as they considered them stakeholders for each partnership or acquisition they engaged.

Additionally, Philly Foodworks’ business increased by 400 percent in two months due to the pandemic of 2020 and advances in technology. Baird was challenged with evolving the organization to manage this growth with his small staff. He hired about 40 new staffers and entrusted decision making to all staff members from a common mindset platform. The platform included expectations of autonomous inquiry, research, learning, peer decision review, and first-hand knowledge of customer needs. This approach allowed the company to grow, survive, and thrive in very challenging times.

Summary: Seeking a New Intentional Mindset

To quote Lord Buddha (Bodhipaksa 2014), Mental states are preceded by mind, have mind as their master, are created by mind. This statement describes the catalyst for designing and building your mindsets to serve you well.

If you are aware of and monitor your thinking, you can be an expert learner, positioned to thrive. My goal is to help you, the reader, become aware of how you think currently, how that mindset drives your behaviors and decisions, the impact that those decisions are having on your outcomes, and how you can manage your mindset to support and/or alter your thinking for your desired destiny. Hopefully, you will recognize that the effort necessary to build a conscious or intentional mindset to achieve this is worthwhile as you define and achieve the destiny that you desire.

Learning (Waitzkin 2007) happens by studying discrete pieces of information thoroughly and practicing their application repetitively,… they eventually shed their technical, nitty-gritty character…shifts… from the conscious mind to the unconscious mind where it can connect with other chunks of internalized knowledge and manifest as the sudden burst of insight we experience as free-flowing intuition.

Waitzkin used this learning concentration to become a champion chess player and, then, a champion in martial arts.

Thinking happens according to a platform of goals, values, beliefs, and modes of work, which makes up a mindset. Responses to daily situations are often unconscious as directed by that mindset. Through awareness you can migrate to a more intentional thinking model. Ideally, you can eventually make that new, more conscious and intentional thinking model into a new unconscious model for automatic and productive thinking, behaviors, and decisions.

Four Sections of the Book

The Intentional Mindset: Data, Decision, and Your Destiny describes the components of mindset, the impact of mindset, how to shape it, and how leaders and managers can manage it within their organizations for best results. It includes four sections: Understanding Mindset, Building an Autonomous Mindset, Using a Learning System, and Building an Environment to Support Autonomous Work. Each section includes relevant discussions to guide your development of an autonomous mindset to maximize your ability to meet your destiny with no exceptions.

Each chapter includes thought-provoking questions integrated into the content to help you internalize the concepts presented. There is also a Call to Action at the end of Chapters 5 through 9, where you can apply ideas to your own world and work. I suggest using a journal to record your thoughts and answers as you come across these questions and Calls to Action. You may also find that you will want to go back and rethink some of those answers as you continue reading. Thinking and reflecting on that thinking is an important tenet of the learning mindset, which we all strive for in the knowledge economy.

Contributing Disciplines

Multiple disciplines of study have been referenced to guide the ideas presented in this book. Topics and references on anthropology, psychology, sociology, strategic management, behavioral economics, economics, intrapreneurship, and entrepreneurship are combined to support these ideas and calls to action.

Disclaimer 1: My research and experiences led me to define the mindset system as I see it and have presented it here. There are undoubtedly many more interpretations and dimensions to the topic of mindset. I only offer this one as it hopefully will be useful in an applied manner to anyone who wishes to ensure autonomy and success in knowledge economy endeavors.

Disclaimer 2: The stories presented are real but the names of the participants have been changed in some cases.

Disclaimer 3: You will find some redundancy on the basic concepts of mindset, autonomy, stakeholders, and narrative in various chapters. This is intentional for the purpose of reinforcing these important concepts and to allow readers to use chapters individually and not be dependent on the content of a previous chapter.

SECTION I

Understanding Mindset

CHAPTER 1

The Knowledge Economy

The 21st century knowledge economy demands new skills and insights.

The 21st century introduces major challenges in the workplace that require an awareness of mindset, how and what you think, and how that thinking leads to decision making. These challenges include globalization, acceleration of technology, and environmental issues (Friedman 2016). World leaders at a 21st century World Economic Forum challenged workers to find new ways to create value from the vast amounts of data and information that were collected in the recent information age. Data and information availability is a major achievement in the history of data science, but now it must be applied to work to create knowledge that can lead to new value. Thus, the 21st century has become known as a knowledge economy, engaging knowledge workers to systematically create that new value. Technology acceleration is a positive force for creating knowledge from data and information as it automates data and information availability and management. But globalization and the environment impose new complexities on work in the 21st century, introducing new issues to be solved. The acceleration of all three areas requires knowledge workers to be autonomous learners who continuously make decisions. These requirements dictate how you work. Figure 1.1 models the current state and management of these 21st century accelerations and complexity.

Work in the 21st century is fast, often remote, continuously changing, technology-driven, and involves working with stakeholders who you most likely do not know. It is the requirement for autonomous work and decision making that makes your mindset so important. This mindset, including your goals, values, beliefs, and mode of work, controls how you think, what you think, and, therefore, what you decide.

Figure 1.1 Complexity in our 21st century world

Mindset components define what, when, and how you learn—the basis of your autonomous decisions. Your decisions control your destiny and legacy. Your mindset and thinking cannot be left to chance. Exploring your mindset and how it impacts your thinking and decisions is urgent, important, and feasible.

The key ideas in this chapter include:

•Knowledge as the newest resource

•New work needs: autonomous thinking guided by mindset

•Fulfilling those needs: managing oneself

•Sample changes to the economy

•The seven skills of autonomy

•An autonomous environment to support autonomous skills

Knowledge as the Newest Resource

Historically, economic resources were categorized into land, labor, and capital. The knowledge economy adds a fourth resource, knowledge. It has overtaken the other resources in importance as it guides the use of the other resources. Since knowledge directs the best and most productive use of each of these other resources, it is essential that 21st century workers have the ability to convert data and information into knowledge to direct action plans for an efficient use of other resources. These workers are called knowledge workers.

Knowledge economy accelerations have made it challenging to consider all of the contributing factors to a decision. In describing these challenges, Friedman in his book, Thank You for Being Late, suggests that people take their time to think and rethink, even if it makes them late in meeting expectations. Thinking yields the best results. He is describing and advocating 21st century autonomy, in which you take control of your work and outcomes through structured learning.

The 2020 worldwide pandemic significantly impacted this already challenging environment, as work had to be remote in order to avoid spreading of the worldwide virus. This new remote work reinforced the need for autonomy through learning. Employers also had to revise their working modes to accommodate these workers on whom they depend to sustain their enterprises. So much change was imposed upon people. Mindset has never been more important in meeting the requirements of these changes.

Challenges are especially difficult when they include other people, known as your stakeholders. These stakeholders are all of those who can impact your work and goals in any way. They often have diverse mindsets, and working together requires a common community mindset for work to be productive and meet the common goal of the work. Mergers and acquisitions, partnerships, global trade, remote work with colleagues, and project delays all require a solid understanding of the people you will work with, how you think about yourself, how you think about them, and how they think about you. What is common and what is not? The first challenge in this work is aligning mindsets to guide joint thinking on decisions in your collaborative work.

For knowledge workers who are autonomous decision makers, knowledge is critical to those decisions. Creating knowledge is based on the importance of learning. This learning is systematized through the knowledge pyramid and Bloom’s taxonomy of seven levels of thinking and inquiry (Armstrong 2010). Figure 1.2 shows these thinking and inquiry levels as they guide data, information, and knowledge to create an action plan.

Think about how many things have changed in your life over the last year. All change impacts your existence in some way. Awareness allows you to mitigate and maximize the impact of change. In the 21st century environment, change is not only ever present but happens in such an accelerated fashion that keeping up with it requires constant attention and learning. The self-sufficiency of autonomy, based on learning and knowledge, gives you control. Without that control, you are subject to whomever or whatever takes control.

Figure 1.2 The knowledge pyramid and Bloom’s taxonomy

New Work Needs: Autonomous Thinking Guided by Mindset

Autonomy, independent and dependent work, depends on your mindset. You act independently based on your goals, values, beliefs, and mode of work. They guide your decisions while working. When trying to sort through a great success or a dismal failure, mindset is the place to start your analysis. Considering the mindset that drove actions, decisions, and outcomes is very insightful for redirecting work and/or tackling the next project. This analysis requires a continuous dependence on learning, which is at the heart of autonomy.

To clarify mindset components, goals set the targets; values set the core principles of your life; beliefs shape your biases, opinions, and assumptions; and mode of work is how you work that reflects the other components. Aligning these components to support each other is of utmost importance. If they do not align, you are working against yourself and will derail your efforts toward your goals. Figure 1.3 describes the connection among the mindset components.

Do I have the right goal for the actual work that I am doing?

Figure 1.3 Mindset components

Fred, a freshman quarterback for a large university, had been playing football since he was 10 years old. He was good at the game and he loved the team experience. His goal was to play university football. Once he achieved this goal, he compared his longer-term life goals of corporate success to the football experience and the time expectations of his coaches and teammates. They did not match. Fred knew he needed to alter his work and time on the football field to be more supportive of establishing a corporate career. He gave up his quarterback position and pursued membership in three university business associations.

When working within a community, you need an awareness of the community mindset as well as the members’ mindsets to guide collaborative actions and decisions toward a common goal and work. Do all members of the community have the same goal for the work that