'Every interaction is a chance to expand your knowledge' - Adam Grant on the Book Club podcast

On the inaugural episode of the World Economic Forum Book Club Podcast, we're joined by organisational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant.

Adam helps his millions of readers, listeners and followers find meaning and motivation in their work. And over the last year, while the pandemic fell across the world, he used his insight to help at home as well - and share that with us in this episode as we discuss his latest book, Think Again:

The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. He also takes questions posed by some of our 200,000 Book Club members and gives us recommendations for books by his favourite authors as says what podcasts he listens to.

I first asked Adam about one of the biggest ideas in his book: 'the power of unlearning'.

Adam Grant: I think that one of the dangers of living in a rapidly changing world is that we end up carrying around mental fossils in our heads, all opinions and assumptions that might have made sense in a previous version of the world but are no longer true. And I think in a in a dynamic world, we need to be as quick to think again as we were to think in the first place.

Many of us don't. There's evidence to suggest that too many of us spend a lot of our time thinking like preachers, prosecutors or politicians. So when you're in preacher mode, you're defending your views. When you're in prosecutor mode, you're attacking someone else's views. And when you're in a politician mode, you only listen to someone if they already agree with your views. And in all three mindsets, you've already determined that you're right. Other people are wrong. So they might need to think again, but you're all good - your mental work is done.

I wrote this book to figure out how we could spend less time in 'preacher, prosecutor and politician' mode, and how we could think a little bit more like scientists, where we recognise that we might be wrong, we're as motivated to look for reasons why we might have incomplete knowledge as we are to assert our existing convictions. We listen to ideas that make us think hard, not just the ones that make us feel good. And we surround ourselves with people who challenge our thought process, not just the ones who agree with our conclusions. And I think if we all brought a little bit of the humility to know what we don't know, the doubt that we don't attach often enough to the things we think we do know, and the curiosity to discover more, we might have more open minds and I think a more open minded world is probably a better world.

Beatrice: Definitely. And do you think age plays a role in this? Are younger people more open and humble to unlearning things? Or is this something anyone can do at any stage in life?

Adam Grant: The age data are interesting, I think they actually cut in both directions. So on the one hand, older people generally are more fixed in their views, and they actually also share more fake news on social media, if you look at the data. On the other hand, though, they tend to be a little bit more humble, whereas younger people are a little bit more narcissistic, a little bit more entitled, and sometimes have inflated opinions of their own opinions. And so I think there's a case to be made that at any age you can struggle with rethinking, but also at any age you can choose to adopt a little bit more mental flexibility. I think all that involves is just recognising that the more you know, the more unanswered questions you raise, and the quest for knowledge is never finished. And I think if you keep that in the back of your mind, you become a lifelong learner and you start to realise that every single person you meet knows something that you don't. And therefore, every interaction is a chance to expand your knowledge.

Beatrice: So would you say that humility and the ability to unlearn are key tools that every employee/manager should have in 2021?

Adam Grant: I think 2020 forced us to do a lot of rethinking: of where we work, of how we get things done, how we collaborate from a distance, how we keep culture alive, how we learn when we're not necessarily having spontaneous interactions. And I think that as those changes were really forced upon us, the people who are reluctant to think again had a lot more difficulty adapting.

What did seem to predict adaptation to this really unexpected situation was being agreeable and emotionally stable, being somebody who is comfortable going with the flow and generally trying to make the best of a bad situation. One of the mistakes that I've watched a lot of people make is, now as we're starting to think about the return to work they're trying to say: 'All right, let's figure out a plan. We might be back in the office, we might be 'remote-first' or we might be hybrid, but we need to make a commitment because we're facing a lot of uncertainty and people are asking a lot of questions.'

And I think this is the worst time for a commitment because we're still barely beginning to surface the knowledge that we gained from this global experiment that no one opted into. And I think what we should be doing is actually running more experiments, even just asking the question of what's the best experiment you ran in the last year and a half when it came to trying to get things done or trying to collaborate or even finding a semblance of work-life balance in a world where it felt like you were either sleeping at work or your office suddenly took over your home. And I think we've all been running these small A/B tests in our own lives, but we're not actually sharing what we've learnt broadly enough and testing it rigorously enough to figure out what kinds of habits are going to work for all of us moving forward.

Beatrice: Definitely. And I think I've conducted a lot of failed experiments myself this year.

Adam Grant: Me too.

Beatrice: Have you noticed any experiments that you've done that work? Waking up early? Going for a jog before you start work? Is there anything specific that has worked for you in the past two years while living in this new normal?

Adam Grant: Well, actually, we have a new experiment at home that we just started last weekend. I was talking with an HR leader who said: 'The best thing we did was we had a person who created a traffic light at home to try to signal when interruptions were OK versus probably not welcome.'

And I just thought that was genius. I couldn't believe I hadn't heard of that in the past year and a half. And I mentioned it to my kids and our 10-year-old immediately drew one, and I've started using it now. The green light says, basically: 'Hugs are welcome - come on in, I would love to see you'. The yellow light is: 'Come in if it's important, but I'm trying to concentrate or focus'. And the red light is: 'DO NOT COME IN unless it's a true emergency - I'm in the middle of giving a keynote speech or some kind of presentation or I'm on TV'.

And it's amazing how much it helps, not only to make the implicit explicit and signal whether you're open or closed off to spontaneous interruptions or Zoom bombs, but also involving our kids in actually coming up with the light, they actually started to take ownership over it, so our daughter was explaining it to our other two kids and trying to talk them through exactly when it was a good idea versus not such a good idea to barge in. When it comes to boundaries, it's such a simple step, but a pretty powerful one.

Beatrice: This actually reminds me of our last conversation in Davos where we spoke about parenting. Has your stance on parenting changed in the past two years? Is there any more advice that you'd have for parents? This boundary setting exercise is a fantastic one. Is there anything else you'd recommend to parents, new parents, in the pandemic with everyone being stuck at home together?

Adam Grant: You know, I think I think this has been really hard. I think probably the best advice that I got came from a conversation I had with Scott Kelly, the astronaut who spent a year in space. Scott told me that when he went to do his version of remote work - living on the space station for 340 straight days - he set a goal that he was going to come back to Earth with the same energy and enthusiasm that he had when he left. And I thought this was ingenious because one of the biggest challenges that the pandemic has been - just the unpredictability of not knowing when it's going to end. And I think it would have been easier for a lot of us to cope with it if someone just said at the outset: 'Look, this is probably going to be a rough two years and don't expect things to return to normalcy anytime soon,' as opposed to: 'Well, we might be turning the corner in a year, and then a year and a half and, then wait a minute, no, there's a Delta variant, now what?'

And I think what what I took away from Scott's approach was to say, if you could create a clearer mental picture of the future, it helps you manage that uncertainty. And so I sat down with my wife and kids and we said: the day this pandemic is over, what do we want to do, where do we want to go, and who do we want to see? And that image kept us energised. We've updated it throughout the pandemic, and I think if you haven't had that conversation with your kids, now is a great time to do it.

Beatrice: You wrote this fantastic piece about 'languishing'. Could you explain to our audience that might not be aware what languishing is? I think when the piece came out, it was at a moment where I think most people were feeling the same. What advice would you have for people that are languishing right now and might not be able to flourish, but at least a piece of advice or two to feel a bit better?

Adam Grant: So I just actually just gave a new TED talk on languishing and one of the things that I realised while I was preparing for it was there is a window of 2020 where I was languishing and I didn't even know it. I found myself staying up way too late doomscrolling, I was lying in bed in the morning playing online Scrabble when I'm usually one of those morning people who just bounces out of bed ready to to start the day. And I couldn't figure out what was going on because I thought: 'OK, I'm not depressed - I have plenty of hope. I'm not burned out - I still have lots of energy. I'm just kind of blah.'

And it took me a couple of months for it to click that I was experiencing what the sociologist Corey Keyes has called languishing and studied for almost two decades now. So languishing is a sense of ennui or stagnation or emptiness where you feel like you're looking at life in grayscale instead of in colour. I think one of the reasons it's so hard to notice languishing is it's really not the presence of anything, it's the absence of something, right? You don't have any signs of mental illness, but you're not the complete picture of mental health, either. So Keyes defined it actually as 'the absence of well-being'. And I think if you want to escape languishing, psychologists often recommend that it's helpful to 'name it to tame it', that just labelling the emotion can help you understand it and then also find ways to overcome it.

I think one of the mistakes a lot of people have made during the pandemic is they've said: 'Well, I don't know what to do. I've never I've never lived through a pandemic before'. It is true, unless you're 104 years old, you probably haven't, and even then, I'm guessing you don't remember it very well. But if you realise that you're languishing and you say that pandemic fog, that sense of not having much to look forward to, that's languishing, you can then step out of the kind of overly narrow view of 'I don't know how to cope with a pandemic'. You can zoom out and say: 'OK, when was the last time I languished? And what helped me through it?' Then you can learn lessons from your own resilience. And I think that so many times when we face adversity, whether you're languishing or burned out or dealing with extreme anxiety or depression, if you can recognise times when you felt those emotions before, you could actually then figure out: 'What do I already know that might help me through this, and what wisdom have I already gained in past trials and tribulations that might be applicable now?'

Beatrice: A very popular question from our Book Club members, who devour your book list recommendations, was: what books would you recommend for 2021? Do you have a top three? Are there any authors that you're particularly following? I know it's a tough question, but our readers would love to know.

Adam Grant: This is like asking me to choose my favourite child. It's really hard. But let me start by saying, if you haven't already, drop what you're doing and read High Conflict by Amanda Ripley. It's it's a book about something I've experienced over and over in my life, which is: I think somebody is wrong, and so I go into 'logic bully' mode and hammer them with data and facts. And I've brought my best prosecuting attorney to the interaction, and they show up with their most stubborn defence attorney. And neither of us gets anywhere and the conflict spirals out of control. I thought Amanda did a brilliant job explaining why we get trapped in conflict spirals and then using science and great storytelling to maybe give you some ideas about how to escape them or avoid them in the first place.

So that's one favourite. Another outstanding book that just came out is Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It's a searing indictment of the gospel of time management, and reading it completely turned upside-down my assumptions about how we can use our time wisely. One of the things I took away from Oliver's writings is that no matter how good you get at time management, if you obsess about it, it just makes you more aware of all the hours you're wasting. And I think he gives a surprisingly uplifting - given how sceptical his take is - analysis of what we can do to make the most of our time and our attention as well. I think it's a must read.

If you finish those two, other than High Conflict and Four Thousand Weeks, what would I recommend with unbridled enthusiasm? Susan Cain has a book coming out called Bittersweet, which is about the joy of sadness and the value of ambivalent emotions and experiences. She's been working on it for a long time. I think it's it's an incredible follow up to her first smash hit Quiet, and I can't wait for it to hit bookshelves.

Beatrice: Very relevant choices. Thank you. And because this is a podcast, I have to ask, do you have any podcast recommendations for our audience? Are there one or more that you would recommend specifically?

Adam Grant: I'm a big fan of Invisibilia if you haven't listened to the episode, How To Become Batman, I think it's the greatest podcast episode ever made - 'highly recommends' - love revisionist history. A new show that I've just started listening to is The Art of Power, which I think is absolutely riveting. And then I think if if you haven't already checked out Glennon Doyle and We Can Do Hard Things, Glennon always challenges my thinking and I really enjoyed that.

Beatrice: Great recommendations again. Thank you. Our Book Club members were very keen to know what your daily routine looks like. When do you have time to read or write? Do you set up a time frame for writing parts of your new book? Do you have a time limit on podcasts you listen to? What does your day look like?

Adam Grant: Well, making time to listen to podcasts is easy. I listen when I take out the garbage, when washing dishes. Sometimes when working out. I was even listening at the dentist the other day. So, you know, anything I'm doing that that requires my eyes, but not my ears is, I think, fair game for podcast consumption. I also sometimes listen when falling asleep, although if it's an incredible episode, it occasionally keeps me awake, but I feel like sometimes it's worth it.

Writing I like to do in the morning. What I typically do is when our kids leave for school, I'll answer a few emails just to warm up and get myself into the rhythm of typing and formulating coherent sentences. And then I'll start writing, and I'll write until I run out of data and ideas, which sometimes is a 15-minute window, sometimes is four or five hours. And I try not to be too structured about it because I find that I really quickly want to be overly linear, and when I'm drafting, I want the creative juices to flow. And then I'll come back and edit when I have a slightly more sceptical and critical lens on. But I think for divergent thinking, I want to keep the attentional filters low and then for quality control, that's when I try to raise the the attentional filters and really ask: 'Who who wrote this? And I hope it wasn't me, because I'm really maybe embarrassed by yesterday's output.' But that way I can cut out all the content that's not worth sharing and hopefully be left with something that is.

Beatrice: As a final question, what piece of advice would you have for our listeners, be it for people returning to work, people still languishing, people not being able to unlearn, as mentioned in your book. What would you tell them? What would be one piece of advice ahead of 2022?

Adam Grant: I would say don't take advice from people who don't know you well because it may or may not apply to your situation. But I actually think that instead of seeking advice, sometimes you're better off giving advice. There's some research which shows that if you give somebody else advice, it actually boosts your confidence and clarifies your thinking. So I would say whatever your challenges for 2022, whether you're worried that you're going to be stuck in an endless loop of languishing, or whether you're not sure about whether to go back to the office or not, find someone who has a similar dilemma and give them some guidance about how to navigate it. And generally, what you'll find is the advice you give to other people is the advice that you need to take for yourself.