Think Again The Power Of Knowing What You Don’t Know By Adam Grant 1_Libmind

Today we start with a book that will give you the power to think: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.

Grant’s specialty is the study of business management using the scientific method. He writes books with characteristics very similar to Gladwell, he will personally research real, probably you have not heard of business cases, and then interspersed with various latest research findings in psychology, forming a system, very beautiful.

In Chinese, Grant’s book is about “rethinking”, which is equivalent to “re-characterizing” things. This is not a general sense of “change of mind”, but rather to change the perception of a thing. You used to think it was one thing, but after rethinking it, you find it is actually something else. You say you are a laborer, I say no, didn’t you buy stocks? I think you’re a capitalist.

Re-characterization, this thing is operating in a different way. Let’s take an example from Grant himself.

Grant went to Harvard for his undergraduate degree. One of the great things about going to Harvard is that you get to meet some very promising alumni. Grant was already working with a few classmates to organize the freshman class before they enrolled. At that time, the Internet was becoming popular, and Grant and his team set up a network group, a bit like the classmates group we use now.

But at that time, their understanding of this network group is just a “network” group. After we all enrolled in the school together, then there is no need to network contact. So they disbanded the group.

They missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Five years later, there was a student named Zuckerberg at Harvard who also created a networking group. But Zuckerberg saw the network group not just as a tool for college students to connect with each other, but as a community …… This, of course, was later Facebook.

You see this is the problem of how to characterize. Something is just one thing, what you can do with it and what you’re going to do with it depends on what you see it as. Change the characterization, you may open a whole new way of thinking.

Grant learned the hard way and has been thinking about “rethinking” ever since. He asked himself countless times, “Why didn’t I think of that at first?

Rethinking is difficult. People in general do not and do not want to rethink, we are inertia thinking. Let’s look at another case.

In 1949, a mountain fire broke out in Montana, U.S.A. Twelve firefighters parachuted into this mountain forest and used the tools they carried to put out the fire. They soon found out that the fire was so fierce that it was not a question of putting it out, but of surviving it. Captain Wagner Dodge (Wagner Dodge) made an immediate decision, let everyone rush to the top of the mountain.

Running, Dodge suddenly stopped. He lay down in a piece of grass, pulled out a match and lit a piece of grass in front of himself, and then greeted the other team members to do so with him. But the others could not understand Dodge’s approach, all still continue to run up. Dodge poured the water from the canteen on his handkerchief, covered his mouth with it, and just lay there. The fire he lit himself helped him burn a small barrier, and he survived. Of those who ran up the hill, only two survived.

There are three things to reflect on in this incident.

One is why Dodge could think of burning the barrier this practice. Post-incident investigation showed that no fire expert had thought of this approach, and all firefighters were not trained in the relevant escape. Dodge was completely his own improvisation. But Dodge’s play is not just this.

The second point is that Dodge reacted first and told the team to throw away all the firefighting equipment before running. The reasoning is simple, now it is important to save lives, those fire-fighting equipment is too heavy. But all the others, before Dodge shouted, no one thought that they could throw away the equipment.

This is not an exception. between 1990 and 1995, there were 23 wildland firefighters in the United States who were also chased by fires and burned to death on the way uphill — and none of them put down their equipment. Later, people assessed that if they dropped their equipment and ran again, their speed could be increased by 15–20%, and they would have survived.

So why can’t you think of it? Because of inertia. Firefighters do not throw away their tools. Just as soldiers do not throw away their weapons. Grant said more seriously that throwing away one’s tools is tantamount to letting go of one’s identity, which is a kind of self-denial!

The third reflection is, why did you have to put out that fire? Keep in mind that the location of the fire in Montana at the time was a very isolated place where no human lives would have been at risk.

And as early as the 1880s, scientists were already emphasizing that wildfires were actually good for the forest, that they were part of the ecology. Small fires are usually allowed so that they don’t build up into big fires. We’ve talked about this in Libmind. But the policy of the U.S. Forest Service until 1978 was that whenever there was a fire, it had to be put out the first time.

You see this is again qualitative. What is the nature of this? Should it be done or not? How do you do it if you want to do it? To do otherwise are you not yourself? All of these can be rethought.

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“Re-qualification” is not a new theory, and we have talked about it many times. Why do people always think according to their past experiences and inertia? Because of the “availability heuristic”. Why are people reluctant to change their minds? Because of “confirmation bias”. How should people change their thinking? You need to think like a scientist, you need to do research and experiments, and use the spirit of Bayes’ theorem to make “opinions change according to facts. On a macro level, you also need to be vigilant that you don’t fall into ‘story thinking’, and so on.

That’s what Grant says, too. But the strength of his book is that it provides a lot of cases. These cases will make you feel that just knowing the theory is not enough. You’re not there, you’re not in the situation, you’re not in the situation, you’re not in the situation, you’re not in the situation.

Let’s take a business case. You see why an incredibly smart person would refuse to rethink.

The case is the BlackBerry being phased out by the iPhone.

The inventor of BlackBerry, the founder of the company, and the CEO are all the same person called Mike Lazaridis. His talent, his execution, his historical opportunities are no less than any technology mogul, but he can only be studied by those business students as a failure. Lazaridis is solely responsible for the elimination of BlackBerry.

The obsolescence did not happen overnight, history has given Lazaridis more than one chance.

The BlackBerry was once a revolutionary, state-of-the-art phone. It was the first time that BlackBerry allowed people to send and receive emails from their phones, and the email on BlackBerry was directly synchronized with the email on the computer. It was the first time that BlackBerry allowed business people to use cell phones to work, which was very good and efficient.

The iPhone was released in 2007, and it did not immediately beat the BlackBerry. The reason is simple: iPhone has no keyboard. BlackBerry loyalists love BlackBerry’s physical keyboard, which is fast and accurate, which is called a productivity tool. In contrast, the iPhone, the way to type with the touch screen is not suitable for serious people.

As late as 2009, BlackBerry still held half of the U.S. smartphone market share. But just five years later, in 2014, BlackBerry’s market share was less than 1 percent.

One of Lazaridis’ mistakes was missing out on the browser. Back in 1997, before the iPhone was even a thing, a BlackBerry engineer suggested that we should put an Internet browser on the phone, so that people could use the phone to look at the Web directly. Lazaridis refused.

Lazaridis thought the BlackBerry was for office use. With a browser, for one thing, it is power hungry, and for another, who would have nothing to do with a phone with such a small screen to surf the Internet ah, is it entertainment? As a result, until 2008, BlackBerry has been valued at more than $ 70 billion, BlackBerry still does not have a decent browser on the phone. But he still had a chance.

In 2010 — note that by this time the iPhone was already aggressive — someone at BlackBerry proposed that we make an instant messaging application from phone to phone. This proposal actually fits the office rule, SMS allows colleagues to contact each other directly, much more convenient than email. And please note that China’s Tencent’s “WeChat”, which was launched in 2010.

But Lazaridis thought about it and rejected it. He was thinking, to engage in such an instant messaging software, it would be necessary to allow BlackBerry and other cell phones to collaborate, so it is not the same as helping other cell phones to do a large market? As a result, he missed out on WhatsApp — which was later acquired for $19 billion. Not to mention that he missed out on WeChat.

Why is Lazaridis so bent on this, Grant analyzes? Because the BlackBerry represents his self-identity. What Lazaridis saw as a BlackBerry was a productivity tool for typing and emailing with a keyboard, and he was not interested in everything else. He only wanted to serve the company’s hardcore fans — not knowing that this would be the equivalent of giving up a market of billions of people for a few million.

The phone, the nature of the thing has changed. The smartphone should have been more than just an email thing a long time ago. But Lazaridis refuses to rethink it.

So you say the iPhone is so revolutionary, is Steve Jobs is good at rethinking it? Actually, no.

Back in 2004, someone inside Apple suggested that Steve Jobs make the iPod a phone. But Jobs refused because he thought iPod was just a thing to listen to music. iPod was iPod and phone was phone. Steve Jobs hated cell phones and he said many times in meetings that he would never make a cell phone.

But people eventually convinced Jobs. It wasn’t that Jobs was easy to convince, it was that they convinced in a good way. Colleagues didn’t make Jobs give up his identity. Yes, we’re a big, high profile Mac company, we’re not a phone company. So this time we are not “Apple’s phone”, but “Apple’s phone”: we use Apple’s way, use Apple’s characteristics to make a unique phone, and after we finish Apple is still a computer company, see if this is good? Jobs agreed.

This truth is to make people deny themselves is the most difficult. But denying yourself often brings benefits. Let’s finally consider a simple question.

For example, you take an exam, do multiple-choice questions, there are four options ABCD. You are not sure about this question, at first you choose an option, after answering the paper back to check, you feel that the first choice is not quite right, want to change the answer. In this case, do you change it or not?

Many teachers will advise students not to change their answers. The teacher says you have to trust your instincts the first time. The teacher says his experience shows that changing the answer tends to change the right one to the wrong one ……

But psychologists say otherwise. Many psychologists have done many studies on this and their conclusion is the same: all should be changed. Statistics show that if you change an answer, there is only a 1/4 chance of changing the right answer to the wrong one, and a 1/2 chance of changing the wrong answer to the right one. leaving a 1/4 chance of changing the wrong one to the wrong one.

So as long as you can think about changing it, you probably should really change it.

But people usually can’t think of changing, and don’t want to change even if they think of it.

Grant’s book is organized to talk about how to get yourself to rethink, then how to convince others to rethink, and finally how to build a community that is good at think again.

Source: https://libmind.com/think-again-the-power-of-knowing-what-you-dont-know-by-adam-grant-1/