Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, best-selling author and the top-rated professor at one of the world’s most prestigious business schools for seven years running. Grant’s influential book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” makes the case for an outsider approach to problem solving, drawn from years of his own academic research, the groundwork of others and interviews with famous freethinkers. In this episode, Cardiff Garcia sits down with Grant to examine how organizations can encourage a culture of originality, and how his thoughts have shifted since the book’s publication in 2016.
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, best-selling author and the top-rated professor at one of the world’s most prestigious business schools for seven years running. Grant’s influential book “Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World” makes the case for an outsider approach to problem solving, drawn from years of his own academic research, the groundwork of others and interviews with famous freethinkers. In this episode, Cardiff Garcia sits down with Grant to examine how organizations can encourage a culture of originality, and how his thoughts have shifted since the book’s publication in 2016.
Cardiff: My name is Cardiff Garcia, and this is The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class.
Hello, and welcome to the show. In each episode, we are introducing you to a bestselling book that everyone in the world of business can learn something from. We are gonna hear how the author’s advice has evolved since they published their work, and what they would write for their next chapter.
Today, we are speaking with Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and the author of Originals: How Non-conformists Move the World. In this book from 2016, Adam makes the case for the outsider’s approach to problem solving, and he does so drawing from his own original research in combination with the research of others and conversations he’s had throughout the years. Adam has quite a resume. He’s a five time #1 New York Times bestselling author and the top rated professor at the Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania for 7 years running.
And I invited Adam on to the show to talk through what we can all learn from Originals, and how his thoughts on what it means to be a nonconformist have evolved since the book came out back in 2016.
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Cardiff: Adam Grant, welcome to The Next Chapter.
Adam: Thank you.
Cardiff: All right, let's start with this. You define originality as follows. It involves introducing and advancing an idea that's relatively unusual within a particular domain, and that has the potential to improve it.
That's a direct quote from the book. And I'm curious about the phrase “relatively unusual” as opposed to outright new. So can you kind of take us through why that's the way you define original.
Adam: There's a great psychologist. Carl Wyke who wrote that creativity is putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations. And we see that all around us. Right? How many innovations are, are basically just taking an idea from one domain and applying it to another? What's the iPhone, it's just like a computer with a phone attached to it and shrunk.
And I think that too often people count themselves out as unoriginal and they dismiss ideas as unoriginal because they seem similar to something that's been done before. But I think that whether it's new to the domain is, is the real question. And so, if you're bringing something that's been tested in, you know, in one world to another one world to another one, you've got a contribution to make there and we should give you credit for it.
Cardiff: You write that one of the big hindrances to becoming an original is, and this is a phrase that you use a lot, achievement motivation. And here's what you write.
Quote, “The more you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success.” And this is fascinating to me because. A lot of us, at least in theory, do want to be original.
So can you kind of just elaborate a bit on that tension between wanting to be safe and wanting to achieve as it is conventionally defined versus wanting to also be original and overturn those very same conventions.
Adam: Yeah, I see it all the time with my students. We measure students on whether they can master the way things have always been done. So if you ACE my test, you have demonstrated extreme excellence in regurgitating, something that's already known and understood. We don't put nearly as much emphasis on evaluating the originality of people's ideas and thoughts.
And what that means over time is that students learn to suppress their originality in favor of basically performing the test. And there's some evidence that this can be problematic. There's a classic study, for example, of highly creative architects, looking at the Frank Lloyd Wrights of their generation, and one of the clearest differentiator between them and their technically skilled, but less original peers is the most creative architects tended to have a spikier grades in school.
They got A's in classes that interested them. Sometimes they were lackluster or even just bombed in classes that they thought weren't that exciting. And they basically learned to follow their own intrinsic motivation. Well in a world of pressure to achieve that doesn't happen, right? Everybody learns to become the straight A student and basically define their success in terms of conforming to expectations, as opposed to doing something original and defying those expectations.
And over time as the fear of failure grows, that means that if you take a risk and do something new, you might embarrass yourself or you might tank your career. Whereas if you do what's already worked for you and other people, you can repeat a predictable success, and over time, that means your comfort zone shrinks and you stop stretching yourself.
Cardiff: Yeah. I was intrigued to learn also that often people who are afraid of being original in a truly risky environment, like the workplace or in school end up finding surface ways of looking like their original. You know, they'll wear funny clothes or a big floppy hat or bright shoes or whatever, where they're giving the appearance of being original while not actually really making original contributions.
But the reason I was intrigued by this is that it does suggest that we all yearn for it. We all want to be original, but there are obstacles in our way. And that's what makes a lot of us shrink away from it.
Adam: You know, there's a lot of uncertainty when it comes to trying new ideas and it's hard to predict whether they're going to work. The patterns that were relevant to success in the past are not going to determine what's effectively original in the future. And it means that you have to be comfortable with a certain degree of risk.
Now that doesn't mean you have to like risk. This was another surprise for me. I've always stereotyped great entrepreneurs as, as daredevils. The kinds of people who leap before they look. Well, it turns out those are the failed entrepreneurs, not the successful ones. The successful ones, actually don't like taking risk, but they think about their lives a little bit like a stock portfolio where, you know, you're not going to get returns if you just put all your money in a bunch of boring, predictable mutual funds, right? You want a balanced portfolio where you have some riskier bets that are higher potential return and they tend to treat their careers the same way.
And empirically there was a nationally representative study of American entrepreneurs showing that the ones who started their companies as a side project in their spare time were 33% less likely to fail than the ones who just quit their jobs and went all in. And I think this is so relevant during the great resignation, right? Where we've had people walking away from, from jobs at a higher rate than, than certainly expected pre pandemic and possibly at record levels in a bunch of industrialized countries.
And I can see the appeal of that, right? And of course, if you are underpaid, if you are in a toxic culture, if you hate your work and you have the luxury, you should run for the hills. But I think what this evidence suggests is that actually there's a case to be made for a little bit of the dabbling as a hobby.
And then that gives me more freedom to try out lots of things with that balanced risk portfolio.
Cardiff: Do you think that we culturally fetishize risk-taking of a certain kind because we impose retroactively the wrong narrative? Because what you're saying here, and what you write in the book is that the people we think of as these daring risk takers are actually more accurately described as risk mitigators.
So yes, they're taking big risks, but they find ways to make that risk more palatable in their own lives and more appropriate to their own circumstances.
Adam: I don't think you have to like risk. I think you have to learn how to manage it. So, every entrepreneur that I've had a chance to work with or advise or invest in or study, has had moments where they know, they're exposing themselves to the possibility of failure and the Silicon valley ethos on this is celebrate failure!
I don't know about you Cardiff. I don't want to throw a party after I've failed. Right? I'm like, how do I become a bear and hibernate for the next six months until it's spring and this whole thing wears off? That's just not realistic. I think what we need to do is we need to normalize failure.
We need to say, if you never fail, you're not aiming high enough. You're not stretching yourself enough. You're not taking enough risks. And that means, you know, concretely, I've actually tried to apply this to my own life, going into the year, I expect to have at least three projects that fail. And if I don't have any failures, it means I'm falling into that achievement motivation trap of I'm just repeating the things I already know how to do well.
And I think that whether you're starting a company or launching a career as an artist, right, the, the same principle holds true. That if you, if you look at your projects, like a portfolio, you do not want to have a hundred percent of them succeed. And I don't know what the magic number is. I don't know whether it's 70 or 80 or 90.
It is not a hundred.
Cardiff: So you are somebody who publishes a lot in, in your area of expertise and your research. You also publish books.
You have a podcast, you presumably do a lot of speaking engagements like this one. And I found a brief profile of you in a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport. And it suggests a way in which you yourself are kind of an original in the way that you go about your work. You batch all of your work both according to the month where you say, this is what I'm going to get done. But also according to your semesters, where you try to like, make sure that you isolate your own time to get work done. And during that time you can't, you know, you can't be bothered, you won't do anything else. And then later you sort of open up your time for something else that you focus on. But I'm kind of curious to just hear a little bit more about how you are productive and in your own kind of personal approach to efficiency and to productivity.
Adam: I think the first thing I would say is you don't have to do everything at once, right? Computers are pretty good at parallel processing. Humans are serial processors.
When I started out my career, I just spent a certain amount of time doing research in order to produce original ideas and publish them.
And I also had to spend a good chunk of time not just in the classroom, but also I knew I was going to be spending a bunch of time in office hours. I was going to be helping students make their career choices, negotiate their job offers, recommending them for grad school. So what I did was I divided the week into basically, maker days versus manager days. We all have things that we make in our jobs. We also all have things that we manage and those two don't mix that well. Right? So the days that I was on stage, teaching a class and then sitting with students in office hours, especially as an introvert, I was getting overstimulated and taxed. And I found myself not having the same creative energy, but on the days where, where I was able to wake up in the morning, analyze some data, read some articles, write a paper. I could get into that zone of flow and completely focus. And I think the world of work has changed to allow many more people to divide their time this way. Right?
And I'm amazed that it's taken us this long to get there because for all of human history, there has been value in, you know, in managerial and collaboration time. There's also been value in independent creative time and I don't think we've done a good job of segmenting the two apart.
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Cardiff: I want to turn now to some ways in which organizations and leaders who run them can not just tolerate originals, but actually encourage them and take advantage of the ideas that originals inside their organizations can come up with. And I want to start with a quote that you include in your book from Francis Ford Coppola, the film director. He says, “The way to come to power is not always to merely challenge the establishment, but first make a place in it, and then challenge and double cross the establishment.” Unquote. Now the phrase double-cross might be a little strong in some sense, but that there is the kernel of a really good idea in there, and that you also flesh out in the book. So can you kind of discuss this idea of how originals inside an organization can actually convince people that their maybe crazy sounding ideas are actually ideas that will benefit the group?
Adam: Well, the, the common mistake is that people join and you're 23 years old and you're telling your boss that the entire company is being run wrong. Right? And you have the audacity to know what the vision and strategy should be when you've been there for three days. And that's a little bit of a caricature, but it's not far off from what I've seen some of my students do..
Cardiff: No. Um, I'm pretty sure you read my diary from when I was 23. And that's exactly what I did. I remember that. And I remember how the idea was greeted. Yeah. Please.
Adam: Yeah. So it's not to say that people without experience are always wrong, just that they're not always aware of the complexity of, you know, of the issues that people in power are facing. And sometimes they also don't know how to package their ideas in a way that will overcome some of the limitations to reach the potential of them.
And so one of the ways you navigate this is to do what Deborah Myerson and her colleagues have called becoming a tempered radical, where you take your radical idea and you kind of put it in a Trojan horse, you kind of sneak it in that way.
Cardiff: Yeah, it strikes me that this is the opposite of the person who is afraid of making original contributions, but then outwardly dresses in a funky way to just appear original. Here what you're saying is have genuinely original ideas and things that are going to overturn the way things are being done, but actually package it in a business suit and a suitcase where you just kind of, you fit in.
You'll look like everybody else at the company, in the sense of how you present yourself and whatnot. But actually you're doing that to establish credibility so that when you present your ideas, they have a better chance of being absorbed. Is that part of what you're getting at here?
Adam: Yeah, I think you captured that very nicely. And I might add that sometimes you score points by acknowledging the limitations yourself before other people call them out. Other people are going to see the limitations of your ideas. You might as well get credit for having the humility to recognize them and the integrity to admit them.
And as you know, one of my favorite examples of this is an entrepreneur of Rufus Griscom who had this startup idea called Babble. That was going to tell parents the truth about what it's like to have a small child who takes over your life. And he went to pitch it and he did something I had never seen an entrepreneur do.
He said to investors, here are the three reasons you shouldn't buy Babble. And he got several million dollars in funding that year. And then two years later, he went to sell his company and he included a slide in his pitch deck that said, here are the five reasons you should not buy Babble. And I will say these investors and executives were very confused.
They're like, I don't think you understand the point of a pitch. You're supposed to tell us why we should invest and spend money, not why we shouldn't. But he ended up selling his company for $40 million with that pitch. And I think part of this is a marketing gimmick, right? He kind of, he surprises you.
You're intrigued. You're like what? I wonder what this guy's going to say next? But also he's making it harder for audiences to think of their own objections. And the harder they have to work to find the flaws, the less flawed they think his idea is. It's also a strong signal of confidence. If he's willing to tell you what's wrong with the company, there's gotta be an awful lot right with it.
And I think we were all taught to do this in debate at some point in school. Anticipate, you know, the weaknesses of your argument and address the counterarguments and that makes you more credible. But we forget to do it when we're pitching new ideas, because we think we think they're fragile and we don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot, but I think it's actually better.
Cardiff: You also mentioned that it's flattering to others when we go to them and we say, Hey, I need your advice. I need your help. And so when you present yourself or your ideas as being flawed, in some sense, you're also conscripting others into helping you fix those flaws and to finding solutions to what's wrong.
And I have to imagine that that's quite powerful because as I also learned in your book, people are psychologically primed to be skeptical when they're aware that they are trying to be persuaded. So if you go into a pitch or you go into a meeting and you try to start persuading people by saying, here's, what's great about this idea and you minimize the downside. People are psychologically gonna start instinctively, I guess, finding the flaws themselves. Whereas if you go and you say, Hey, this is what's wrong. I think it's a good idea. I think maybe it could work, but I need some help. And now suddenly the people who might've been otherwise skeptical are on your side, they're on your team and you might gather some momentum that way for getting your original ideas accepted.
Adam: It's interesting how that happens because sometimes the audience just wants to feel and look smart and the way that they do that is by showing that they can, you know, they can find all of the warts. Well, if you already called those out, how are they going to look smart? They're going to look smart by solving the problems you've just pointed out.
I, I've actually, trained some students to do this. I've, I've encouraged and coached some entrepreneurs to do this, uh, to say, you know what? I'm, I'm excited about this idea. Here are the drawbacks I see and I'm just in the early phases of figuring out how to tackle them. And I have watched venture capitalists say, oh, that problem is totally solvable.
I already know how to do it. And then walk through a solution and talk themselves into, the solvability of the problem. And I don't think any of this is effective if you do it manipulatively, right? The evidence on advice seeking, for example, suggests that that people see right through it.
When you say, hey, like here's something I really want you to do that you don't want to do. I'd love your advice about how to get you to do the thing that you know what to do. And you're like, mmm, nope. I know what's happening here. If you go in genuinely wanting to learn from the person, I am stuck on this problem.
I haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet. I know you have a lot of expertise and experience that I don't. How would you approach this? Right. You're going to get sincere engagement and response, and both you're going to learn and you're going to increase the probability that the other person is willing to give your idea a shot.
Cardiff: Adam. Do you think that an organization can have too many originals inside of it? Like, is there an appropriate balance between originals and people who are there perhaps primarily to execute on ideas to get things done? Because one thing that comes to mind is just that if everybody inside an organization is constantly trying to sort of undo the way things are being done already, then it might result in some chaos.
So I'm just, I'm wondering if there's like some happy tension or a happy medium inside an organization, or if really everybody should be constantly applying some of the ideas in your book for how to be original?
Adam: I think it's an important question. I would love to run into an organization that has too much original thinking because the vast majority of what I see is the opposite.
Cardiff: Haven't found it yet?
Adam: No. I mean, I've, I've scoured the earth, like looking for a place that's too creative or where people, you know, they, they have too many good ideas.
Right? And you could imagine that I have seen organizations that lack alignment or that struggle to execute, but that's, that's the absence of a separate skillset, right? It's not the excess of originality that's plaguing them, it's, it's a deficiency of the ability to prioritize ideas and then put them into action.
And so I would say the goal here isn't to reduce originality it's to, to increase the excellence with which you capitalize on your most promising original ideas, which means you need a discipline around ideas, selection and evaluation, around idea implementation. Right? So much of doing requires what you might think of as, as little C rather than big C creativity and I think that anybody who lives in the world of implementing ideas knows that it takes problem solving skills and therefore takes the ability to generate new ideas in order to be good at executing it.
Cardiff: One final question about managers and leaders inside of organizations. And this question is about getting feedback. The best place you write to get feedback is not from, you know, a panel survey of potential customers or from managers, but from other fellow creative types, even if they're not inside the organization.
Can you explain how that works?
Adam: Yeah, this, this is another Justin Berg study. And it turns out the worst predictor of the success of your creative idea is you.
Uh, and on average, the creators were just overconfident about their own ideas.
Cardiff: Yeah, we love our ideas. Yeah. We're going to filter all the bad stuff out.
Adam: This is mine. How could it not be amazing? The next worst group of predictors though, was the managers for the opposite reason, instead of being too positive on original ideas, they were too negative.
And I think part of that is that managers become prisoners of their own prototypes. They over-index on what's worked in the past. Outsiders are great sources of feedback.
Well, who's most likely to be an outsider? A creative peer, somebody who's at your level, but working on something completely different, um, they have some distance unlike you. But unlike the managers, they are invested in seeing new ideas take off by default. And instead of looking for reasons to say, no, they look for reasons to say yes and maybe, and I think that that means we should let peers do much more evaluating of, of new ideas, but also we can teach managers to think more like creative peers and Justin found there's a five minute exercise that opens manager's minds.
All you need to do is you get them out of an evaluative mindset and into a creative mindset. So before they judge somebody else's idea, you ask them to spend five minutes brainstorming in a different domain about their own ideas, and that gets them into the frame that you want for seeing possibilities, as opposed to crushing possibilities.
Cardiff VO: You’re listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. When we come back, I’ll ask Adam Grant about how his thinking has changed in the time since Originals was published.
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Cardiff: I want to move on now to the next chapter, part of the show, which is what's happened in the time since originals came out in 2016. Now obviously you've been doing a podcast all those years. And so, you've also just obviously kept up with the research that's come out in the time since it was published.
Cardiff: So I'm wondering if there's any bit of research that's been released since then that made you think about the concepts in originals in a different way.
Adam: Yeah, there's been a lot, actually. So in my most recent book think again, I stumbled into a framework that in retrospect would have been extremely helpful for originals. And I really haven't done much to connect the dots yet. So let's, let's do it here. This, this is the next chapter in some ways.
Cardiff: Yeah, here we go.
Adam: So my colleague, Phil Tetlock originally put part of this framework on the map for me when he observed that too many people spend too much of their time thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians.
And the basic premise is that when you're in preacher mode, you're trying to proselytize your ideas. When you're in prosecutor mode, you're attacking somebody else's ideas. And when you're in politician mode, you don't even bother to listen to people unless they already agree with your ideas. My favorite alternative to those three mindsets is to think more like a scientist and Cardiff when I say, think like a scientist.
I do not mean that you need to own a microscope or buy a telescope. Although I did enjoy it if we had Bill Nye day on occasion.
Cardiff: Why not.
Adam: I just mean don't let your ideas become your identity. Recognize that every opinion you hold is a hypothesis waiting to be tested. Every decision you make is an experiment where you forgot a control group.
Like he ran an AB test, but there was no B. And what I love is, I've done some research recently on I'm thinking like a scientist. It motivates people to experiment and iterate a lot more, which is good for learning and good for original thinking instead of going in to prove themselves, right they go in looking to prove themselves wrong. And that makes it a lot easier to not only tolerate failure, but to reframe it and say, how do I create a system whereby we run smart experiments? Which is, we bet on good processes, regardless of whether we think they're going to have a good outcome or not.
Which is the opposite of what most workplaces do, right. They reward people for good outcomes, even when the process was bad, which is called luck. And I do not want to try to repeat that. And I think that I wish I'd had this framework when I was writing Originals, because the best original thinkers that I've, I've advised and observed up close are the ones who think like scientists.
So many great original thinkers seem to be these pictures of, they seem to be paragons of conviction and certainty, but the way they got there often was by running many different experiments and doing lots of trial and error to figure out what worked.
The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most. They have the most bad ideas because they are the ones who try the most ideas. And that gives them a better shot at ultimately doing something that's worthwhile.
And this is, this is something you see if you study great musicians or inventors as well, or artists across domains of originality. It's not that their average is better, it's that their peaks are higher. You take more shots on goal you're much more likely to make one of them. And I think that this is something people get wrong a lot about originality. They think that like, I have to come up with the one perfect idea. No, you have to try many potentially good ideas.
Cardiff: One of the topics that you've covered in your podcast work-life, uh, within the last couple of years is loneliness. And I have to imagine that this topic has become increasingly important in the last couple of years, precisely because of the pandemic, which forced a lot of us to go through periods of isolation and loneliness, but which I also suspect would have an especially poignant meaning for originals who often spend some time, you know, trying to go against the grain, trying to convince others of new ways of doing things. And that seems to me, like it can be a lonely thing to do. So I'm just kind of curious to hear more about what you've learned about loneliness in the last few years and how you think that might apply to originals.
Adam: Oh, that's a fun question. I think that, a lot of times when people feel lonely, you know, there are two ways to respond to that. One is, uh, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and, and fuels that vicious spiral where you say, you know, I'm excluded, nobody cares about me.
You withdraw, you get lonelier, you get depressed and you're trapped in a sad situation. And some people responded that way. We saw many other people say I'm feeling lonely. That is an impetus to reach out. I need to get connected with people. I need to reconnect with people I've lost touch with.
And the, the data on reconnection are fascinating to me. There's some evidence to suggest that most people avoid reconnection because they think it's gonna be awkward. And they'll say like, well, I don't want to talk to like my dormant ties. Those ties are dormant for a reason! But actually, there's not a good reason.
We didn't mean to fall out of touch. We moved. We got busy. We had kids. We changed jobs. 93% of people in one study enjoyed the experience of reconnecting. It also turns out to be a great source of new ideas. And this is the connection to originality. Your weak ties, the people you don't know.
Well, give you more original ideas than your strong ties who bring you a lot of redundant knowledge. They know the same people and the same stuff. They tend to, to reinforce what you already know. The weaker ties traveled in different circles. They learn different things. They open up access to different worlds.
And so I think the, the much shorter answer to your question would have been, in the loneliness of COVID one of the real sources of original ideas for people, a new job lead, a thought on a new hobby to take up a way to survive while your kids are doing online school, which is not fun if you have a kindergartener, especially, those came from dormant ties. Those ideas came from people picking up the phone or shooting a text, or writing a message on social media to somebody they had not talked to in a year or a decade and getting back in touch and having all kinds of new ideas to share. And I think sometimes loneliness is the prompt that you need to say, hey, I'm feeling isolated, I need to get back in touch.
Cardiff: That's a beautiful answer. And I think that's a, that's just a lovely connection that I hadn't made in the past.
You described your podcast, Work-life, in the following way, quote, “We spend a quarter of our lives and our jobs. This show is about making all that time worth your time.” Unquote. Which is very different by the way, I should say, then the concept of work versus life balance, you're saying that work is a part of life and we should find a way to make it worth our while.
And I think something that really deeply threatens it and perhaps increasingly so in the last few years is burnout. So why don't we close there? Uh second last question, what are some good ideas for combating burnout that we've learned throughout this pandemic experience?
Adam: If you look at the new research on zoom fatigue, it turns out that some of it is caused just by sitting still way too close to your computer screen.
And if you give people permission to get up and, or back up, all of a sudden they don't flinch at an oversized virtual head staring at them, and it re-energizes them. But there's also some interesting evidence to suggest that the process of trying to send and receive glitchy facial and body signals is a problem for us.
Constantly misreading other people's facial expressions. Their arm movements, um, and also wondering if you're being misperceived. And so some people have dealt with that by saying, all right, I'm turning off the self view, which we should have figured out a lot earlier Cardiff because you would not in your right mind, go to work in a room full of mirrors all day.
Cardiff: Yeah.
Not good for anybody's mental health and yet a lot of people have done that over, you know, Teams or whatever platform they're using, but there's even evidence to suggest that we don't need to see the other person, either that if we just agree camera's off altogether, exhaustion goes down, engagement goes up. And that's especially true for women and newcomers, which are two groups that unfairly have to worry more about their appearance and their image.
And I'm not saying the cameras should be off all the time. If you're presenting, if you're in a large group, if you're meeting someone for the first time, of course, there can be value in connecting face-to-face if it's a small group and I know you, well, I don't need to look at you all the time. I know what you look like, and it takes some of that pressure off and reducing strain is something we all need.
So I think we need norms around when cameras need to be on and when it's okay to shut them off.
Cardiff: Thanks so much for this chat, Adam, and I've had a great time and I want to close with this final question. What are some ways that you yourself want to be more of an original in the future, or alternatively, are there ways that you recognize you could be more original, and that you're frustrated that you haven't been, and so you're going to pursue them now.
Adam: Well, I think I would say yes to both, um, and maybe I'll combine them and say, one of my biggest barriers to originality is I always want to know what's been said before when I tackle a problem. And sometimes that creates what psychologists call cognitive entrenchment. Where I take for granted assumptions that I don't even realize that making, instead of questioning them and you know, it's kind of amusing when you read the studies and I'll look at them and say, oh yeah, highly experienced accountants?
They're slow at adapting to new tax laws because they're so used to the way they've always done things. Or expert bridge players, if you change the rules up on them, they play like novices because they're all familiar strategies don't work so well. And then I realize, oh wait, that’s me. Like why did I spend two weeks reading every study that's ever been done on this topic before I formulated my own thoughts on it?
What I should've done is formulated my own thoughts first and then juxtapose them against the body of knowledge to figure out where I had something that might be new, where my experience conflicted with the evidence and where there might be an opportunity to reconcile these different points of view.
And so what I'm trying to do now is resist the impulse to look to the existing body of information before I begin brainstorming. And, I don't want to waste my time, I don't want to reinvent a wheel, but so often, once you've learned something it's hard to unlearn it. And so it's, you know, it's, it's worth spending even the 10 minutes to jot down my own thoughts on a topic before I look up what's known and that applies to all of us.
Before you go to Wikipedia, before you do the Google search, before, you know, you ask everyone on social media, formulate your own hypothesis and then see how, what you think tracks with what's known.
Cardiff: It's like the professional version of not watching the movie trailer or reading the reviews before you go see the movie, just show up.
Adam: Yes!
Cardiff: You don't know what's going to happen and have your own authentic reaction. Then you can go check out all the other stuff. Right?
Adam: Yes, no spoilers.
Cardiff: Adam Grant. Thanks so much for being on The Next Chapter.
This was great.
Adam: Thanks for having me. Thoroughly enjoyed it.
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Cardiff VO: You’ve been listening to The Next Chapter by American Express Business Class. Special thanks to Adam Grant for coming on the show today. And please tune in to our next episode where I’ll speak with Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters.
Priya Parker:Groups have their own life. They're complex beings, they’re like amoebas. And it’s developing a toolkit to start understanding which groups need what tools in order to have a breakthrough.
Cardiff VO: Be sure to follow or subscribe on whatever app you may be using right now. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please also leave us a review. And thank you for listening.