Individuals benefit by rethinking even when it goes against their training or beliefs.

In Think Again, Adam Grant argues that rethinking habitual responses to questions and problems can help people adapt to changing circumstances, seize new opportunities, and avoid being trapped by outdated beliefs. As a cautionary tale against inflexible thinking, Grant uses the example of Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry, whose tech empire failed because he struggled to rethink his product. A market leader in the early 2010s, BlackBerry lost ground against touchscreen phones, mainly because Lazaridis would not rethink his favorite feature: the keyboard. Grant contrasts Lazaridis’s failure to rethink with the success of Steve Jobs, who was initially dead set against the mobile phone category. Luckily for Apple, Jobs’s team persuaded him to rethink his beloved iPod, encouraging him to add a telephone function, and this exercise in flexible thinking gave birth to the iPhone. Good judgement, Grant argues, depends on having both the skill and the will to be open-minded and revise firmly held views. He encourages individuals to acknowledge that there is always more to learn and that their current understanding may be incomplete or flawed. Thinking again, says Grant, can set individuals up for success at work and happiness in life.

Individuals can influence others to rethink entrenched opinions.

Grant believes that, with the right approach, it is possible to convince others to rethink their opinions, no matter how tightly held these may be. He notes that an adversarial approach is almost never persuasive. Simply telling someone that they are wrong about gun control, for example, will not prompt them to rethink. Instead, Grant advises a more collaborative approach in which people show humility and curiosity and think more like scientists. He uses the example of champion debater Harish Natarajan who wins a debate against a computer, not because he has more facts and figures at his fingertips (he doesn’t), but because of his tactics. To get others to rethink, Natarajan starts by finding common ground and then proceeds to challenge his opponent’s position using only a few strong arguments, not a blizzard of studies.

Another way to successfully change minds is to arouse curiosity by posing genuine questions. This tactic helps Black musician, Daryl Davis, open up the minds of a group of white supremacists. By genuinely asking Ku Klux Klan members how they can hate him without even knowing him, Davis has coaxed some of the Klan’s officers to rethink their racist views. Grant also demonstrates that it’s possible to get Boston Red Sox fans to think of fans of their longstanding bitter baseball rivals, the New York Yankees, with less hostility by asking them to reflect on the arbitrariness of their animosity. Grant goes on to explore how a method of persuasion called motivational interviewing can help those struggling to make healthy decisions to find their own motivation to change. Motivational interviewing works in both professional settings and in everyday situations, Grant claims. Getting other people to change their minds is similar to prompting one’s own rethinking in that it involves adopting a mindset of openness, humility, and curiosity.

Communities need to practice rethinking to tackle problems and adapt in a changing world.

The ability for communities to rethink is vital, Grant argues, in dealing with the new problems that emerge in an ever-changing world. However, rethinking on a community level is complex and made more complicated by the internet, which allows people to seal themselves off in echo chambers where they are exposed only to what they want to hear. Simply showing people the other side of an issue is not the solution, Grant says, because presenting two extremes tends to merely increase polarization. He believes that this is why An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary on climate change, didn’t persuade more skeptics. Grant says that Gore was preaching to the choir and slipping into binary bias by presenting only two sides to a complex story: a monolithic truth versus people who denied that truth. Instead, says Grant, it is more compelling to showcase the range of perspectives on a given topic. To illustrate how the media can convey complexity, Grant quotes the effectively complex headline: “Can Planting a Trillion Trees Stop Climate Change? Scientists Say It’s a Lot More Complicated.” A dose of complexity can spur cycles of rethinking.

Rethinking as a collective capability depends heavily on an organization’s culture. Organizations where performance is prioritized can slip into a habit of not questioning past practices, Grant says, and this can stifle rethinking. He uses NASA as an example of an organization whose performance culture has caused failures to rethink that resulted in disasters, including the explosion of the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003. Organizational rethinking requires, instead, a culture of learning where people feel psychologically safe enough to speak up and question practices. Grant points to Amazon as an organization that models a learning culture where experimentation is encouraged.  Important decisions are made at Amazon only after everybody reads a six-page memo that lays out the problem in detail, including past approaches and the proposed solutions. Then, rather than demanding convincing results, management is usually open to taking a gamble on a new solution. It’s a mistake, Grant concludes, for organizations to follow traditions blindly. Instead, groups should question whether past routines are still serving them well, with a view to rethinking processes to create a better future.

Thinking like a scientist is a crucial component of rethinking.

Grant strongly asserts that individuals must start thinking in the way scientists think as a crucial first step towards becoming a rethinker. The scientist mindset cannot be achieved without effort and persistence, as it requires updating your views based on the newest facts and data. Grant contrasts the scientific approach with the less flexible but far more typical approaches of thinking in ways commonly associated with preachers, prosecutors, or politicians. Grant describes thinking like a preacher as being devoted to defending beliefs without evidence, thinking like a prosecutor as seeking to prove others wrong, and thinking like a politician as trying to persuade others to support their views. He contends that all three of these approaches hinder rethinking, while taking on the scientist mindset allows us to be more flexible, curious and open to new ideas, while promoting personal growth and improved decision-making.

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