Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

by Adam M. Grant

If multiple credible supporters believe in us, it’s probably time to believe them. If ignorant naysayers don’t believe in us, it might be time to prove them wrong. And when our faith falters, it’s worth remembering what we’re fighting for.

Some powerful evidence on the impact of opportunity comes from Raj Chetty—the economist behind the research we covered earlier linking the character skills we learn in kindergarten to our future success. Chetty and his colleagues were interested in how opportunity shapes who ends up innovating. They reasoned that some kids would grow up in environments that gave them special access to resources. When they linked federal income tax returns with patent records for more than a million Americans, they found an alarming result. People raised in the top 1 percent of family income were ten times more likely to become inventors than people from families below the median income.

The effect of opportunity is more than just a correlation, and it goes beyond wealth—it lies in geography too. Some zip codes are hotbeds of invention, and landing in them has an impact.

Role models do matter, and underrepresented groups often have a hard time finding them.

Instead of only looking for geniuses where we expect to find them, we can reach humanity’s greatest potential by cultivating the genius in everyone.

Just as Michelangelo thought there was an angel locked inside every piece of marble, I think there is a brilliant child locked inside every student. —Marva

Beginning in 2000, every three years the OECD would invite 15-year-olds from dozens of countries to take the PISA—a standardized test of their math, reading, and science skills. Their scores would reveal which nation had the most knowledgeable young minds—and thus the best schools.

But when the results came in, people were stunned. The highest-performing country wasn’t anywhere in Asia. It also wasn’t one of the usual education superpowers in the Americas or Europe—not Canada, the United Kingdom, or Germany. It wasn’t Australia or South Africa either. The winner was none other than the unheralded underdog country of Finland.

As of 1960, 89 percent of Finns didn’t make it past ninth grade. By the 1980s, in international comparisons of graduation rates as well as math and science Olympiad performances, Finnish students were still mediocre.

Today, Finnish teachers have a great deal of autonomy to use their judgment to help students grow. They’re expected to stay up-to-date on the latest research—and to educate and coach one another on applying it. And they don’t have to waste time teaching to the test.[*] These reforms set the stage for Finnish schools to build cultures of opportunity. By placing such a premium on teaching, they instilled the assumption that everyone is teachable.

To discover and develop the potential in each of their students, teachers make a fundamental assumption that education should be tailored to individuals. Surprisingly, that doesn’t require small classes; a typical Finnish teacher has around 20 students. It involves a set of practices for personalized learning.

It’s common for Finnish elementary schoolers to have the same teacher for multiple grades—not just two years in a row, but up to six straight years. Instead of just specializing in their subjects, teachers also get to specialize in their students.

I was lucky to benefit from looping. My middle school piloted a program to keep students with the same two core teachers for all three years. When I struggled with spatial visualization in math, Mrs. Bohland didn’t question my aptitude. Having seen me ace a year of algebra, she knew I was an abstract thinker and taught me to use equations to identify the dimensions of shapes before drawing them in 3D.

Yet looping isn’t the norm in American schools. In North Carolina between 1997 and 2013, 85 percent of schools didn’t do any looping at all, and just 3 percent of students got the same teacher two years in a row.

But in America, students in many under-resourced schools don’t have access to the individualized support they need. The majority of states don’t even comply with federal special education laws, let alone have the personnel to offer free tutoring and support to students who fall behind or face language barriers.

In Finland, every student has access to personalized help and support. It starts at the top: Finnish school leaders aren’t merely administrators. They’re responsible for checking in on the progress and well-being of every single student. And they’re expected to spend at least part of their week teaching classes of their own.[*]

Every school in Finland has a student welfare team. Along with each student’s classroom teacher, the team typically includes a psychologist, a social worker, a nurse, a special education teacher, and the school principal.

This support system is like a social safety net for students. In most cases, it’s an alternative to holding students back when they’re struggling.

During their first nine years of school, about 30 percent of Finnish students receive extra assistance.

Norway—Finland’s Scandinavian neighbor—has fallen short. Norway’s education system doesn’t do nearly as much early intervention when students show initial signs of stumbling. In America, some states have started to improve in this area: Alabama and West Virginia have raised high school graduation rates by intervening early to support freshmen whose grades have suffered in the transition from middle school to high school.

“The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland” was written by an American elementary school teacher, Tim Walker, who had burned out after struggling to plan lessons that could make his students light up. His wife was from Finland, so they decided to move there for a fresh start.

When he visited a public kindergarten, he could hardly believe his eyes. He expected to see students sitting at their desks doing worksheets to build their cognitive skills, like in the United States. Over time, American kindergarten has become more like first grade. Students spend more time on spelling, writing, and math—and less time on dinosaurs and space, arts and music, and free play. How else could they get ahead on core competencies and be ready to ace standardized tests in seven years?

Kindergartners only sat at their desks for spelling, writing, and math one day a week.[*] Each lesson was a maximum of 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of recess.

In Finnish early education, students spend most of their time in play. Mondays might be dedicated to games and field trips; Fridays may be for songs and activity stations.

Teachers weren’t catering to kindergartners’ so-called learning styles. They were giving them ample time to explore their individual interests. “Why?” some Americans might ask. Because Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun.

Research in the United Kingdom reveals that students who enjoy school at age six go on to earn higher standardized test scores at sixteen—even after controlling for their intelligence and socioeconomic status. A refrain among Finnish teachers captures it nicely: “The work of a child is to play.”

Finland’s new programs, Me & MyCity. The initiative has won international awards for educational innovation and promoting entrepreneurial thinking. It’s a powerful example of deliberate play for older students. Think of it as the middle school equivalent of running an imaginary ice cream shop. Students apply for the roles that pique their interest, and then interview with their teacher for the jobs they want. Me & MyCity was such a hit that the majority of Finland’s sixth graders now participate in it.

They told me that although experiential learning programs are a start, there’s another key ingredient for intrinsic motivation. “Reading is the basic skill for all subjects,” Kari explained. “If you don’t have the motivation to read, you can’t study any other subject.” Cultivating the desire to read nourishes individual interests.

The Finnish Reading Center recently found that over half of parents felt they weren’t reading enough to their kids. They started giving a free bag of books to every baby born in Finland.

Reading is a gateway to opportunity: it opens the door for children to keep learning.

Research reveals that when students get to pick their own books and read in class, they become more passionate about reading.

In Finland, when Nelli Louhivuori saw her elementary schoolers languish through reading, she invented a new kind of recess. Every Monday, she took her students on a little field trip to “library recess.” There wasn’t a set list of books—they got to choose their own. They got to know the librarians—who in turn got to know their interests and started stopping by Nelli’s classroom with teasers on relevant new releases.

In America, research shows that students at high-achieving high schools are clinically depressed and anxious at rates three to seven times above national norms. In

Right now, what we know is that Finland is the best in the world at helping students progress without monopolizing their time, wreaking havoc on their lives, or making them hate school.

Some other eyes will look around, and find the things I’ve never found. —Malvina Reynolds

But that’s not what the leaders of the Chilean mine rescue did. Instead of merely relying on an exclusive group of established experts, they built a system to bring a broader and deeper pool of ideas and intelligence to the surface. When they made their first voice contact with the miners, it was thanks to a $10 innovation from a small-time entrepreneur. The eventual rescue was made possible by a series of suggestions from a 24-year-old engineer who wasn’t even part of the core team. Maximizing group intelligence is about more than enlisting individual experts—and it involves more than merely bringing people together to solve a problem.

I looked through the window and saw a disheveled giant of a man outside, tall enough to be an NBA forward. He paced back and forth, holding a pipe in one hand and scanning a stack of notes in the other. When he lumbered into the classroom, he didn’t walk us through the syllabus. He announced that he had failed our country. It was September 13, 2001. The professor’s name was Richard Hackman, and he was the world’s leading expert on teams.

He’d found that in most cases, teamwork failed to make the dream work. It was more likely to be a nightmare . . . as anyone who ever did a group project in school can attest. Most teams were less than the sum of their parts. For several years, Richard had been studying how to improve collaboration within the major U.S. intelligence agencies. He told us that although analysts had tried to sound the alarm about the threat of airplanes being hijacked as weapons, the intelligence community had failed to heed their warnings. If his research had produced the needed results sooner, they might have been able to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

They revealed something vital to making teams more than the sum of their parts. Anita was interested in collective intelligence—a group’s capacity to solve problems together.

It turned out that the smartest teams weren’t composed of the smartest individuals.

Anita and her colleagues discovered that collective intelligence depends less on people’s cognitive skills than their prosocial skills. The best teams have the most team players—people who excel at collaborating with others.

It’s well documented that a single bad apple can spoil the barrel: when even one individual fails to act prosocially, it’s enough to make a team dumb and dumber.

When we select leaders, we don’t usually pick the person with the strongest leadership skills. We frequently choose the person who talks the most. It’s called the babble effect. Research shows that groups promote the people who command the most airtime—regardless of their aptitude and expertise.

We get stuck following people who dominate the discussion instead of those who elevate it. It’s not just the loudest voices who rise to lead even if they aren’t qualified. The worst babblers are the ball hogs. In many cases, the people with the poorest prosocial skills and the biggest egos end up assuming the mantle—at a great cost to teams and organizations. In a meta-analysis, highly narcissistic people were more likely to rise into leadership roles, but they were less effective in those roles.[*] They made self-serving decisions and instilled a zero-sum view of success, provoking cutthroat behavior and undermining cohesion and collaboration.

The people to promote are the ones with the prosocial skills to put the mission above their ego—and team cohesion above personal glory. They know that the goal isn’t to be the smartest person in the room; it’s to make the entire room smarter.

When teams were relatively reactive, waiting for direction from above, extraverts drove the best results. They asserted their visions and motivated teams to follow their lead. But when teams were proactive, bringing many ideas and suggestions to the table, it was introverts who led them to achieve greater things.

Brainstorming usually backfires. In brainstorming meetings, many good ideas are lost—and few are gained. Extensive evidence shows that when we generate ideas together, we fail to maximize collective intelligence. Brainstorming groups fall so far short of their potential that we get more ideas—and better ideas—if we all work alone.

To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we’re better off shifting to a process called brainwriting. The initial steps are solo. You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately. Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group. To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own. Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options.

They find that another key to collective intelligence is balanced participation.[*]

Instead, he and his colleagues established a global brainwriting system to crowdsource search and rescue proposals from a diverse network of contacts. To shield the process from the havoc at the mine, they set up a separate team to gather and vet ideas off-site, hundreds of miles south in Santiago.