Bestselling author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant is challenging us to think again. Actually, he wants us to think more like scientists and remain open to new knowledge. He shares powerful ideas from his new book, Think Again, around the power of lifelong learning, challenging your beliefs, healthy debate, and the fascinating difference between asking “why” and “how.” Plus, he talks about which questions to ask if you find yourself debating conspiracy theories.
Bestselling author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant is challenging us to think again. Actually, he wants us to think more like scientists and remain open to new knowledge. He shares powerful ideas from his new book, Think Again, around the power of lifelong learning, challenging your beliefs, healthy debate, and the fascinating difference between asking “why” and “how.” Plus, he talks about which questions to ask if you find yourself debating conspiracy theories.
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Heather Reisman:
Hi, I’m Heather Reisman, and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo.
Most of us have trouble letting go of ideas we believe, particularly if the subject at hand is something about which we care deeply. It’s also the case that most of us go into defense mode if we are told we are wrong about something that feels important to us.
Our guest today is here to encourage us to change the way we think, and the way we communicate. In his compelling new book, Think Again, he makes a powerful case for us to learn how to challenge our beliefs, unlearn prejudices, let go of views that no longer serve us, and explore the joys of thinking and communicating like a scientist.
Adam Grant is a much beloved professor and organizational psychologist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam holds a B.A. from Harvard and a PhD from the University of Michigan and is the author of five bestselling books, including this latest one. Twenty-five million people have watched his TED Talks. It is a pleasure to welcome Adam to Well Said. Adam, thank you for being with us today.
Adam Grant:
Delighted to be here, Heather. Thanks for having me.
Heather Reisman:
I just have to share that your book literally has blown me away. And I haven’t stopped talking about it and recommending it to every person who will listen. And I can’t wait to dive into this discussion.
Adam Grant:
Wow. Well, maybe you should think again.
Heather Reisman:
(laughs) On this one, I may not have to. Let’s start with this: what is it about the way we are thinking that you feel we need to change?
Adam Grant:
I think we’re pretty quick to form opinions, but we’re far too slow to reconsider them. And I think this applies to the assumptions we make about the world. It applies to our knowledge and expertise. It applies to the decisions we make and the goals we pursue. I think that so many of us, Heather, prefer the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. And once we believe something is true, or once we’re proud of our knowledge in an area, we don’t want to let it go, because then we have to admit that we were wrong. And that makes the world a little bit less predictable, a little bit less controllable. It puts our ego and our image on the line. It runs the risk of exclusion from a group. And yet, if you never change your mind in a rapidly changing world, then you’re going to end up, at best case, being an expert for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. And I think the thing that I’ve learned over and over again is that the faster you are to admit when you’re wrong, the faster you can get closer to being right.
Heather Reisman:
So what happens to us? What happens inside our brains that makes our brains and our way of thinking ever less malleable?
Adam Grant:
Well, I think we live in a world that rewards certainty, right, that takes confidence as a signal of competence. And the danger of that is that if you’re the kind of person who is comfortable, “Well, I don’t know,” then other people look at you and they think that you’re ignorant. I think we’d be much better often recognizing that when you admit you don’t know something, that’s not a sign of insecurity; that’s actually a signal that you’re secure enough in your expertise to point out the things that you’re not yet informed about. And I think that’s the only way to learn. Right? You can’t learn anything if you can’t admit that you have something to learn. But I think we’ve built a culture that rewards knowing over learning.
Heather Reisman:
Let me get into some of the meat of the book. In Think Again, you describe four different modes of thinking. You talk about preachers, prosecutors, politicians, and scientists. And these modes of thinking come out in the way we communicate. Help us understand these different modes of thinking, and how they get us into trouble.
Adam Grant:
When our beliefs and our knowledge are under attack, we normally go into preacher or prosecutor mode. Preacher mode is, “I’m right.” Prosecutor mode is, “You’re wrong.” And the odds that I’m going to rethink anything when I’m operating that way are pretty low. Right? I’m trying to proselytize my beliefs and win my case. Politician mode is a little bit different. When you’re thinking like a politician, you’re trying to win the approval of an audience. And you usually do that by lobbying and campaigning. You might tell people what you think they want to hear, but the odds that you’re changing what you really believe deep down are pretty low. Right? You might flipflop but you’re not actually searching for the truth.
And I find it fascinating, by the way, Heather, as an organizational psychologist, I have never been a preacher; I’ve never been a prosecutor; I’ve never worked as a politician. And yet I catch these occupations sneaking their way into my mind from time to time.
I want to encourage people to think a little bit more like scientists. And I don’t think you need to own a microscope or a telescope, or wear a lab coat. When I talk about thinking like a scientist, I mean that you value humility over pride and curiosity over closure. That you don’t let your ideas become your identity.
And you say, “You know what? When I have an opinion, that’s just a hunch. It’s a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And I’ve got to go and search for reasons why I might be wrong, not just the reasons why I must be right. I have to listen to ideas that make me think hard, not just the ones that make me feel good. I need to surround myself with people who challenge my thought process, not just the ones who agree with my conclusions.” And if you adopt that mode of thinking like a scientist, there’s amazing evidence that it could actually make you more successful as an entrepreneur or a business person. And so I think the style of thinking is something we could probably all do a little bit more.
Heather Reisman:
How do we move from these more locked-in ways of thinking to begin to approximate a way that could be more helpful for us?
Adam Grant:
I think one of the things you can do is you could identify specific ways of thinking like a scientist. So, you know, I love this experiment that was done in Italy with startup founders, where they go through a three- to four-month crash course in how to build and run a business. What they don’t know is they’ve been randomly assigned—half of them to a control group and half of them to think like scientists. And they get the exact same training but the scientist group is told, “You know what? Just put on the goggles of a scientist and say your strategy is just a theory. When you do customer interviews, those are helping you formulate hypotheses. And when you launch a product or a service, it’s just an experiment to test your hypotheses.”
The entrepreneurs who were taught to think like scientists, over the next year averaged more than 40 times the revenue of the control group. Which is a staggering effect. And the main reason is they’re more than twice as likely to pivot. When they find out that their initial product or service didn’t work, they say, “All right. The experiment proved my hypothesis false. Let me now go and test a new one”—instead of doubling down and sticking to their guns, which is what most of us would do if we were stuck in preacher or prosecutor mode.
And I think that this is such a liberating way of operating—to say, “Okay. When I start to form an opinion, let me identify the conditions that would change my mind. If one of those conditions comes true, then I have a responsibility to rethink.”
Heather Reisman:
There’s a really powerful example of the risks inherent in being a preacher, rather than a scientist, in the story you tell on BlackBerry. And I must say, this story touched me quite a bit, because of how much respect I have for the co-founder of BlackBerry, Mike Lazaridis. Unfold this one for us.
Adam Grant:
Yes, Heather, I’m such an admirer of Mike Lazaridis, and I still miss the BlackBerry keyboard. And so I really wanted to understand what went wrong. Because they had captured half of the smartphone market; the iPhone comes in. And I think what happened is, first of all, a lot of people assume that the better you are at thinking, the better you will be at rethinking. That’s not the case. The data tell us that intelligence is not a cure for failures to rethink. And sometimes it’s even a curse, because the smarter you are, the more reasons you can find to convince yourself of what you want to believe. Right? Highly intelligent people are more likely to fall victim to what I think of as the I’m-not-biased bias. It’s the mother of all biases, where you’re quick to spot all the flaws in other people’s thinking but you think you’re immune to them.
And I think what happened in the case of RIM is Mike and his colleagues fell in love with their product, they took pride in it, and they got over-confident. And they said, “OK. You know what? Let’s listen to the love we’re getting from these millions of customers who are fans of this keyboard that helps us send work emails.” And they overlooked the fact that there were billions of users who wanted a touchscreen that could do all kinds of home entertainment and put an entire computer in your pocket.
And I think, you know, if you look at the demise of the BlackBerry, it’s stunning to me that even by 2011 or 2012 they still only had one product. All they sold was different versions of a BlackBerry. And when you’re a company valued at $50 to $70 billion U.S. dollars—as you well know, right—you want to diversify a little bit and make sure you have a bunch of experiments running to keep your organization alive. And the biggest lesson for me is that when you achieve that kind of stratospheric success, it’s very easy to fall victim to the “fat cat syndrome,” where you rest on your laurels and you get complacent. And it’s when you’re successful that you have the most freedom to rethink. You have all this flexibility. You have all these slack resources. Take advantage of them, as opposed to waiting until it’s too late.
Heather Reisman:
When I shake my head out from the book, I essentially come across three different moments when your ideas can be inspiring: when we’re trying to be creative or when we’re trying to advance things forward; then, when we’re trying to inspire someone to a view we think is valuable; and then, in the most significant situation, when we’re in a deeply polarized situation. And I want to go into each of those with examples from your book.
You made a really compelling point for how prosecutor mode blinds us to real insights—in the story you tell about the intense debate between Daniel Goleman, who originated the idea of emotional intelligence, and the well-known psychologist Jordan Peterson, who essentially argued that everything Daniel was saying was pure hogwash. Unpack that one for us.
Adam Grant:
Here we have two psychologists who have spent time in the Harvard psychology department, have completely opposite views of emotional intelligence, and neither seem to track with the scientific evidence.
So my read is that Dan Goleman has become a preacher—that he played a critical role in popularizing the idea of emotional intelligence, and he’s trying to sell it to everybody else. He’s drank his own Kool-Aid, and his goal is to spread it as widely as possible. And he ends up making these outrageous claims that are statistically impossible, like emotional intelligence explains 90 per cent of leadership success. I’ve never seen a variable that explains more than 10 per cent of leadership success by itself, you know, in a century of social science research.
And then on the flipside, Jordan Peterson is a prosecutor of this whole literature. He sees these outrageous claims, and I think he overcorrects and just, you know, attacks them, wanting to take them down.
So I see both sides of this. And I say, “Look. I want to try to think like a scientist. This is, after all, my job; I publish research on emotional intelligence; I’ve taught it for years. What does the evidence actually teach us?” And what the evidence teaches us is that there are always caveats and contingencies. There are situations where emotional intelligence is extremely important; there are situations where it’s not that relevant; and there might even be times where it’s detrimental.
And it turns out, if you look at the meta-analytic data, that emotional intelligence is a pretty strong predictor of job performance in situations where emotional demands are heavy. If you’re a salesperson, for example, if you’re somebody who is managing a crisis, if you have to do a lot of client service, then of course you need to be able to manage your own and other people’s emotions. On the other hand, though, in jobs where emotional demands are much lower—if you’re an accountant, for example, or a mechanic—emotional intelligence not only doesn’t predict higher job performance, it seems to predict lower job performance. And I think we’re still trying to figure out what’s going on there, but my hypothesis right now is that if you’re an accountant or you’re a mechanic with extremely high emotional intelligence, you’re spending too much time paying attention to the emotions of your clients and your colleagues, instead of to your spreadsheets or your cars. So if you’re going to work on my car or do my taxes, “Please don’t worry about my emotion,” (laughing) would be my request.
Almost nothing complex in life is black and white. We need to find the shades of grey. And so there I would say, yes, what we’re trying to do with emotional intelligence—just like anything else—is recognize that the question is not whether emotional intelligence is real and important, it’s when. And let’s look at the situations where it’s helpful, not helpful, and may be unhelpful.
Heather Reisman:
Your story on the vaccine whisperer and the anti-vaxxer was a lovely, and I would say, almost moving example of the scientist mode in action and how it works so well. Share that one with us.
Adam Grant:
You know, it’s funny, since doing this research, I have rethought even the label “anti-vaxxer,” because it locks people into an extreme camp, and there are a bunch of stereotypes, and there may be some prejudice attached to that. So I actually don’t know if she would have described herself as an anti-vaxxer or not. But Marie-Hélène Étienne-Rousseau was concerned about vaccines. She had her fourth child in Quebec. She had not vaccinated any of her three children. And her fourth was born premature. Obviously the medical staff is very worried about susceptibility to various kinds of diseases. And she initially says, “I’m not interested in vaccinating.”
And then they call in their last great hope, which is a physician and neonatologist named Arnaud Gagneur. He is known as “The Vaccine Whisperer,” because instead of preaching or prosecuting, he puts on his scientist hat and he interviews parents, just tries to better understand what are their concerns, what’s leading them to resist vaccination, and what would potentially change their mind.
And so for over an hour, he sits down with Marie-Hélène. And he says, “Tell me a little bit about what you know about vaccines. What are your worries?” And he says, “I’m not here to judge you. I’m here to listen to you and to understand your perspective.” And eventually during the conversation, he says, “With your permission, I would love to share some of my knowledge.” And he tells her that some of her fears are real. He walks her through some of the side effects. And he says, “Some of the others seem to more conspiracy theories, and I’m not aware of any evidence for this.” And at the end of the conversation, he says, “I know that you want what’s best for your children. And so do I. And so the final decision is yours.” She goes and ends up vaccinating not only her son Toby but also her other children.
And Arnaud has studied this approach—it’s called “motivational interviewing”—and applied it to vaccination and has shown that just asking people to really explain the downsides and the upsides of vaccination often leads them to realize that there are gaps in their knowledge, it makes them curious about what they don’t know, and it sometimes opens their minds.
Heather Reisman:
It feels so relevant, our collectively embracing the idea of changing the way we think and communicate. It feels so relevant right now. Particularly as I think of the example of what’s going on in the U.S. with QAnon and with all the followers of QAnon, who seem to be resistant to facts and science. So if you were in a room with a whole bunch of passionate QAnon people, how would you approach a discussion to even try and understand their motivation?
Adam Grant:
I don’t know that I know anything that would get through to somebody who is all-in on QAnon. But I think there are steps you can take that would probably increase the probability that they’re at least interested in having an open-minded discussion. So, Heather, where I would probably start is I would say, “I think that a lot of people have just started by vilifying this movement. But I don’t know any of you. I don’t know what exactly you believe. I’m sure there’s a whole spectrum of opinions in this room. And so I’d love to understand your opinions better.” And then as I start to hear some of the views, I’d ask, “Well, how do you know that? What are your sources? And can you share with me some information that I can use to look that up?”
At some point I’ll probably hear a conspiracy theory. And I think, to your point, debunking conspiracy theories with facts is very difficult. I think what tends to work better is to first acknowledge that some conspiracies are real. Watergate actually happened. I think, then the next thing you do is you ask people how the conspiracy could have been orchestrated. Psychologists keep finding that “Why” questions let people dig their heels in. When you ask someone, “Why do you believe what you believe?” they can come up with a whole set of justifications.
Heather Reisman:
Ahh, OK.
Adam Grant:
Whereas, when you ask, “Well, how would this work?” or “How does this happen?” then they have to explain, and they start to see some holes in their story. So for example, let’s say you have a QAnon person who thinks that the government is being controlled by a bunch of people who are satanic murderers. I want to know, “OK. Well, how did these people, who you think are incompetent, by the way, how did they manage to orchestrate this conspiracy and pull the wool over all of our eyes? And how is it that there’s not even one journalist who is motivated to win a Pulitzer Prize for getting to the bottom of that?” And I want to ask those questions in a way that again is as non-judgmental as possible—to say honestly, “I’m confused. I just don’t understand how anyone could do that, and I would love to find out. Can you help me make sense of it?”
Heather Reisman:
How can we make debate healthy, productive—particularly in work environments but maybe even at home with your kids? How do we make debate a joyful thing to embrace, even if it gets heated?
Adam Grant:
I think we need to make the distinction that organizational psychologists often make between task conflict and relationship conflict. Relationship conflict is what most of us are afraid of. There’s a clash of personalities or values, and it ends with, “I don’t like you.” And we know that gets in the way of having productive disagreements. But there’s another kind of conflict that can be healthy. It’s called “task conflict.” And that’s when we have different ideas, different opinions, a range of perspectives. We might be debating different visions or different strategies. And I think the key to a healthy debate is to have task conflict without causing relationship conflict.
There’s some evidence showing that just saying, “Hey, can we debate this?” helps. Because it activates that mental model of, “Oh. Well, you probably aren’t attacking me. We’re just trying to sort out some ideas here.” There’s also a case to be made, though, that sometimes debate locks us into winning and losing. That my job in a debate—and I’ve been guilty of this my whole career, Heather—is I’ve been called a “logic bully.” I had a student who called me that. And at first I thought it was a term of endearment. “Yes! That’s my job.” And I think that one of the mistakes that I’ve made, periodically and probably more often than that, is I’ve gone into arguments thinking my responsibility as a social science is to try to just bombard you with logic and facts, and that way I’ll win the argument. But I’m not here to win, I’m here to learn.
And I think that’s a big reframe for me. So I’ve actually started now having disagreements where, at the outset, I’ll say, “OK, Heather, I actually have a different point of view on this, and I know I have a bad habit of becoming a ‘logic bully.’ I go into prosecutor mode and I’m basically just trying to win the argument. And I don’t want you to lose. I want to learn from you. I hope you’re going to learn from me too.”
Heather Reisman:
I love this. I love this. This idea: I’m not here to win, I’m here to learn. And I like your idea, too, that if we can say, “Look. I know I tend to get passionate about my ideas,” if I start by saying that and then back up and say, “But you can be equally passionate and how do we come together?”
Adam Grant:
I just wanted to react to that quickly and say, you know, sometimes when I do that, people will say, “But wait a minute. What if the other person is wrong?” And I think that’s actually the fear that a lot of people have is they think, “Well, if I say I’m here to learn, then am I admitting I’m willing to be educated by somebody who is misinformed? That could be dangerous.” And I think there’s maybe a little edit that can help with that, which is to say, “OK. I’m here to learn from you. And I hope there’s also maybe something that I could teach you.” And if we’re both interested in teaching and learning, we’re both going to walk away more informed—and isn’t that the best-case outcome of a disagreement?
Heather Reisman:
What would you encourage parents—and you have kids—how are you helping your kids become truly creative thinkers?
Adam Grant:
Well, they’re actually helping us (laughing) is the first thing I would say. I will never forget the dinner we had where Allison and I were sitting at the table with our three kids, and one of them announces that King Tut probably didn’t die in a chariot accident. And I’m stunned, because that’s what I learned in school. “Like wait. I’m sorry. Tell me more? How could we possibly know that?” And we have this whole discussion about all the ridiculous things that we thought were true when we were in school that they’re being taught to question. And our kids thought it was hysterically funny that I learned Pluto was a planet. I’m still trying to come to grips with the reality that it’s not. “Wait. I’m sorry. What else is not true?”
But what that led to is we have myth-busting discussions at family dinner from time to time, where our kids will bring us things that we think are true, and they’re teaching us that maybe some of those things are not true. And it’s a great way to just make rethinking a norm, because we get to model saying, “I was wrong. I thought I knew something and I didn’t.” And the hope is that it keeps them eager to keep rethinking.
Heather Reisman:
I love the idea of myth-busting dinners. So thanks for that inspiration, because, you know, that’s just a whole idea that people could run with.
Adam Grant:
Try it at your own risk.
Heather Reisman:
A few questions I like to ask at the end of every interview. What are you reading right now that is really holding your interest?
Adam Grant:
What am I reading right now? I am reading several wonderful books. One is Professional Troublemaker by Luvvie Ajayi Jones—a fascinating book about how to make good trouble. And I think it’s in some ways the sequel to: OK, when you’ve rethought something, now how do you drive change and challenge the status quo. Also incredibly excited to finish High Conflict, by Amanda Ripley, which is a whole book about how to overcome polarization and have difficult conversations.
Heather Reisman:
Do you find your own, are you rethinking all the time?
Adam Grant:
Oh, definitely not. One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I can be extremely stubborn, and I think I’m eager to encourage other people to rethink their ideas but sometimes I’m too slow to rethink mine. I hope that I’ve started to do it more often—in part because I’m having conversations like this, and everybody expects me to be an enthusiastic rethinker. And so I think if you ever have trouble making a change, there’s nothing better than planting a flag in the ground and saying, “This is who I aspire to be,” and then everyone you know will hold you accountable for it.
Heather Reisman:
It’s generous that you say that.
What brings you joy in life?
Adam Grant:
So many things. I think one of my favourite sources of joy is just the wonder of discovery.
Heather Reisman:
And what constitutes intentional living, for you?
Adam Grant:
For me, intentional living is making time not only for thinking but for rethinking. I’ve actually started putting an hour in my calendar every week, to reflect on assumptions, opinions, knowledge, and decisions that I should be questioning. And one of my favourite things I’ve done since writing Think Again is I reached out to a bunch of people who have been my most thoughtful critics, and I said, “Hey, you may not know this, but I consider you a founding member of my challenge network.” They’re like, “What’s a challenge network?” I’m like, “You know, the opposite of a support network—the people who really push me to reach my potential. And I know I haven’t always responded well to your feedback. Sometimes I’ve been defensive, other times I’ve just been distracted or dismissive. But I’ve always appreciated how much you challenge me, and I want to let you know if you ever hesitate because you’re worried you’re going to hurt my feelings, the only way you can hurt my feelings is by not telling me the truth.”
Heather Reisman:
Thanks for sharing in your book, Think Again, that you think of yourself as a work-in-progress. It is such an optimistic way to embrace life—feeling that every day brings us the opportunity to make little changes toward being the best we can be. I just love that. And thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.
Adam Grant:
Oh, thank you, Heather.
Heather Reisman:
Thank you for tuning in to our conversation with Adam Grant. For more ideas to help you live well, including the book featured in this episode, Think Again, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Well Said was produced for Indigo Inc. by Vocal Fry Studios and is hosted by me, Heather Reisman.
Shivani Persad:
The information provided in this podcast should not be relied upon by our listeners as medical advice, even where it has been presented by physicians or medical practitioners. Any information presented in this podcast is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed throughout this podcast represent the views of the guests and do not necessarily represent the views of Indigo.