By: Adam Grant

  LISTEN

  READ

When most people think about the concept of mental fitness, they first think of intelligence. The higher your IQ, the more complex problems you can solve.

However, in increasingly changing world, there are a set of cognitive skills that matter more: the ability to unlearn what you know and to "rethink."

Grant starts off this book by telling the riveting story of a wildland firefighter named Wagner Dodge. As an out of control fire changed direction and threatened to overtake his team, he did something unorthodox.

He shed all his gear, lit a match, and burned a patch of grass around him. Then, he wet his handkerchief, put it to his mouth, and lied down for 15 minutes as the fire raged all around him and passed by.

Nobody had taught him to do it, and it seemed so counterintuitive to the rest of his team that they kept running, trying to reach safety before it was too late. 2 of them made it, but 12 of them didn't and perished in the blaze.

Dodge had saved himself by improvising a solution that nobody in the history of firefighting had been taught to do - he burned a patch of grass around himself so that the fire didn't have the fuel to burn as it passed by.

He had exhibited mental flexibility, which is what this book is all about. Join us for the next 12 minutes as we learn how to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving us well, and find our identity in flexibility rather than consistency.

Part I: Individual Rethinking

A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a Politician, and a Scientist Walk Into Your Mind

One of Grant's colleagues, Phil Tetlock, discovered that when we talk and think, we will often exhibit the mindsets of three different personas: preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.

When we feel that our sacred beliefs are being challenged, we go into preacher mode to protect and promote our ideals.

When we recognise flaws in other people's reasoning, we go into prosecutor mode and try to prove them wrong.

When we are trying to win over an audience, we go into politician mode, campaigning and lobbying for the approval of our ideas.

The risk here is the we become so wrapped up in whichever mode we have chosen that we we are unable to ever rethink our own views.

The antidote, Grant suggests, is to think like a scientist. Although being a scientist includes having an open mind about reality, it goes much further. It requires us to search for the reasons that we might be wrong, and revising what we believe based on what we learn in the process.

Here's what happens when you get stuck in one of the P modes instead of thinking like a scientist:

• Changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness in preacher mode, rather than a sign of intellectual integrity;
• Allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat in prosecutor mode, rather than a step towards the truth;
• As a politician we flip-flop in response to carrots and sticks, rather than responding to sharper logic and stronger data.

The Armchair Quarterback and the Impostor: Finding the Sweet Spot of Confidence

Confidence itself is a measure of how much you believe in yourself, and most people have a hard time matching their level of confidence with their level of competence.

One one end, our confidence exceeds our competence. This is the aptly named armchair quarterback syndrome. As it turns out, the less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we seem to overestimate our ability. Sports fans around the world who don't have high-level experience in a sport are far more likely to yell at the coaches on their TV than those that do.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imposter syndrome, where our competence exceeds our confidence. While this isn't the optimal place on the spectrum to be (more on that in a minute), there are some clear advantages to feeling like an imposter rather than an armchair quarterback. Feeling like an imposter can:

• Motivate us to work harder;
• Motivate us to work smarter. When we believe that we are not going to win, we have nothing to lose by rethinking and changing our strategy;
• Make us better learners because we are much more likely to seek out help from others.

So if you are trying to optimize for mental flexibility, it's better to err on the side of underestimating your competence.

The sweet spot of confidence, however, is somewhere in the middle between armchair quarterback and impostor.

People who occupy this spot in the spectrum are much more likely to make the distinction between their goals and their methods. They can be extremely confident in their ability to achieve a future goal, while having the humility to question whether or not to have the right skills and strategies today.

The Joy of Being Wrong: The Thrill of Not Believing Everything You Think

One of the things you need to get comfortable with when thinking like a scientist is being wrong. Unfortunately, most of us don't like being wrong, especially when it's related to something that matters deeply to us.

When something meaningful to us is questioned, we tap into the inner dictator in our heads. The psychological term for it is the totalitarian ego, and its purpose is to keep out threatening information.

The world's most successful people have figured out how to escape the pull of their ego by detaching themselves in two critical ways. They can detach their past selves from their present selves, and their opinions from their identities.

One of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, Ray Dalio (the founder of Bridgewater Associates), puts it this way:

“If you don’t look back at yourself and think, ‘Wow, how stupid I was a year ago,’ then you must not have learned much in the last year.”

People like Dalio update their beliefs and ideas more often than less successful people. They have the ability to question ideas before accepting them, and to keep questioning them after accepting them.

The reason they are so comfortable being wrong in the short run is that they are terrified of being wrong in the long run. They know that the only way to be right in the long run is to continually "think again," iterating their way to the truth and success.

As Grant points out, this path isn't always sunshine and rainbows because admitting our mistakes is painful. But when we keep in mind that they are essential for progress, we tolerate the short-term pain in service of the long-term reward.

The Good Fight Club: The Psychology of Constructive Conflict

There are two kinds of conflict in teams.

The first is relationship conflict, and it stands in the way of rethinking. When a conflict becomes personal and emotional, it stands in the way of rethinking because we are spending all of our time defending ourselves and our identity.

The second is task conflict, which is focused mainly on the tactics and strategies that are deployed to meet goals and objectives. This kind of conflict encourages us to air our differences of opinion without making things personal.

Studies have shown that teams that perform poorly have more relationship conflict than task conflict. They end up being so busy disliking each other that they don't feel comfortable challenging one another.

High performing groups, by contrast, have low relationship conflict and keep it that way throughout their time together. This allows them to challenge each other and then align on a direction to get things done.

So how to do you create a team that feels comfortable debating the tactics and strategies they will use to reach their ultimate goal?

One thing you can do is frame a dispute as a debate rather than a disagreement. This tells everybody that you are willing to hear diverse opinions and that you are open to changing your mind. So the next time you want to have productive task conflict, try starting with this question:

"Can we debate?"

PART II Interpersonal Rethinking: Opening Other People’s Minds

Dances with Foes: How to Win Debates and Influence People

How do we get other people to open their minds and rethink their positions?

Neil Rackham has spent his career studying what expert negotiators do differently from average ones. He found that there were five differences.

First, the experts spent almost one third of their preparation time finding areas of common ground with the other side. Average negotiators spent almost no time doing this.

Second, the experts tend to present fewer reasons to support their case than the average negotiators did. Average negotiators believe that the more arguments they have in their favour, the more persuasive they will be. The experts understand that this only serves to water down their best points.

Third, the experts avoid what Rackham calls the defend-attack spirals where they shoot down their opponents proposals and doubled down on their position. Instead, the experts displayed their curiosity with questions like "So you don't see any merit in this proposal at all?"

Fourth, experts ask more questions than average negotiators. For every five comments made by the experts, at least one ended in a question mark.

Fifth, experts are much more in tune with feelings - both their own and of their counterparts - throughout the process. For instance, if they are frustrated by something, they'll voice it, and ask whether or not the other side is feeling the same thing.

When you add all of these differences up, you are much more likely to short circuit the overconfidence cycle and get people to engage in rethinking their position.

Bad Blood on the Diamond: Diminishing Prejudice by Destabilizing Stereotypes

Psychologists have found that many of our beliefs are widely shared, but rarely questioned.

The question we'll explore in this section is "why do people create stereotypes, and how do we get people to rethink them?"

That's a big question, and the answer lies in something that psychology calls counterfactual thinking. It asks us to imagine how the circumstances of our lives would have unfolded differently and impacted our views of the world.

For instance, we might consider asking people questions like:

• How would your stereotypes be different if you were born Black, Asian, Native American, or Hispanic?
• How would your opinions be different if you were born on a farm instead of in a city?
• What would you believe differently if you were born in the 1700s?

What this does is help people realise that many of the people in a group they previously, and blindly, hated, are not so terrible after all. This destabilises their prejudice by helping them realise that they very easily could have held different stereotypes if they were placed in different circumstances.

Vaccine Whisperers and Mild-Mannered Interrogators: How the Right Kind of Listening Motivates People to Change

For the first time in a half century, measles is on the rise, mostly because not enough people are getting vaccinated. And mostly because they don't believe in the science behind it.

Governments have tried to prosecute their way to success by fining people and jailing them, but it hasn't worked.

Instead of relying on carrots and sticks, Grant suggests the solution can be found in inverse charisma, which describes the magnetic quality of a great listener.

One powerful listening technique you can use is called motivational interviewing. It's the most highly proven and successful practical theory the entire field of behavioural science has ever produced.

It's based on three key techniques:

• Asking open-ended questions
• Practicing reflective listening
• Affirming the other person's desire and ability to change

When people ignore advice, it's not always because they disagree with it. It's often because of our natural tendency to resist the feeling that somebody else is controlling our decision.

The studies in this area have shown that when people are dealing with empathetic, nonjudgmental and attentive listeners, they feel the freedom they need to explore their opinions more deeply, recognse more nuance in them, and share their thought process more openly.

Basically, they feel more freedom to uncover their own reasons and motivations for changing their minds.

PART III Collective Rethinking: Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners

Charged Conversations: Depolarising Our Divided Discussions

Human beings suffer from something that psychologists call binary bias. It's our tendency to simplify a complex continuum into two categories in an effort to seek clarity and closure.

Grant uses Al Gore as an example, and how he presents his arguments for the destructive nature of climate change. By making a complex issue into one where there are scientists on one side, and "climate deniers" on the other, he is unintentionally encouraging people who are on the fence to disengage from or dismiss the problem.

The solution to this problem is called complexifying - showing that there are a range of possible perspectives on a given topic.

One of the keys to overcoming this shortfall in your communication of complex issues is to include caveats. A single study, or even a series of studies, are rarely conclusive. Scientists include multiple paragraphs on the limitations of their findings.

Rewriting the Textbook: Teaching Students to Question Knowledge

We all grew up in a school system that focused on one person (the teacher) delivering information to the students using a lecture format.

Even with the advances in technology over the last decade haven't changed this paradigm. We are simply getting better at delivering the same method, at scale.

While it's clear from things like TED talks and other inspirational videos that lectures can be entertaining and informative, the question Grant asks us is whether or not they are the ideal method of teaching.

As it turns out, they are not, especially when it comes to helping us adapt. That's because lectures aren't designed to accommodate dialogue or disagreement, which means we are turning students into passive receivers of information, rather than the active thinkers we so desperately need them to be.

The antidote to this is called active learning, which is all about getting the learner deeply involved in the learning process.

Grant encourages his students at Wharton to question what they learn in an assignment he gives them where they are asked to question a popular practice, or to challenge principles that were covered in the class.

One of the ideas that came out of that assignment was a "passion talk day" - an entire day of "passion talks" where students can make a presentation on something they are passionate about. This encourages his students to question not only how they learn, but also who they can and should learn from (everybody).

That’s Not the Way We’ve Always Done It: Building Cultures of Learning at Work

Rethinking isn't just an individual skill. It's an organisational ability that largely comes out of its culture.

In performance oriented cultures, the company often becomes attached to their standard operating procedures. This alone isn't a bad thing, because it is a a proven way to generate the results a company is looking for. But it turns from a virtue into a vice when the people stop wondering where the process might be imperfect and how it might improve.

Learning cultures - where the people are constantly searching for new and better ways of doing things - are founded on a combination of psychological safety and accountability. Although they may seem like complete opposites, the sweet spot is when they are both present.

If you have psychological safety without accountability, people tend to stay in their comfort zone. When there's accountability but not safety, people tend to stay silent in the anxiety zone.

The term psychological safety was made popular by Amy Edmonsdon of Harvard University. It's the belief that you won't be punished when you make a mistake, which encourages the creativity and moderate risk-taking that helps organisations flourish.

So how do you create a learning organisation?

To create a culture of psychological safety, you can start by admitting some of your imperfections out loud to your team, and constantly invite constructive criticism. This will help others feel comfortable admitting when they are wrong, and focus on solving issues rather than sweeping them under the rug.

To create a culture of process accountability, you can start by having everybody ask the question "how do you know?" As in, "how do you know that if we try that new approach it won't work?" Or, "how do you know that this was what caused that mistake?" It's an easy but effective way to keep everybody focused on finding a better way forward, while ensuring we don't blindly accept opinions as facts.

Conclusion

In a world that is demanding us to rethink almost everything, this is a book that helps us let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving us well, and find our identity in flexibility rather than consistency.