Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

by Adam M. Grant

The accelerating pace of change means that we need to question our beliefs more readily than ever before.

We go into preacher mode when our sacred beliefs are in jeopardy: we deliver sermons to protect and promote our ideals. We enter prosecutor mode when we recognize flaws in other people’s reasoning: we marshal arguments to prove them wrong and win our case. We shift into politician mode when we’re seeking to win over an audience: we campaign and lobby for the approval of our constituents. The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views.

If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new data.

But being a scientist is not just a profession. It’s a frame of mind—a mode of thinking that differs from preaching, prosecuting, and politicking.

It was too easy to preach the virtues of their past decisions, prosecute the vices of alternative options, and politick by catering to advisers who favored the existing direction. The entrepreneurs who had been taught to think like scientists, in contrast, pivoted more than twice as often. When their hypotheses weren’t supported, they knew it was time to rethink their business models.

What’s surprising about these results is that we typically celebrate great entrepreneurs and leaders for being strong-minded and clear-sighted.

One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see.

When we’re in scientist mode, we refuse to let our ideas become ideologies. We don’t start with answers or solutions; we lead with questions and puzzles. We don’t preach from intuition; we teach from evidence. We don’t just have healthy skepticism about other people’s arguments; we dare to disagree with our own arguments.

In preacher mode, changing our minds is a mark of moral weakness; in scientist mode, it’s a sign of intellectual integrity. In prosecutor mode, allowing ourselves to be persuaded is admitting defeat; in scientist mode, it’s a step toward the truth. In politician mode, we flip-flop in response to carrots and sticks; in scientist mode, we shift in the face of sharper logic and stronger data.

the purpose of learning isn’t to affirm our beliefs; it’s to evolve our beliefs.

What set great presidents apart was their intellectual curiosity and openness. They read widely and were as eager to learn about developments in biology, philosophy, architecture, and music as in domestic and foreign affairs. They were interested in hearing new views and revising their old ones. They saw many of their policies as experiments to run, not points to score. Although they might have been politicians by profession, they often solved problems like scientists.

intellectual humility—knowing

In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge.

“The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”

a deficit in metacognitive skill, the ability to think about our thinking.

overconfidence in situations where it’s easy to confuse experience for expertise, like driving, typing, trivia, and managing emotions. Yet we underestimate ourselves when we can easily recognize that we lack experience—like painting, driving a race car, and rapidly reciting the alphabet backward.

It’s when we progress from novice to amateur that we become overconfident.

As we gain experience, we lose some of our humility.

“While humility is a permeable filter that absorbs life experience and converts it into knowledge and wisdom, arrogance is a rubber shield that life experience simply bounces off of.”

Confident humility doesn’t just open our minds to rethinking—it improves the quality of our rethinking.

They’re aware that each answer raises new questions, and the quest for knowledge is never finished. A mark of lifelong learners is recognizing that they can learn something from everyone they meet.

To paraphrase a line attributed to Isaac Asimov, great discoveries often begin not with “Eureka!” but with “That’s funny . . .”

totalitarian ego, and its job is to keep out threatening information.

First, our wrong opinions are shielded in filter bubbles, where we feel pride when we see only information that supports our convictions. Then our beliefs are sealed in echo chambers, where we hear only from people who intensify and validate them.

I couldn’t wait to tell my roommates about all the assumptions I’d been rethinking.

Attachment. That’s what keeps us from recognizing when our opinions are off the mark and rethinking them. To unlock the joy of being wrong, we need to detach. I’ve learned that two kinds of detachment are especially useful: detaching your present from your past and detaching your opinions from your identity.

Who you are should be a question of what you value, not what you believe.

“People who are right a lot listen a lot, and they change their mind a lot,” Jeff Bezos says. “If you don’t change your mind frequently, you’re going to be wrong a lot.”

Every time you encounter new information, you have a choice. You can attach your opinions to your identity and stand your ground in the stubbornness of preaching and prosecuting. Or you can operate more like a scientist, defining yourself as a person committed to the pursuit of truth—even if it means proving yourself wrong. The faster you are to recognize when you’re wrong, the faster you can move toward getting it right.

The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict than task conflict.

A meta-analysis of those studies showed that relationship conflict is generally bad for performance, but some task conflict can be beneficial: it’s been linked to higher creativity and smarter choices.

“The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”

If two people always have the same opinion, at least one of them isn’t thinking critically—or speaking candidly. Intellectual friction isn’t a relationship bug. It’s a feature of learning.

the tension is intellectual, not emotional. The tone is vigorous and feisty rather than combative or aggressive. They don’t disagree just for the sake of it; they disagree because they care.

It’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable.

It means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother.

A major problem with task conflict is that it often spills over into relationship conflict.

A good debate is not a war. It’s not even a tug-of-war, where you can drag your opponent to your side if you pull hard enough on the rope. It’s more like a dance that hasn’t been choreographed, negotiated with a partner who has a different set of steps in mind. If you try too hard to lead, your partner will resist. If you can adapt your moves to hers, and get her to do the same, you’re more likely to end up in rhythm.

They actually presented fewer reasons to support their case. They didn’t want to water down their best points. As Rackham put it, “A weak argument generally dilutes a strong one.”

They lost ground not because of the strength of their most compelling point, but because of the weakness of their least compelling one.

When we concede that someone else has made a good point, we signal that we’re not preachers, prosecutors, or politicians trying to advance an agenda. We’re scientists trying to get to the truth. “Arguments

A single line of argument feels like a conversation; multiple lines of argument can become an onslaught.

Taken together, these techniques increase the odds that during a disagreement, other people will abandon an overconfidence cycle and engage in a rethinking cycle. When we point out that there are areas where we agree and acknowledge that they have some valid points, we model confident humility and encourage them to follow suit. When we support our argument with a small number of cohesive, compelling reasons, we encourage them to start doubting their own opinion. And when we ask genuine questions, we leave them intrigued to learn more. We don’t have to convince them that we’re right—we just need to open their minds to the possibility that they might be wrong. Their natural curiosity might do the rest.