By Adam Grant
We started a project more than two quarters ago to extend a framework to support another case. We just ended a month of war rooms trying to address correctness and performance issues of this solution, engineers from both our team and the customer team responsible for the integration were exhausted with the support cost, the possibility that we could count on this solution to empower future production use cases became dimmer and dimmer.
Inside the team, we began discussing if we could explore other options to solve the problem. After two weeks of internal discussions, we reached alignment in the team that the solution we were building could not work either for short term or long term use cases. In the meantime, with recent advancement in software and hardware upgrade, we got a much simpler solution that has a high possibility to succeed. Relieved with internal consensus, we started to share the thoughts with our customers to explore another much simpler solution together. To our surprise, the engineers from one of the customer teams pushed back fiercely — “We have spent 6 months on this project! Just one more issue to fix and we are good to launch online in 2 weeks.” “How can this new solution work? We need at least another 6 months to make it work!”
The conversation ran into a deadlock, so we started the discussion with another customer team which has a large scale but with lower sunk cost as we have spent most of the time integrating with the first customer. Now to our surprise, that customer team was super welcome to our newly proposed solution and suggested to make that work. After 2 more weeks of discussion with both customers together, we reached consensus to move on with the new solution.
2 months after this conversation, we found we must change a backbone orchestrator of our pipeline service with a new solution. However, the previous orchestrator has been used in the company for more than a decade. This time we need to overhaul the system from a customer perspective, it had been a stressful debate and heated discussions from both sides.
In a 1:1, I brought this to a discussion with a partner team’s leader, and he shared this book with me to find some leads in systematically introducing new technologies.
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Creative Destruction
Sheryl Sandburg: great creators don’t necessarily have the deepest expertise but rather seek out the broadest perspectives.
Jost and his colleagues concluded: People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject and change it.
Reminded me of the EMS change for a deeply engaged AI vertical. Deeply suffered but hardly motivated to change it due to a huge sunk cost.
Individuals with high family income or high salaries weren’t any more or less likely to quit and become full-time entrepreneurs. A survey showed that the ones who took the full plunge were risk takers with spades of confidence. The entrepreneurs who hedged their bets by starting their companies while still working were far more risk averse and unsure of themselves.
Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33% lower odds of failure than those who quit…having a sense of security in one realm gives us the freedom to be original in another.
Chapter 2 Blind Inventors and One-eyed Investors
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. — Scott Adams
Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves.
It’s widely assumed that there’s a tradeoff between quantity and quality — if you want to do better work, you have to less of it — but this turns out to be false. In fact, when it comes to idea generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. Original thinkers will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, daed ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — esp. novel ideas.
Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection.
Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential.
Henry Ford: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.
Comedians often say that the highest badge of honor is to make a fellow comic laugh; magicians like fooling audiences but live to baffle their brethren.
The unique combination of broad and deep experience is critical for creativity.
Being a creator in one particular area doesn’t make you a great forecaster in others… our intuitions are only accurate in domains where we have a lot of experience… in dealing with unfamiliar products, you need to take a step back and assess them.
Products don’t create value. Customers do.
Intuition operates rapidly, based on hot emotions, whereas reason is a slower, cooler process.
We need to look beyond the enthusiasm they express about their ideas and focus on the enthusiasm for execution that they reveal through their actions.
Chapter 3 Out on a Limb
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. — Albert Einstein
Power involves exercising control or authority over others; status is being respected and admired.
When people sought to exert influence but lacked respect, others perceived them as difficult, coercive, and self-serving… we squash a low-status member who tries to challenge the status quo, but tolerate and sometimes even applaud the originality of a high-status star.
Sarick Effect: it’s actually more effective to adopt powerless communication by accentuating the flaws of your idea…unbridled optimism comes across as salesmanship; it seems dishonest somehow, and as a consequence it’s met with skepticism…the job of the investor is to figure out what’s wrong with the company. By telling them what’s wrong with the business model, I’m doing some of the work for them. It established trust.
The listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse code. we typically under-communicated our visions by a factor of ten.
As a Google employee put it, disagreeable managers may have a bad user interface but a great operating system.
Disagreeable managers are more inclined to challenge us, improving our ability to speak up effectively… they’re motivated to advance the organization’s mission, which means they’re not so loyal that they turn a blind eye to its shortcomings.
Middle-status conformity leads us to choose the safety of the tried-and-true over the danger of the original.
As Carmen Medina moved up the ranks, she learned that it was more effective to voice ideas upward and downward, and spent less time attempting to make suggestions to middle managers. Senior leaders saw her as one of the rare employees who believed there were things wrong with the agency, and also believed it could change. Her credibility was further bolstered by a growing following of junior colleagues.
For minority-group members, it’s particularly important to earn status before exercising power.
In some circumstances, leaving a stifling organization can be a better path to originality. The best we can do is voice our opinions and secure our risk portfolios, preparing for exit if necessary.
Chapter 4 Fools Rush In
Timing, Strategic Procrastination, and the First-Mover Disadvantage
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
If it is a ten-minute speech it takes me all of the two weeks to prepare it, said President Woodrow Wilson, if I can talk as long as I want to it requires no preparation at all.
I’ve learned that the advantages of acting quickly and being first are often outweighed by the disadvantages. It’s true that the early birds gets the worm, but we can’t forget that the early worm gets caught!
Procrastination may be the enemy of productivity, but it can be a resource for creativity.
Zeigarnik Effect: people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds.
One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly 3/4 fail because of premature scaling — making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.
First-mover advantages tend to prevail when patented technology is involved, or when there are strong network effects.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The more experiments you run, the less constrained you become by your ideas from the past.
Chapter 5 Goldilocks and the Trojan Horse — Creating and Maintaining Coalitions.
Common goals weren’t sufficient for a coalition to prosper, noting, people will differ as to what they consider the best methods & means. Difference in methods as the essential issue dividing the two associations.
To form alliances, originals can temper their radicalism by smuggling their real vision inside a Trojan horse.
Foot-in-the-door technique, where you lead with a small request to secure an initial commitment before revealing the larger one.
Ambivalent relationships are literally unhealthier than negative relationships. Evidence suggests we — cut our frenemies and attempt to convert our enemies. Our best allies aren’t the people who have supported us all along. They’re the ones who started out against us and then come around to our side.
Instead of assuming that others share our principles, or trying to convince them to adopt ours, we ought to present our values as a means of pursuing theirs. It’s hard to change other people’s ideals. It is much easier to link our agendas to familiar values that people already hold.
They must strike the appropriate balance between resonating with the existing cultural repertoire and challenging the status quo.
Chapter 6 Rebel with a Cause
We are not our brother’s keeper… in countless large and small ways we are our brother’s maker.
Younger brothers were 3.2 times more likely to steal a base safely… first born preferred safer sports. In both the U.S. and South Korea, firstborn CEOs take fewer strategic risk than later born CEOs.
Niche Picking — Competing by Not Competing. Laterborn children actively seek to be different.
Emphasizing consequences for others can motivate adults better. Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases > hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.
Why nouns are better than verbs. Character praise > behavior praise. When our character is praised, we internalize it as part of our identities. Instead of seeing ourselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, we start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person.
Chapter 7 Rethinking Groupthink
The myths of strong cultures, cults, and devil’s advocates.
Polaroid fell due to a faulty assumption. Within the company, there was widespread agreement that customers would always want hard copies of pictures, and key decision makers failed to question this assumption. It was a classic case of groupthink — the tendency to seek consensus instead of fostering dissent. Groupthink is the enemy of originality; people feel pressured to conform to the dominant, default views instead of championing diversity of thought.
There is a fine line between having a strong culture and operating like a cult.
There are 3 dominant templates for hiring:
- Professional — emphasizes hiring candidates with specific skills. Javascript, C++.
- Star — focuses on future potential, placing a premium on choosing or poaching the brightest hires.
- Commitment — skills and potentials are fine, but cultural fit is a must.
When founders had a commitment blueprint, the failure rate of their firms was zero — not a single of them went out of business… skills and stars are fleeting; commitment lasts.
Dark side of commitment culture: Once a market becomes dynamic, big companies with strong cultures are too insular: they have a harder time recognizing the need for change, and they’re more likely to resist the insights of those who think differently.
Companies performance only improved when CEOs actively gathered advice from people who weren’t their friends and brought different insights to the table, which challenged them to fix mistakes and pursue innovations.
Dissenting opinions are useful even when they’re wrong!
Social bonds don’t drive group thinking, the culprits are overconfidence and reputational concerns.
Instead of assigning a devil’s advocate to argue for Kenya, they picked someone who actually preferred Kenya. For devil’s advocates to be maximally effective, they need to really believe in the position they’re representing — and the group needs to believe that they believe it, too.
Ray Dalio doesn’t want employees to bring him solutions; he expects them to bring him problems.
Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.
Ray Dalio:
- I can see that I might not have been clear enough that there’s a hierarchy, because these 200 (principles) are not all the same. A principle is just some type of event happening over and over again, and how to deal with that event. Life consists of billions of these events, and if you can go from those billions to 250, you can make the connection — ah this is one of those.
- No, absolutely not (to have everyone live by his principles), the number one principle is that you must think for yourself.
The greatest shapers don’t stop at introducing originality into the world. They create cultures that unleash originality in others.
Chapter 8 Rocking the Boat and Keeping it Steady — Managing Anxiety, Apathy, Ambivalence, and Anger
Choosing to challenge the status quo is an uphill battle, and there are bound to be failures, barriers, and setbacks along the way.
The trick is to make fear your friend, fear forces you to prepare more rigorously and see potential problems more quickly.
Calm vs Excited
Students scored 22% better if they were told Try to get Excited than Try to remain Calm.
Instead of hitting the stop switch, you can motivate ourselves to act in the face of fear by pressing the go switch.
Outsourcing inspiration — the most inspiring way to convey a vision is to outsource it to the people who are actually affected by it… I found that people are inspired to achieve the highest performance when leaders describe a vision and then invite a customer to bring it life with a personal story.
Sense of urgency — 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! When Harvard professor John Kotter studied more than one hundred companies trying to institute major changes, he found that the first error they made was failing to establish a sense of urgency. WHY NOW?
… research revealed that we can dramatically shift risk preferences just by changing a few words to emphasize losses rather than gains.
Deep acting — deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them. Deep acting dissolves the distinction between your true self and the role you are playing. You are no longer acting, because you are actually experiencing the genuine feeling of the character.
Fanning the flame — VENTING doesn’t extinguish the flame of anger; it feeds it.
Actions for Impact
Individual Actions:
A. Generating and Recognizing Original Ideas
- Question the default.
- Triple the number of ideas you generate.
- Immerse yourself in a new domain.
- Procrastinate strategically.
- Seek more feedback from peers.
B. Voicing and Championing Original ideas
6. Balance your risk portfolio.
7. Highlight the reasons not to support your idea.
8. Make your ideas more familiar. Repeat yourself — it makes people more comfortable with an unconventional idea.
9. Speak to a different audience. Your best allies are the people who have a track record of being tough and solving problems with approaches similar to yours.
10. Be a tempered radical.
C. Managing Emotions
11. Motivate yourself differently when you’re committed vs. uncertain.
12. Don’t try to calm down. Turn anxiety into intense positive emotions like interest and enthusiasm.
13. Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator.
14. Realize you’re not alone.
15. Remember that if you don’t take initiative, the status quo will persist.
Leader Actions:
A. Sparking Original Ideas
- Run an innovation tournament.
- Picture yourself as the enemy. People often fail to generate new ideas due to a lack of urgency. Create urgency by an exercise of “kill the company”.
- Invite employees from different functions and levels to pitch ideas.
- Hold an opposite day.
- Ban the words like, love, and hate.
B. Building Cultures of Originality
6. Hire not on cultural fit, but on cultural contribution.
7. Shift from exit interviews to entry interviews.
8. Ask for problems, not solutions.
9. Stop assigning devil’s advocates and start unearthing them.
10. Welcome criticism.
C. Parent and Teacher Actions
- Ask children what their role models would do.
- Link good behaviors to moral character.
- Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others.
- Emphasize values over rule.
- Create novel niches for children to pursue.