In Conversation with Catherine Wallwork: Growth and Innovation Mindset
Catherine Wallwork is the head of innovation engagement and mindset in Deloitte Ventures and leads their Mindset Studio capability in London.
Catherine specialises in helping organisations and leaders at all levels to understand engagement and mindsets so they can create the best environments for people to thrive and unleash their creative potential.
In a conversation with Catherine, she outlined what growth mindset is about and how Deloitte is cultivating it to accelerate innovation.
You lead the Mindset Studio at Deloitte Ventures. What is the scope of your work and how do you do it? What might be some of the impacts so far (or objectives for the future)?
Deloitte Ventures is an innovation capability at Deloitte set up so we continually disrupt ourselves from within as well as to enable the firm to run non-traditional innovation methods like cross-industry and sector open innovation challenges.
The Mindset Studio is the part of Deloitte Ventures that brings mindset psychology, motivation science and storytelling into workplace innovation engagement strategies. Our scope fits into three main areas, helping teams with their mindset and motivation for innovation, leading storytelling for change initiatives and hosting forums for employees to challenge conventional wisdoms.
We work by forming cross-functional teams to solve innovation engagement and mindset challenges together. The impact of this approach has been breaking down silos and bringing people who care about solving a shared challenge.
People across the whole firm have developed new skills and knowledge such design thinking and open innovation alongside finding new networks of change agents within and outside our firm.
How can companies cultivate a growth mindset more broadly?
Introducing growth mindset language and theory is an important first step so people understand why this mindset is important. Leaders play a crucial in this, the best way is to be visible and lead by example such as sharing with teams their own development goals or projects that haven’t gone well and what they learned.
Within teams, making time to think about what they would start or stop to really live a growth mindset is a great exercise to do and often results in really creative and often provocative ideas!
World of Insights has been working closely together with Deloitte Ventures for the past 2 years. What is your experience like in working with them?
I’ve found the team a great source of inspiration and to help us keep pushing the boundaries about how innovation and learning experiences could be designed.
I really enjoy their start-up attitude to getting to the next milestone quickly and seeing how together we can bring play and game dynamics into the workplace to help create workplace cultures which value innovation and creativity.
Learning More
Take a look at our blog post and infographic on Transformative questions for Corporate Innovators.
To learn how to use growth mindset and accelerate innovation culture in your company in an engaging, experiential workshop (online or face to face), take a look at our Unicorn Innovation Workshop. A sneak peek below.
