HIGHLIGHTS: Susan Cain

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:01)
Hi, everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Wealth Fund. And today, I'm in really good company with Susan Cain. Now, Susan is the author who gave the world of introverts a voice, because her book Quiet spent eight years on the bestseller list, and her TED Talk has been watched by millions and millions of people.
She changed how millions of us think about personality, leadership and creativity. And Susan, warm welcome.

**Susan Cain** (0:35)
Thank you so much, Nicolai. It is such a pleasure to be here with you.

**Nicolai Tangen** (0:39)
Susan, I'd love to start with AI, because the world is changing. Is it changing the relationship between introverts and extroverts?

**Susan Cain** (0:48)
I don't know that it's changing the relationship. I mean, maybe you mean between introverts and extroverts.
But it's very interesting with these technologies in general. I often feel that they often at the beginning offer more promise for introverts to have multiple ways of communicating beyond the conventional ones of being always in person, always on, always activated. And then somehow they end up often becoming additional platforms for self-presentation because that's so prevalent in our culture. So actually with AI, I'm adopting a bit of a wait and see attitude.

**Nicolai Tangen** (1:29)
Yeah. There is a new expression we share here, which is the kind of the high agency people, people who kind of really leverage the technology to make them even louder. And I'm just wondering whether that's one of those things, you know, which amplifies the extroverts even more. What do you think?

**Susan Cain** (1:47)
Well, not necessarily. I mean, from the dawn of the Internet, there's actually been this kind of concept of the, people call it sometimes the online extrovert, the in-person, I'm sorry, yeah, online extrovert, in-person introvert.
And introverts are just as high agency as extroverts in terms of having goals that they're excited about, projects that they want to accomplish, and having high agency in the service of those goals that they care about. And in fact, I would say what is singular about introverts, or what distinguishes them is that they tend to focus on one or two or three goals in their lives. They tend to focus on people in their lives that they really care about. If they're committed to a given company or to leading a company, they're really, really, really committed. And so, they're high agency in that sense. And in that sense, being able to mobilize AI towards those highly directed goals can be incredibly amplifying and powerful.

**Nicolai Tangen** (2:54)
Susan, what are the implications for leadership?
How should introverts and extroverts be led differently? If they should.

**Susan Cain** (3:03)
Oh, how should they be led differently? And we should talk also about the difference between introverted and extroverted leaders.
But yeah, in terms of being led differently, it's really the idea of leading the actual person as opposed to just leading an undifferentiated mass of humans. It really applies here, of course, because introverts and extroverts have incredibly different needs for a perfect workday.
So if you think, if you go back to that idea of equilibrium, and what is it that gets each person into a state of equilibrium? And by the way, so less less sensitive people have nervous systems that react much less to stimulation. So for them, the downside and the danger is that they're not having enough stimulation coming at them, and then they can start to feel unhappy and bored and sluggish, so we have to take care of that as well. So you want to be creating environments where each employee can have access to the proper amount of stimulation for them, so that they can be spending as much of their time in a state of equilibrium as possible. So this shows up in terms of how do we design our office space? Are we making sure that we have spaces where there's lots of interaction and stimulation and noise? Which all of us, introvert or extrovert, we all want that at some point during the day. And then do we have places in the office where people can go to be quiet and focus and have their heads down? In terms of how do we design schedules? An introvert will probably function at their best if they can have a schedule where they can focus a lot uninterrupted and get into that state of flow. Whereas extroverted workers will need that some of the time because all good creative work needs that. But they're going to start feeling unhappy if they don't have enough enough social interaction during the day. So even so thinking about how do you structure the day? Do you want to maybe have designated zones where there's uninterrupted flow time, no meetings and then the zones where the meetings can happen?