Think Again — Adam Grant | Decision-Making Skills in a Fast-Paced World

**Adam Grant** (0:00)
If you are in the middle of a crisis, and everyone is doing their right thing, but that same right thing is destroying them, what would you do? If you realize an old belief is quietly holding you back, can you actually let it go? And why do some people change their mind at the exact moment it matters and others can't? Why doesn't being smarter always help, and sometimes make it even worse? Why do people become more stubborn the more evidence we bring? And how do we help people to become ready to change? In this video, I'm going to answer these questions. By the end, I'll pull together a few practical tools you can use at work in relationships, in debates and in big decisions. Stay with me. In a world that changes fast, intelligence isn't just learning more. Real intelligence is being able to rethink quickly when you need to, even when the thing you're changing used to save you. A lot of time, the problem isn't not knowing enough. It's being too certain. And sometimes, the distance between getting stuck and getting rescued is one skill. Being able to change your mental frame in the moment. Let me start with the real story. The Mongols fire in Montana, 1949 15 smokejumpers parachute in to contain it. Their leader is Wagner Dodge. At first, it's normal. Then everything flips. Wind, slope, dry vegetation. And the fire changes direction and starts racing towards them. Dodge sees it and tells everyone to retreat the way they came. But here is a problem. That means climbing up a steep rocky hillside with almost no time. Halfway up, Dodge realizes something terrifying. If they keep running like this, they won't reach safety before the fire catches them. And then he does something that looks insane. He lights a match and sets the grass in front of him on fire. The logic is simple. Burn the fuel before the main fire arrives, so when the fire reaches that patch, there's nothing left to burn. And he can survive by lying in the already burned area. Today this is called an escape fire. Dodge yells for the others to do the same, but the team thinks he's lost it. They don't listen. They keep running uphill. 12 people die. Only three survive. Two survive because they were fit enough to reach the ridge, but Dodge survives for mental fitness. And here is where my main question starts. Why in crisis do some people not just think faster, but think differently? Here's the painful detail. Many of those firefighters were still dragging their heavy tools while running. From the outside, you're like, drop it. Why are you carrying that? But for them, the tools weren't just tools. They were identity. Under stress, we fall back to automatic behavior. And even if dropping the tools could save you, your brain locks because there is an identity question underneath. Without my tools, who am I? Now, let me bridge that to us. We have mental tools, too. Knowledge, assumptions, beliefs, opinions. And some of them aren't tools anymore. They're tied to who we think we are. That's why, when it's time to rethink, we resist, especially under pressure. Let me name a few common traps. Sometimes we can tolerate uncertainty, so we cling to certainty. We grab a conclusion quickly and freeze it. We hear a story and we don't even check if it is true. Like the famous frog in boiling water story, which its popular version isn't actually accurate. Even in exams, lots of people believe changing your answer makes your score worse. But research found that changing answers is more often from wrong to right than the other way around. That's called the first instinct fallacy. Assuming your first idea is the correct one, in today's world, that assumption doesn't always hold. So here's the message of this section. Intelligence isn't just learning. In a chaotic world, intelligence is the ability to rethink and even unlearn what no longer helps. The hardest part is some beliefs are attached to identity. Now let's move into chapter one and see why rethinking became a survival skill and why some people get stuck in it.
Here's a sentence I truly like. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Why is rethinking so important now? Because knowledge is growing faster and faster. For example, in 1950, medical knowledge doubled around every 50 years. By 1980, it doubled every 7 years. By 2010, that time was cut roughly in half. With that pace, if we don't challenge our assumptions, we fall behind. But here's the catch. The older beliefs get, the more rooted they become. And sometimes, they get more extreme. We treat them as obvious until the world changes and we realize we're living on an outdated version. A great example is the rise and fall of Blackberry. Michael Lazzarus founded Blackberry. The early idea was brilliant. Wireless e-mail exploded. Everyone loved it. From Bill Gates to Oprah, even Barack Obama didn't want to give his device up when he entered the White House. The collapse was just as dramatic. In summer of 2009, Blackberry had close to half the US smartphone market. By 2014, its share dropped to under 1%. We might say the company didn't adapt, but adaptation isn't something a company does. People do. Mike was making technical and product decisions. Early on, he could see the market clearly, but in 2007, when the iPhone arrived, he made fun out of it and said, they put a Mac in it. And that was the beginning of the end of Blackberry. Instead of seriously testing alternative possibilities, he clung to what had made them successful. Since 1997, Blackberry's chief engineer wanted a browser added. Mike said, e-mail only. By 2008, the company's value rose beyond $70 billion and still no reliable browser. In 2010, the idea of an instant messenger came up. Fear of becoming obsolete made them reject it. An opportunity that later helped WhatsApp grow into around $17 billion. So why do humans, even someone like Mike, get stuck? Researchers described three common modes we fall into in thinking and conversations. Preacher, prosecutor, politician. The preacher. When sacred beliefs are threatened, we deliver sermons. The prosecutor. We hunt for flaws and try to prove the other side won't. The politician. We seek approval, campaign, and lobby for our side. The danger is that we stay in those modes so long that we stop doing the work of rethinking our own beliefs. There's a fourth mode we need right now. The scientist. Make hypothesis, test them, and update beliefs with new evidence. Rethinking usually begins with intellectual humility. Knowing what you don't know. That humility feeds doubt, curiosity, discovery, and then humility grows. To test the scientist mode, researchers ran an experiment with 100 plus Italian startup founders. Two groups got the same training, but one group was taught to use scientific thinking to pursue their goals. The control group's average income the next year was under $300. The scientific thinking group earned over $12,000, and they made more than twice as many strategic pivots. Now, here's the surprising part. Being smart doesn't automatically mean you're flexible. Higher IQ can mean faster pattern recognition, which can also make someone more vulnerable to stereotypes. Research found that math skills help when data is neutral, but when the same data gets ideological labels like gun laws in the US, even people strong in math may distort analysis to protect their beliefs. That's driven by two biases, confirmation bias, desirability bias. Mike got trapped here too. Attachment to the keyboard versus touch screens, reinforced by fans and by his own biases. To show that changing your mind is possible, look at Apple. For a long time, Steve Jobs was strongly anti-mobile. His engineers pushed him to face what he didn't know and to doubt his certainties. Instead of framing it as changing who Apple is, they framed it as continuity. Apple estates the computer company with just adding a phone. After six months of debate, Jobs got curious and let them explore. Four years after the iPhone launched, about half of Apple's revenue came from it. So let's wrap up chapter one. When we cling to what we know, it can become a prison. Scientific thinking means actively looking for reasons we might be wrong, not just reasons we might be right. Now let's move to chapter two. Why people can be blind to their own ignorance and how that creates confidence. Ignorance brings more confidence than knowledge. Let's start with a medical case from 1950s. A tailor develops headaches, back pain, dizziness and over a month she gets worse. Eventually she can't even find the water glass next to her bed. She bumps into walls when she walks. What's strange is that she looks fine in many ways. She can cut shapes with scissors, describe patterns, but she can't tell light from dark. Her vision is severely damaged. And yet when the doctor asks about the deficit, she insists she can see. Even when she becomes completely blind, she doesn't realize it. Later, this was labeled Anton syndrome, a lack of awareness of one's disability. Now, let's get back to our life. Even with healthy brains, we all have a version of this. Blind spots in our knowledge and beliefs that make us blind to our blindness. To explain it, there are two syndromes, plus an effect, plus a trap. Imposter syndrome, confidence is behind competence. Armchair quarterback syndrome, confidence is ahead of competence. Both extreme low confidence and confidence can block rethinking and scientific thinking. Now, we get to the Dunning-Kruger effect. In many situations, people who can't, don't know they can't. A study showed that those with the lowest scores believed they were, on average, better than 62% of their peers. In reality, they were only better than 12%. Comparisons of managers' self-rating versus real operational performance across thousands of companies found the same pattern. Overconfidence everywhere, the strongest, where management was weakest. And then, there is the Dunning-Kruger trap. Absolute beginners might not be that delusional, but when people move from beginners to amateurs, a little knowledge can shoot them up the mountain of stupidity. They start believing they know everything in that domain. Even the increase in hospital mortality in July has been linked to this trap. When new residents start, the risk isn't only low skills, it's overestimating skills. So, what's the solution? The solution is confidence paired with humility. Meaning, faith in your ability plus awareness that you might not have the right method or might not even be defining the problem correctly. There is an experiment that shows this clearly. When the students read a short article about the benefit of accepting not knowing, the likelihood they would ask for help with a weakness rose from 65% to 85%. Now, a question. Is imposter syndrome always bad? Evidence suggests not necessarily. Research found that medical students with lower confidence and more imposter feelings weren't worse at diagnosis, and were sometimes even better in clinical interactions. It can push us to work harder, work smarter, become better learners. Here's the chapter two takeaway. High confidence can be a sign of blind spot, not a sign of skill. The balance point is confidence with humility, belief in growth, plus healthy doubt about our current methods. Now, let's talk about why being wrong hurts so much.