Tim Harford used his Cautionary Tales podcast to talk to Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at Wharton and author of Think Again and Hidden Potential, about the consequences of letting our ideas become part of our identity.
Just to set the scene Grant is really saying we sometimes hold on to ideas that once served us well but are no longer appropriate, and Harford illustrates this with the example of the firefighter who ran into the fire as opposed to away from it. Grant says that “So many of us see intelligence as thinking and learning” but we need to be able to choose to rethink by letting go of assumptions and adapting to circumstance. There is a basic cognitive entrenchment problem whereby we become so used to a certain way of doing things that we don’t even bother to question our assumptions.
There’s a deeper problem at play here, which is our assumptions become part of our identity. He points out that sometimes we need somebody from outside the situation to say, “you need to make a change when the situation changes”, because our instinctive reaction is to what we usually do, what we are trained to do, what we’ve done in the past. But in a desperate situation sometimes we need to take desperate measures.
Big picture thinking
“You make a plan, it doesn’t work out, and instead of abandoning the plan, you double down and you invest more, and the data on this is chilling in some cases”. Grant quotes research on mountaineers which suggests that the grittiest ones are the most likely to die on expeditions because they cannot let go of the goal of getting to the summit. But, of course, the ultimate goal is not to make it to the top, it’s to get back down.
He talks about threat rigidity. “When we’re under stress or pressure, we revert to our most basic, well learned instincts and we narrow our field of vision. We’re more likely to fall into a tunnel vision at the very moment when we most need to broaden it and rethink our definition of the situation”. It’s difficult to train to plan for the unexpected!
Grant notes that being more prepared to rethink would have helped in dealing with the pandemic, for instance. “How many politicians and CEOs did we see clinging to their modus operandi as opposed to saying, actually, we might need to wear masks, it might be a good idea to social distance? There were so many missed opportunities for rethinking there”.
Future thinking
In essence his argument is that where we most need to think again is when dealing with highly consequential, irreversible decisions. Every decision made is a prediction about the future. When you choose a career, or when you take a job, you’re making it about what kind of work you’re going to find motivating and what sort of culture will be healthy not toxic.
When you marry someone, you’re making a prediction about what you’re going to want in the next few decades, and also who they, and you, are going to become. That’s when it’s worthwhile slowing down, because it really matters, and you can’t easily change your mind tomorrow. This is when we need to be rethinking.
Any change, any rethink, is hard to contemplate. The research is established – people are more willing to embrace change when they’re reminded of what’s going to stay the same, right, so if you give people a vision for change, they’re less likely to resist it if they also hear a vision for continuity.
Mind changing
I think this is key, when Grant says: “One of the most powerful lessons in the last few decades of psychology research is it’s very difficult to motivate someone else to change their mind. What you can do is try to help them find their own motivations to change their minds”.
This is not just about personal assumptions but also about societal and cultural failures in rethinking. The pandemic fits that bill pretty clearly and so do stock market crashes. Almost any example of a frog in a slow boiling pot situation would probably align with this line of argument and, it turns out, even that story needs to be rethought.
Because, the frogs will move! The moment you heat up the water to the point of discomfort, the frog leaps out. It’s not the frogs who can’t think again, it’s us; you hear the story, you assume it’s true, and you retell it rather than pausing to rethink it. It’s ironic, in a way, because Charles Handy used the frog story to point out that we will not survive if we don’t respond to the radical way in which the world is changing. I always wondered how Handy knew the frog didn’t jump out!
Rethinking in the real world
When we make an assumption and it proves to be a successful one in the moment, because it helps us achieve our goals, we count it a win. But if we then forget to ask whether the practices that we build around that assumption, our best practices, are time honoured traditions we will be relying on assumptions created in a world that no longer exists. Grants cites examples from tragic to inspirational, including Steve Jobs, who hated his phone so much that he smashed it against a wall, yet went on to invent the world’s most popular smartphone. Why did he change his mind?
The podcast shows that creative geniuses are not attached to one identity, but constantly willing to rethink their stances and that leaders who admit they don’t know something and seek critical feedback lead more productive and innovative teams. We need to overcome our own unjustified overconfidence by developing the habits of mind that force us to challenge our assumptions and, when necessary, change them.
Adam Grant maintains that we should: “let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom”.
Tim Harford is a favourite 10Eighty podcaster, listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/id1484511465?i=1000663450012
