Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

by Adam M. Grant

Recognize that behavior modification typically takes about 18 months of constant reinforcement”).

“No one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it.”

In hiring, instead of using similarity to gauge cultural fit, Bridgewater assesses cultural contribution.* Dalio wants people who will think independently and enrich the culture. By holding them accountable for dissenting, Dalio has fundamentally altered the way people make decisions.

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While it can be appealing to assign a devil’s advocate, it’s much more powerful to unearth one.

Hofmann found that a culture that focuses too heavily on solutions becomes a culture of advocacy, dampening inquiry. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a broad range of perspectives.

Believability takes into account test results, performance reviews, and other assessments, but a major component is the judgments of others. As one Bridgewater employee described it to me, “You gain believability by other believable people saying you’re believable.”

Before the college students gave their speeches, Brooks asked them to speak three words out loud. She randomly assigned them to say either “I am calm” or “I am excited.” That one word—calm versus excited—was sufficient to significantly alter the quality of their speeches. When students labeled their emotions as excitement, their speeches were rated as 17 percent more persuasive and 15 percent more confident than those of students who branded themselves calm.

To overcome fear, why does getting excited work better than trying to calm yourself down? Fear is an intense emotion: You can feel your heart pumping and your blood coursing. In that state, trying to relax is like slamming on the brakes when a car is going 80 miles per hour. The vehicle still has momentum. Rather than trying to suppress a strong emotion, it’s easier to convert it into a different emotion—one that’s equally intense, but propels us to step on the gas.

So, instead of appointing a leader to activate the go system, Popovic outsourced inspiration to a symbol: a black clenched fist. The effort began in the fall of 1998, when Popovic and his friends were college students. They spray painted three hundred clenched fists around the town square and plastered stickers of the image throughout buildings in Belgrade. Without that fist, he says, the revolution would never have happened. In the spring of 2010, a year after training the Egyptian activists, Popovic stopped cold in front of a newspaper stand. The clenched fist of Otpor! was featured on a front page, pictured on a poster held by a woman under the headline “The Fist Shakes Cairo!” The Egyptian activists had chosen to galvanize their own go systems by outsourcing inspiration to the same symbol. What made the fist so energizing?

better talk about black people.

Merely knowing that you’re not the only resister makes it substantially easier to reject the crowd. Emotional strength can be found even in small numbers. In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” To feel that you’re not alone, you don’t need a whole crowd to join you.

Popovic sees a role for amusement wherever fear runs rampant. Instead of trying to decelerate the stop system, he uses laughter to rev up the go system. When you have no power, it’s a powerful way to convert strong negative emotions into positive ones.

In a study of hundreds of managers and employees who championed environmental issues at their companies, the successful campaigns didn’t differ from the failures in the amount of emotion they expressed, their use of metaphors or logical arguments, their efforts to consult key stakeholders, or their framing of a green movement as an opportunity or threat. The distinguishing factor was a sense of urgency. To convince leaders to sponsor the issue, create a task force, and spend time and money on it, the environmental champions had to articulate why the original cause needed to be adopted now.

you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present. To drive people out of their comfort zones, you have to cultivate dissatisfaction, frustration, or anger at the current state of affairs, making it a guaranteed loss. “The greatest communicators of all time,” says communication expert Nancy Duarte—who has spent her career studying the shape of superb presentations—start by establishing “what is: here’s the status quo.” Then, they “compare that to what could be,” making “that gap as big as possible.”

Venting doesn’t extinguish the flame of anger; it feeds it. When we vent our anger, we put a lead foot on the gas pedal of the go system, attacking the target who enraged us. Hitting the punching bag without thinking of the target, though, keeps the go system on but enables us to consider alternative ways of responding. Sitting quietly begins to activate the stop system.*

One of the fundamental problems with venting is that it focuses attention on the perpetrator of injustice. The more you think about the person who wronged you, the more violently you want to lash out in retaliation.

Picture yourself as the enemy. People often fail to generate new ideas due to a lack of urgency. You can create urgency by implementing the “kill the company” exercise from Lisa Bodell, CEO of futurethink. Gather a group together and invite them to spend an hour brainstorming about how to put the organization out of business—or decimate its most popular product, service, or technology. Then, hold a discussion about the most serious threats and how to convert them into opportunities to transition from defense to offense.

How does this work individually?

CEO Nancy Lublin forbade employees from using the words like, love, and hate, because they make it too easy to give a visceral response without analyzing it. Employees aren’t allowed to say they prefer one Web page over another; they have to explain their reasoning with statements like “This page is stronger because the title is more readable than the other options.” This motivates people to contribute new ideas rather than just rejecting existing ones.