Side note:

Background music plays

Logo:

J.P. Morgan Private Bank.

On screen:

A book's front cover displays  this video's opening title: "JPMorgan Summer Reading List 2021." Then, a group of books from the summer reading list appear, including:
 - Digital Body Language by Erica Dhawan;
 - Think Again by Adam Grant;
 - No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin;
 - Never Enough by Mike Hayes;
 - What the Road Said by Cleo Wade;
 - By Design;
 - Wonderworks by Angus Fletcher;
 - How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates;
 - My Shanghai by Betty Liu;
 - (and)  The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson.

Next, a man with brown eyes who keeps his head shaved, Darin Oduyoye, speaks (remotely) from a room with a wall-sized window overlooking a large city.

Text on screen:

Darin Oduyoye, Chief Communications Officer,  J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management.

Darin Oduyoye:

Hi, I’m Darin Oduyoye and welcome to J.P. Morgan’s 2021 Summer Reading List Series. We are thrilled to be joined today by superstar, top-rated, Wharton professor, bestselling author and chart-topping podcast host, Adam Grant. Adam’s latest book, Think Again, is featured on J.P. Morgan’s 2021 Summer Reading List, and he’s here to talk with us about it today. Welcome, Adam.

On screen:

A photo appears of the book, "Think Again." Then, Mr. Grant appears remotely, sharing a split-screen with Mr. Oduyoye. Grant (a man with light eyes who keeps his head shaved) speaks from his living room. The room has a large bookshelf and a high-chair with a stuffed frog toy in it.

Adam Grant:

Thanks, Darin. Honored to be selected and hope you don’t rethink that by the end of this conversation. Side note:

Both laugh.

Darin Oduyoye:

(Laughs) Of course not. And this is a bit of an annual tradition because this is actually the fourth of your books that we’ve had on our Summer Reading List.

Adam Grant:

Wow, four for four. I feel like I should stop writing books now. Thank you for the support. It means a lot.

Darin Oduyoye:

Thank you. So, let’s go ahead and dive in. Um, Think Again really revolves around a concept and a subject that is so timely. When did you decide to begin writing? And what was the impetus for it?

Text on screen:

Adam Grant, Author of "Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t."

Adam Grant:

Well, I think—I think probably this book takes— took shape in my head about two decades ago, uh, when a group of high school seniors got into Harvard and they decided they wanted to go but they were afraid they wouldn’t have any friends. So they started running searches on the state-of-the-art technology at the time, which is America Online, and they—they found a few future classmates. They started a little email list and every week the email list grew. And by the time they got to college in the fall, they had connected more than an eighth of the entering Harvard freshmen class. And then they said, “You know what? We’re in Cambridge now. We all live together, we don’t need an online social network anymore.” And they shut it down. And five years later, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in the house next door.

So those students have lived with deep regret ever since. And I know because I was one of them. (laughs) Uh, and it was such a missed opportunity to think again. It never occurred to me that an online social network could be useful even if you live near people, that this was of interest to adults not just college students, and especially that I could be an entrepreneur not just a student. And I guess that was an early seed planted for this book. Look, I don’t know how to code, I never would’ve had the vision for what Facebook became, but it was definitely a—a missed opportunity to question assumptions and decisions that I made.

And then, I was teaching my first class, uh, at Wharton and a student pitched me Warby Parker. (laughs) I declined to invest in it. Uh, didn’t rethink those assumptions either, and ever since then, as an organizational psychologist, I have confronted the same problem among CEOs, among startup founders, that they’re too slow to let go of their past convictions. And I decided that, you know, when something frustrates me in my own life and I also watch leaders grapple with it, it’s something that we need to understand better.

Darin Oduyoye:

So it sounds like thinking again is both a mindset as well as a skil lset. Why do you think both of them are important?

Adam Grant:

I think they’re important because we live in a rapidly changing world. If the world stood still, right, once you became an expert you could basically freeze your beliefs and opinions. But in a dynamic world, you might be an expert for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. And that means that the longer that you hang on to your old beliefs, the more likely they are to become mental fossils that need to be discarded, but might be blinding you or holding you back. Um, I think in a—in a rapidly changing world, the faster you are to recognize you were wrong, the faster you can move toward getting it right. Which is, last time I checked, where we all wanna land.

Darin Oduyoye:

What would you say to, sort of, the smartest people in the room who may think that thinking again may actually constitute, you know, a weakness or may look like a flipflop? How do you coach them to expand beyond that viewpoint?

Adam Grant:

You know what I would say to all those people? Blockbuster, Blackberry, Kodak, Sears, Toys ‘R’ Us... Sh—should I keep going? (laughs) Right? None of those leaders were bad at thinking. Where they struggled was with rethinking. They fell in love with the way they’d always done things, and they didn’t question their visions and their strategies until it was too late. I—I do think we live in a world that mistakes confidence for competence, right? And assumes that when a leader expresses certainty and conviction, that that’s actually a signal that the leader has the right answers. I think we need to decouple those two things. What I’m looking for in leadership now, and I think COVID has been probably the most critical proof of this that we’ve seen, I’m looking for confident humility. Which is being secure enough in your strengths to acknowledge your weaknesses, being confident enough in your knowledge that you’re willing to admit what you don’t know.

 

And I think if—if you pick your most effective COVID leadership, whether we’re thinking about Adam Silver with the NBA or Jacinda Ardern with New Zealand, right? What you see in both of those leaders is a very quick recognition that we don’t know exactly how COVID’s gonna spread, we don’t know how deadly it is, we don’t know how to stop it, and our first responsibility is to protect the safety of our people. And so we’re gonna act very quickly but let everyone know that as we learn new information, we may be rethinking our policies and practices.

 

And, you know, in Adam’s case, right, the NBA was the first pro sports league to shut down in the U.S. A lot of people thought it was rash, but Adam said, “I don't have the answers yet. I’m confident we can figure it out together.” And they ended up then reconvening in a bubble with zero infections, right? That’s the kind of confident humility a leader saying, “Hey, you know what? I’m not sure yet what we’re gonna do, but I believe we’re gonna work this out together.” That invites everybody else to share their rethinking, and ultimately leads to better decisions.

Darin Oduyoye:

And so confident humility seems to be a little bit of trust your gut as well as testing your gut.

Adam Grant:

I think we need a little bit of both. Uh, I think trusting your gut is a decent place to end, but it’s a scary place to start. Because at the end of the day, your intuition is just subconscious pattern recognition, and what you have to test is whether the patterns you’ve detected today, which are usually built up in your past experience, are diagnostic of what the world is gonna look like tomorrow. And, I—you know I love the research that my colleague Phil Tetlock did on superforecasters: people who are unusually good at predicting what’s gonna happen tomorrow. And it turns out that one of things that they do differently from the rest of us is, most of us, we look at those patterns, we basically envision the future, and then we build a strategy around it. What the world’s best forecasters do is they will imagine eight or nine possible futures. They assign a probability to each of them, and they’ll then invest in the strategy that has the best chance at working in multiple of the likely futures. And I think that’s a great way to test your gut.

Darin Oduyoye:

But that can be challenging because oftentimes when you feel like your getting challenged, um, your immediate reflex is to go into defense. And so how do you get hot but not get mad, as you say in the book?

Adam Grant:

Well, I think the—the beginning of that is to think a little bit less like a preacher, prosecutor or politician and think a little bit more like a scientist. When we’re in preacher mode, we’re basically trying to defend our pre-existing views. When we’re in prosecutor mode, we’re attacking somebody else’s views. And when we’re in politician mode, we only listen to people if they already share our views. And it’s not surprising that if you’ve already concluded for any of those reasons that you’re right and other people are wrong, you are not gonna think again. I think thinking like a scientist is a great alternative. And Darin, when I say think like a scientist, I do not mean you need to own a microscope or buy a telescope. Although, personally I would enjoy it if you dressed up like Bill Nye from time to time. (laughs)

Darin Oduyoye:

(Laughs) I love it. But—but to that point, you actually say in your book that you approached, uh, writing this book thinking, leading like a scientist. And so why was that important to you?

Adam Grant:

Well, it’s important ’cause I’m a social scientist and the first principle of—of thinking like a scientist for me is, don’t let your ideas become your identity. That means I have to be as motivated to look for reasons why I might be wrong as for reasons why I must be right. It means that I have to listen to the ideas that make me think hard, not just the opinions that make me feel good. And especially, that I have to surround myself with people who challenge my thought process, not just the ones who already agree with my conclusions. And when writing the book, that meant that I had questions I was excited to explore, not answers I was determined to support. It meant that I had built a whole challenge network, a group of people, a group of thoughtful critics who I trusted to hold up a mirror and help me see my blind spots more clearly.

And so every time I finished a chapter, I would send it to about 20 people in this challenge network and I—I actually had to reach out to all of them first and say, “Hey, you may not know this, but I consider you a founding member of my challenge network.” And then I had to explain what a challenge network was. But I told them, “I know I haven’t always taken your criticism well. Sometimes I’ve gotten defensive, other times I’ve just been too dismissive ’cause I was on a path and your concerns seemed like a distraction. And I regret that. I know I need you to push me to think again. So if you ever hesitate because you’re afraid you’re gonna hurt our relationship or hurt my feelings, don’t. The only way you can hurt me is by not telling me the truth.” And they eviscerated drafts of this book. I rethought two chapters from scratch. I wrote a completely new third chapter that was not even on my radar. Um, and I’m so grateful that they were willing to invite me to think again as opposed to waiting until after the book was published, when it’s sorta too late.

Darin Oduyoye:

So that’s great. I mean... but oftentimes, you know, people have a reticence to actually rethinking or thinking again. I’m curious, you have little ones at home. Um, at what age do you think people start to resist, uh, you know, the concept or the idea of rethinking?

Adam Grant:

I would love to see better data on this, but my read of the evidence is that, at least in the U.S., um, kids start to form their identities around ages eight, nine and ten. Um, that’s—that’s an—an age when they start to feel like they have stable sense of self, right? Th—they’re clearer about their personality traits, their values. Uh, if you ask them who they are, they can start to tell you what their tendencies are. And I think that’s when people start to take beliefs as part of their identity, right?

I’m guessing if you teach a five-year-old, um, about the solar system and then tomorrow you say, hey, by the way, turns out Pluto’s not a planet after all, they’ll be totally fine with it. You take a ten-year-old and you say, hey, you know that model of the solar system we brought you? Turns out we were wrong, Pluto’s not a planet. And if they’re like me, they’re kind of mad. Like, wait a minute. Wait, y—Pluto’s not a planet. W— are we gonna declassify Earth next? Like, are there planets out there, you know, floating in the Kuiper Belt that maybe belong? Like, what even is a planet? Is this science? Who are you? You’ve just—y—you’ve shattered my whole worldview.

Um, and I—I think there is something about taking beliefs in as part of your identity, um, that happens around those formative ages that makes it harder then to open your mind. And that’s one of the reasons why we need to debunk, um, what might be misinformation or fake news early on because the longer people get attached to it, the more likely they are to get stuck to it.

Darin Oduyoye:

Absolutely. And so I know you talked about, you know, having your challenge network. What are other things that you’ve had to rethink in your life?

Adam Grant:

Well, my—my biggest lesson from writing this book is that I needed to practice what I teach. (laughs) Um, and it’s particularly around persuasion. So I have—I think my biggest vice in this framework of preacher, prosecutor, politician and scientist is thinking too much or arguing too much like a prosecutor. If—if I think you’re wrong, Darin, as a social scientist I feel it’s my moral responsibility to, you know, try to correct your views with the best data and logic. And I’ve actually been called a logic bully (laughs), because I’m just—I’m so motivated to bombard you with facts and reasons. And what I found is when I go into logic bully mode, and I’m—I’m the world’s worst prosecuting attorney, that motivates you to bring your best defense attorney to the case. Or to just withdraw from the conversation altogether.

So what I’ve learned to do moving forward, and I have to remind myself to do this, is to actually let people know in advance and say, “Hey, I have a bad habit of going into prosecuting attorney mode. Sometimes I even get called a logic bully. I don’t wanna be like that anymore. If you catch me doing that, please let me know.” And I’ve found that people will call me out, which is helpful ’cause then I can course correct before it’s too late, but also that they reciprocate. Often, people will say things like, “Oh, I can be the most stubborn person on Earth, and I don’t wanna be that way either.” And guess what, we’re both committing to be a little bit more open and curious now in the conversation.

And then, I’ve learned to ask just—instead of bombarding you with all my reasons, to just say, “Hey, Darin, here’s—here’s the data that I have. What evidence would change your mind?” And then I can learn from what your concerns are, and hopefully we can agree on some common standards.

Darin Oduyoye:

And so as you think about that, are there particular people or brands that you think are really excelling at rethinking?

Adam Grant:

You know, it’s funny. I think one of the most interesting projects that I’ve—I’ve seen during COVID is at Pixar, where they had a—a lot of big questions about how are we gonna keep our culture alive when we’re not in that building that was designed by Steve Jobs to facilitate creative collisions? And one of the projects they’ve been doing is they’ve asked every single person at Pixar, what is a moment when the culture was at its best? And then they’re analyzing the stories that come through to identify their culture carriers: The people who are disproportionately shaping everybody’s sense of our values and our norms and our identity by exemplifying those principles. And also by, you know, kind of gently letting people know when they’re not living up to them.

And then they’re also using those stories to reimagine and rethink what they want Pixar to stand for. To say, look, you know, we have an actual culture which is, you know, hopefully something we can be proud of. But we also have an aspirational culture and the stories people tell about what makes out culture special, that’s what we wanna work toward. And so let’s redefine our values around those stories so that then people can try to create more of those stories. And granted, it helps if you’re a world-class storytelling organization, right (laughs), to understand your culture through stories, but I think that’s a great example of a rethinking project to reimagine who you are and what you stand for.

Darin Oduyoye:

Obviously, the pandemic has caused many people to rethink their career choices, to rethink their life plans, um, and we’re still, of course, in this very unprecedented environment. Are there any sort of parameters you give people in terms of rethinking, but rethinking particularly as it pertains to major life changes?

Adam Grant:

Yeah. I think one of the things that—that I didn’t spend enough time on in the book is when to rethink. Uh, I think that (laughs), you know, if you rethought everything all the time, one, you probably have no consistency in your life, uh, and two, you—you might get just caught in an analysis paralysis trap where you’re overthinking everything. Although, you know, if you’re gonna err on one side, I would rather have you overthink your choices than to underthink them. But, I—I’ve started to draw a two-by-two framework that I’ve found helpful, and it really—it revolves around two questions. The first one is how inconsequential is the decision you’re about to make? And the second is how reversible is the decision?

So when you really wanna do your rethinking upfront is when you’re dealing with high stakes, irreversible decisions. It really matters, and it’s more of a locked door than a revolving door, so you can’t easily change your mind tomorrow. That’s when you wanna do your rethinking upfront. If you’re dealing with a lower-stakes or more reversible decision, you know what, it’s fine to just act on the best information you have and then be open to questioning what you know as you gain new information.

And then, the other thing I like to—to just encourage people to think a l—about a little bit in career choices is, um, how different are the options, really? Um, there are lots of options that are subjectively different, but so many that are not objectively better or worse. And I—I see this with my students all the time. They’re like agonizing over should I take the consulting job at Bain or BCG? And I have to tell them there is not an objectively better company here, right? Like you—like you—there is not an Olympic gold medal handed out to the person who chooses one company and only a silver to someone who chooses the other company. There is only, instead of an objective best, a subjective best, which is the best fit and the place where you can make the best contribution.

And so what you wanna do in that situation is identify, at most, your three core values that would determine what you’re looking for in this job, in this culture. And then try to weigh both organizations on those and figure out which one might be a better fit and a better place for you—you to add value. And I think if more people looked at the decision that way, it would get a little bit easier.

Darin Oduyoye:

We definitely love your book Think Again. I think it’s one of the best ones out there, and it is a must-read for us for this summer. I’m curious, what’s on your summer must-read list?

Adam Grant:

Oh. High Conflict by Amanda Ripley, for sure. How to get out of all these toxic arguments we’re having and depolarize our conversations. Uh, I thought it was a brilliant combination of data and stories. And then, the other book that—uh, that is brand new that I thought was outstanding is Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, who got me to rethink my stance on time management and convince me that, in fact, time management is a counterproductive exercise, and it may make you less efficient and also lead you to lead a slightly less meaningful life than you did before.

Darin Oduyoye:

Wow, interesting. Well, I can’t wait to check out both of those two books. Adam, thank you so much for your enlightening perspectives, for inspiring us and always encouraging us to think outside of the box and to think again, as you say. This is a...great conversation.

Adam Grant:

Such a privilege to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for asking such thoughtful questions. Thank you for choosing Think Again. And if I could just end with one closing piece of advice, um, it’s that we actually don’t need more advice. (laughs) It’s that, if you’re trying to figure out how to rethink a situation, find somebody else who’s struggling with that situation, give them some guidance, and you will generally find the advice you give to others is the advice you need to take for yourself.

Darin Oduyoye:

Perfect. Perfect way to close.

On screen:

Mr. Oduyoye addresses the viewer.

Darin Oduyoye:

And thank all of you for joining us today. We hope that you’ll join us for our next installment of the 2021 J.P. Morgan’s Summer Reading List Series.

On screen:

A photo appears of the book, "Think Again."

Text on screen:

J.P.Morgan - Summer Reading List 2021. JPMorgan.com/readinglist. Hashtag SRL 2021.

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