Embracing Uncertainty in the Growth Mindset to Improve Business Outcomes with Nikhil Arora, CEO of Epignosis

[00:00:00] We get fixated on our own solution because we believe that is the right solution. And kind of forgetting the problem which we identified because the problem is the right problem is identified, it's not changing. It's really how close is our solution coming to solve that problem. And it's about, you know, embracing that journey and getting out of our fixed kind of mindset to a growth mindset, which is really around the whole process of getting to the solution.

[00:00:28] If you have a hammer, if you think you just have a hammer, everything will look like a nail. Every customer will look like a problem that can be solved with your hammer. I could have used a better analogy, I guess, maybe. You don't want to hammer a customer.

[00:01:03] Well, welcome everybody to this episode of Small Talk Window, a podcast where we have a small window of time to dispense with a small talk as quickly as possible and settle into a meaningful conversation around the world of work. And my guest today is Nikhil Arora, who is CEO of Epignosis Learning Technologies. Welcome, Nikhil. Thank you, Brent, for having me. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And maybe you could share with our audience just what Epignosis is about.

[00:01:32] And also, you know, what gets you fired up in the morning when you wake up and you think about the world of work? What really gets you fired up? Yeah. The biggest gift I feel I have is working in an industry where we are making people do the best work of their life, right? So Epignosis is all about skilling, upskilling, reskilling employees of small and medium-sized businesses.

[00:02:00] And, you know, we serve customers all around the world. And our mission is really, you know, to give an opportunity to every employee of a small, medium-sized businesses to do the best work of their life and give them that learning path, which is personalized, customized to them. Oh, yeah. You know, we hear a lot about that in the market right now.

[00:02:27] And it's such an important mission and goal. And, you know, and we have better technology at our disposal to do it and all this kind of stuff. And it's an exciting time. This might be a good segue into today's topic because as much as we have that technology in place and we're thinking about it more, that's great. But there's some things I think that we were talking in the green room a little while ago, Nick Hill. And we're talking about, you know, what does it have to do, you know, the growth mindset.

[00:02:57] You know, you really have to have a growth mindset. But it's not just about that. It is important to a business and also to individual contributors in the workforce. The most visceral objectives for each differ, of course. But there's a lot of uncertainty in it as well. So you have an employer's needs, right?

[00:03:17] They want to focus on business outcomes, increasing profits, improving EBITDA, ensuring its own perpetuity very much as a going concern in the parlance of accounting, right? Once you're no longer a going concern, that's a problem, right? Meanwhile, employees, they need to invest in their professional development to maximize their value to the organization. And the great thing about all this is that the latter's improvement, the employee's improvement fuels the business's success.

[00:03:46] And high-performing employees instinctually understand this individual imperative. But one way to think, to get into the growth mindset, I think, is, and we talked about this, is embracing uncertainty. That's really key. To focus not on solving a problem or challenge, but on the problem or challenge itself. So when you think about the problem or challenge, I think it was the way you put it, Nikhil, and I'm going to ask you about that.

[00:04:14] When you think about it, you don't necessarily focus on what the solution will be. You just look at the problem in almost kind of a Zen-like meditation. Could you elaborate a little bit on that? What does it mean, this concept of embracing uncertainty, when it comes to adopting a growth mindset? How does it help individual contributors in the workforce? Yeah, I think the word problem you use, right?

[00:04:43] I talk about fall in love with your customer's problem, not your own solution. Okay. And, you know, your solution could be wrong, but if you identify the right problem, the right process will get you there, right? So I think the growth mindset is all about kind of focused on, from a business point of view, right, what problems are we trying to solve for our customers?

[00:05:08] And the growth mindset will then help us experiment and come up with different pivots around our journey to solve that problem. And really, it's around not getting fixated on our own solution, right? Because a lot of times we get fixated on our own solution because we believe that is the right solution.

[00:05:35] And kind of forgetting the problem which we identified, because the problem is the right problem is identified. It's not changing. It's really how close is our solution coming to solve that problem. And it's about, you know, embracing that journey and getting out of our fixed kind of mindset to a growth mindset, which is really around the whole process of getting to the solution. You brought up a couple of good points.

[00:06:02] First of all, thank you so much for talking about the growth mindset and embracing uncertainty in it from the organizational standpoint because that is so important. You know, if everything – if you have a hammer, if you think you just have a hammer, everything will look like a nail. Every customer will look like a problem that can be solved with your hammer. I could have used a better analogy, I guess, maybe. You don't want to hammer a hammer. No, that's appropriate. That's appropriate.

[00:06:29] But you also – the other thing that you brought up that I really thought was great is we can think about growth in more than one way, right? I think we instinctively, when we're talking about organizations and we think about growth, we think, okay, growing profits, growing the bottom line and all this kind of stuff. But you're also talking about growth in terms of a maturation, like a maturing in their perspective. That's also growth for an organization.

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[00:07:28] Yeah, I think it's, you know, growth's definition is organization by organization, business by business. So I think one thing to recognize is that what growth means is the same, that you are getting better, faster, and more improved, whether it's your product, performance, or process.

[00:07:51] But the definition is very different because it depends on your conditions, you know, your product market fit and your, you know, kind of resources you have. So I think it's important to kind of level set what does growth mean to you, what the growth mindset mean to you as a company for your employees.

[00:08:11] And then make sure that you're embracing it with full authenticity and an ability to be able to measure it, right? Because otherwise they become words, right? Fixed mindset, growth mindset, great. But how are you measuring that progress once you have defined that journey line of your going from fixed to growth? You bring up a good point, too, about the measurement.

[00:08:37] And there's always this tension between what we're actually, what we feel like we're achieving as an organization or as individual and then actually measuring it. We're always, you know, reaching and searching for new ways to measure things, to understand the organization better and its potential. What are some ways, getting back to the individual contributor, however, what are some ways that we can encourage individual contributors to embrace uncertainty in the growth mindset?

[00:09:07] And how does that help the organization? It starts with leadership. So, you know, for the leadership and the company culture, it should celebrate failures. Because, you know, when you go on the path of a growth mindset, you will fail in the process many times before you get to what you call, you know, your success metric.

[00:09:27] So if you create an environment of acceptance of failure, celebration of failures, a safe environment to, you know, experiment in that journey, then the individual contributor feels a lot more encouraged, a lot more safe and a lot more motivated, you know, to do that.

[00:09:44] And what it does for the organization is really, you're up leveling the, you know, the culture fabric of the company now because you're going to try new things, you're going to produce new things, you're going to create new innovations, you're going to improve productivity, right? So all these elements will ultimately result to a better north star for you, whether it's revenue growth or profitability or, you know, product innovation.

[00:10:11] So leadership, role models, management creates the right environment, individual contributors then embrace it, and then it all adds up to, you know, a kind of a higher growth output for the company. So a couple of things that that's really interesting. And I think you really hit the nail on the head. No, no pun intended based. Based on what we just talked about a moment ago with hammers. But leadership, it really does come down to leadership. And that's really important.

[00:10:39] You also mentioned managers putting the right sort of environment, getting the right environment in place or the right sort of setting in place for folks to be able to do this. And I think that really segues into my final question for you here. And that is, we hear a lot about these AI powered self evolving skills ontologies and modern investments and learning management systems and content delivery and all this.

[00:11:03] How do all of these new sort of these new innovations, the state of the art of skills and learning and all this? How does it all help accommodate uncertainty in the growth mindset? The new innovations like AI, I think, has created a far accelerated path, you know, to get to learning faster, which means your growth mindset is going to come there faster.

[00:11:33] Right. Because now with the kind of content available much faster, the personalized nature of content, because it's catered towards your individual need. And like our product, for example, you know, we have a skill assessment capability, which then uses AI to match the content, which will be relevant for you at the speed at which you want to learn.

[00:11:56] So I think with all these advancement, it's created a very personalized learning path for users, which is going to be available to them at the tick of a button now versus before it was taking many, many longer cycles to get there. So there's really some efficiency now in the learning.

[00:12:22] And at the same time, it's really interesting that with personalization, that a really great outcome or positive byproduct is efficiency as well in learning. That's really interesting. This has been a fantastic conversation, Nikhil. This is really fascinating. And there's a lot to talk about. And I think we really drilled down deep in terms of one of these major components of it. And thank you so much for joining us for this episode.

[00:12:53] Thank you, Brent.