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

by Adam M. Grant

Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again.

After all, 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.

If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

Our convictions can lock us in prisons of our own making. The solution is not to decelerate our thinking—it’s to accelerate our rethinking.

The most effective leaders score high in both confidence and humility.36 Although they have faith in their strengths, they’re also keenly aware of their weaknesses. They know they need to recognize and transcend their limits if they want to push the limits of greatness.

Plenty of evidence suggests that confidence is just as often the result of progress as the cause of it.46 We don’t have to wait for our confidence to rise to achieve challenging goals. We can build it through achieving challenging goals.

That’s where the best forecasters excelled: they were eager to think again. They saw their opinions more as hunches than as truths—as possibilities to entertain rather than facts to embrace.32 They questioned ideas before accepting them, and they were willing to keep questioning them even after accepting them. They were constantly seeking new information and better evidence—especially disconfirming evidence.

If we’re insecure, we make fun of others. If we’re comfortable being wrong, we’re not afraid to poke fun at ourselves. Laughing at ourselves reminds us that although we might take our decisions seriously, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously.

Research suggests that the more frequently we make fun of ourselves,36 the happier we tend to be.fn3

Being wrong won’t always be joyful. The path to embracing mistakes is full of painful moments, and we handle those moments better when we remember they’re essential for progress. But if we can’t learn to find occasional glee in discovering we were wrong, it will be awfully hard to get anything right.

After all, it doesn’t matter “whose fault it is that something is broken if it’s your responsibility to fix it,”43 actor Will Smith has said. “Taking responsibility is taking your power back.”

The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on and were so busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel comfortable challenging one another. It took months for many of the teams to make real headway on their relationship issues, and by the time they did manage to debate key decisions, it was often too late to rethink their directions.

For example, there’s evidence that when teams experience moderate task conflict early on, they generate more original ideas in Chinese technology companies,11 innovate more in Dutch delivery services,12 and make better decisions in American hospitals.13 As one research team concluded, “The absence of conflict is not harmony,14 it’s apathy.”

Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in the way of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side, or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don’t come from our side. Task conflict can be constructive when it brings diversity of thought, preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth without damaging our relationships.

That quality often comes with a bad rap: disagreeable people get stereotyped as curmudgeons who complain about every idea, or Dementors who suck the joy out of every meeting.

Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.

I’ve watched too many leaders shield themselves from task conflict. As they gain power, they tune out boat-rockers and listen to bootlickers. They become politicians, surrounding themselves with agreeable yesmen and becoming more susceptible to seduction by sycophants.

When we choose not to engage with people because of their stereotypes or prejudice, we give up on opening their minds. “We are living in space-age times, yet there are still so many of us thinking with stone-age minds,” he reflects. “Our ideology needs to catch up to our technology.”

When people ignore advice,28 it isn’t always because they disagree with it. Sometimes they’re resisting the sense of pressure and the feeling that someone else is controlling their decision.

Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that kind of listening is.

Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

When we succeed in changing someone’s mind, we shouldn’t only ask whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.

A few years ago, the media reported on a study of the cognitive consequences of coffee consumption.22

that when it comes to reliability and validity, the Myers-Briggs personality tool falls somewhere between a horoscope and a heart monitor;46 and that being more authentic can sometimes make us less successful.

The focus is less on being right, and more on building the skills to consider different views and argue productively about them.

This is part of a broader movement to teach kids to think like fact-checkers:7 the guidelines include (1) “interrogate information instead of simply consuming it,” (2) “reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability,” and (3) “understand that the sender of information is often not its source.”

Rethinking needs to become a regular habit. Unfortunately, traditional methods of education don’t always allow students to form that habit.

If you spend all of your school years being fed information and are never given the opportunity to question it, you won’t develop the tools for rethinking that you need in life.

When I started teaching, I wanted to adopt some of his principles. I wasn’t prepared to inflict an entire semester of half-baked ideas on my students, so I set a benchmark: every year I would aim to throw out 20 percent of my class and replace it with new material. If I was doing new thinking every year, we could all start rethinking together.

It turns out that although perfectionists are more likely than their peers to ace school,21 they don’t perform any better than their colleagues at work.22 This tracks with evidence that, across a wide range of industries, grades are not a strong predictor of job performance.23

A similar pattern emerged in a study of students who graduated at the top of their class. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,”26 education researcher Karen Arnold explains. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”

In a typical three-hour class, I would spend no more than twenty to thirty minutes lecturing. The rest is active learning—students make decisions in simulations and negotiate in role-plays, and then we debrief, discuss, debate, and problem solve.

She invited her classmates to write letters to their freshmen selves covering what they wish they had known back then. The students encouraged their younger selves to stay open to different majors, instead of declaring the first one that erased their uncertainty. To be less obsessed with grades, and more focused on relationships. To explore different career possibilities, rather than committing too soon to the one that promised the most pay or prestige.

One student put it eloquently: “I need time for my confusion.”31 Confusion can be a cue that there’s new territory to be explored or a fresh puzzle to be solved.32

Ultimately, education is more than the information we accumulate in our heads. It’s the habits we develop as we keep revising our drafts and the skills we build to keep learning.

When she analyzed those data, the results flipped: psychologically safe teams reported more errors, but they actually made fewer errors. By freely admitting their mistakes, they were then able to learn what had caused them and eliminate them moving forward.

In psychologically unsafe teams, people hid their mishaps to avoid penalties, which made it difficult for anyone to diagnose the root causes and prevent future problems. They kept repeating the same mistakes.

Over the past few years, psychological safety has become a buzzword in many workplaces.

Edmondson is quick to point out that psychological safety is not a matter of relaxing standards,6 making people comfortable, being nice and agreeable, or giving unconditional praise. It’s fostering a climate of respect, trust, and openness in which people can raise concerns and suggestions without fear of reprisal. It’s the foundation of a learning culture.

In performance cultures, the emphasis on results often undermines psychological safety.

The standard advice for managers on building psychological safety is to model openness and inclusiveness. Ask for feedback on how you can improve, and people will feel safe to take risks.

By admitting some of their imperfections out loud, managers demonstrated that they could take it—and made a public commitment to remain open to feedback. They normalized vulnerability, making their teams more comfortable opening up about their own struggles.

Best practices suggest that the ideal routines are already in place. If we want people to keep rethinking the way they work, we might be better off adopting process accountability and continually striving for better practices.