Review of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant

Of everything a person must maintain, his mind is most important, and king of all is his connection to reality. Yet, our tether to the world can be tenuous. Our ideas, particularly our most fundamental ones, help us make sense of the world. But if they’re wrong, they completely shift the image, like a turn of the kaleidoscope.

Nature is no child’s toy, though, and to be commanded, it must be obeyed. So, as much as we hate to feel the ground move beneath our feet, we have real incentives to get things right, even if that means upending ideas we’ve held for decades. And, according to Wharton professor Adam Grant, the trait of regularly rethinking one’s beliefs, big and small, is what puts the best thinkers a cut above the rest. Here, from Grant’s Think Again, are some great ideas on how and why to do so.

Recognize the problem

“You must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool,” said Richard Feynman, Nobel-winning physicist. Laureates of another kind—David Dunning and Justin Kruger, winners of the 2000 Nobel prize—backed this truism with data, showing that we are particularly prone to fooling ourselves when we know just enough to be dangerous, which partly explains why mortality rates spike every summer as fresh residents take up the mantle of medicine.

Think more like a scientist

I can’t tell you how much I admire Jason Crawford, creator of the “Roots of Progress” project. When he set out to tell “the story of human progress—and how we can keep it going,” he set aside his prior beliefs to completely re-examine the evidence. He recently posted a quote from a hero of medicine, Louis Pasteur, that captures that scientific spirit: Keep your early enthusiasm, dear collaborators, but let it ever be regulated by rigorous examinations and tests. Never advance anything which cannot be proved in a simple and decisive fashion.

Persuade by listening

If Think Again were a song, it would probably be “Belief” by John Mayer, not just because both are punchy and poignant, but because both reflect on the destructive nature of strongly held but bad ideas and the flat-footed ways in which people often attempt to persuade others. We should take a lesson, says Grant, from people such as Daryl Davis, the black musician who has helped hundreds leave the Ku Klux Klan, and Arnaud Gagneur, the “vaccine whisperer” whose motivational interviewing methods have been used to help thousands of parents see that the MMR and other common vaccines are safe for their kids.

Acknowledge complexity

Westerners have been reading the works of Aristotle for more than 2,000 years, and his ideas even animated the Islamic Golden Age. Despite the fact that what we have are but dry lecture notes, not works Aristotle actually published, they remain a staple of the persuasive arts, and for good reason. Not only did Aristotle’s book on persuasive speaking, Rhetoric, anticipate many of the lessons on persuasion in Think Again, his corpus seems implicitly to commend another of the book’s ideas.

Find challengers, not followers

Orville and Wilbur Wright were so close they said they “thought together,” but as Grant points out, you could as aptly say they fought together. The brothers enjoyed “scrapping” about ideas, but as heated as their debates got, they never came to blows. That’s because, although they challenged each other to think long and hard about their respective ideas, they didn’t make things personal. They engaged in what psychologists call “task conflict,” not relationship conflict. They prodded one another to think and work smarter and harder, and their results speak for themselves.

Lead by transparency

Zooming out, how do we build agile organizations where the rethinking habit and the scientific mindset are baked into the DNA? How, especially, can those leading massive companies do this when they can’t possibly interact with every contributor?

When asked to consult on this topic by the Gates Foundation, Grant ran an experiment to test the standard advice: getting managers to model behavior and ask their teams for feedback on how to improve. Afterward, employees reported greater psychological safety, a marker of willingness to take risks and try new things, but this didn’t last. In another group in the experiment, Grant advised managers “to tell their teams about a time when they benefited from constructive criticism and to identify the areas that they were working to improve now.” A year later, these teams were still reaping benefits.