Originals (book by Grant)

Originals

Adam Grant

Originals

This book is an examination of some of the traits of “original” people. Grant defines “originals” as creative people who have gone on to make their novel idea into reality. He makes clear that the creative part is important, but the realization part is more important. The book contains a wide range of stories about people and events that illustrate elements of Grant’s conclusions. Like many such books, it is less a scholarly exposition than a series of stories that can be used as inspiration.

The book ends with a list of suggestions for developing our originality.

• Question the default* – Don’t assume the status quo is immutable or optimal
• Triple the number of ideas you generate – The best way to have good ideas is to have many ideas, many will be useless but you’ll have more chances to have a good one.
• Immerse yourself in a new domain – People get stale with too much focus on one thing. There is a reason that Einstein played violin.
• Procrastinate strategically – ­Haste makes waste, but giving ideas a chance to mature before acting can make a huge difference.
• Seek more feedback from peers – The best feedback comes from peers doing work similar to yours. They will see the strengths and weaknesses better than most others.
• Balance your risk portfolio – Few originals are risk seekers, so if they are taking a big risk in one part of their life, they are extra conservative everywhere else. Successful entrepreneurs are not risk junkies.
• Highlight the reasons not to support your idea – People are too used to being sold ideas, but they are not used to hearing a balanced story. There are always problems, so show that you are aware of them.
• Make your ideas more familiar – A new idea is a shock, but repetition over time and in the flow of other information increases familiarity and comfort.
• Speak to a different audience – It is easier to form alliances with people who use similar methods than with those having similar goals.
• Be a tempered radical – Really radical ideas invoke extreme resistance, so break the big radical idea into smaller incremental ideas and share them progressively.
• Motivate yourself differently when you’re committed vs. uncertain – Everybody loses confidence at times; recover by focusing on the progress to-date when your commitment is faltering. Focus on what remains to be done when your determination remains high.
• Don’t try to calm down – Convert anxiety and anger into energy to move forward. Don’t vent – redirect.
• Focus on the victim, not the perpetrator – If you are trying to change things, focus on the impact that the change has on the people affected. Sometimes we are obsessed with bad behavior instead of the people hurt by the bad behavior. Focus on helping, not punishing.
• Realize you’re not alone – One ally makes all the difference.
• Remember that if you don’t take the initiative, the status quo will persist- If not you, then who? They haven’t done anything yet, have they?

Actors

What difference does originality make? An interesting example comes from call center employees. Most employees in call centers don’t stay very long; some with tenures of less than one year. But some employees stay with the job and they have fewer absences and higher customer services scores. These are desirable employees. Some researchers were able to collect data on the browsers used by job applicants. Prospects used Explorer, Safari, Chrome or Firefox. Employees who used Chrome or Firefox remained in their jobs 15% longer and had 19% less absences. Grant explains that the Explorer and Safari users were using the default browser on their computers. Users of Chrome or Firefox had to take action; this is the sense that “actor” is used above, originals are not passive acceptors of their condition. This group of people were dissatisfied with the default and took action to make a change. And this behavior carried over into their work. When they saw something unsatisfactory, these people would find ways to rectify the situation. In effect, they created the job that they wanted. 

Expressed differently, these people did not give the status quo too much deference. Many people think the status quo represents some sort of “best case” and is therefore legitimate or necessary. Originals reject this idea and seek improvement. It is the sort of thing that permeates their lives, influencing small things (browser choice) and large (job choice).

Grant suggests that curiosity is a key component of people seeking better conditions. In particular, he suggests that original people experience “vu deja”; this is a condition where we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems. Less curious people see the familiar and give it no more thought or grumble and carry on. One hallmark of originality is the openness to change.

One of the countervailing forces to originality is success. This force acts early in a child’s life to discourage originality. Creative children are less likely to be teacher’s favorites. The traits preferred and rewarded by teachers are not those of nonconformists. In response, many children quickly learn to get with the program, keeping their original ideas to themselves. In the language of author William Deresiewicz, they become the world’s most excellent sheep. The problem is particularly acute for prodigies, who excel in well-defined ways. Achievement motivation can crowd out originality: The more that you value achievement, the more you come to dread failure. Instead of aiming for unique accomplishments, the intense desire to succeed leads us to strive for guaranteed success. Because creative thoughts are unproven, they increase the risk of failure which is incompatible with success (as we commonly view it). Once you achieve more than an intermediate level of success, research shows that creativity begins to fall. This is obviously a generalization, but points to the fact that a potential tradeoff made by originals is that they may experience considerable failure.

It may seem like many original or creative people embrace risk, but it is much more nuanced than this. A variety of studies have shown that entrepreneurs may take risks in one part of their lives, but are very conservative in the rest of their lives. In fact, they can be quite tentative even in the domains where they take risks. Grant taught a group of students who started a company; they asked if he would like to invest. He declined because all of the students were going to keep their full time jobs for at least a year while working on the start-up. He thought they lacked conviction, but came to understand that they were hedging their risk. Most startups failed and they knew it. Grant did not invest, their company did very well and the founders all gave up their “real” jobs as the company could afford them. This is a poorly reported by common story. Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. In fact, the unwillingness to take big risks leads to decisions that favor long-term survival. If you’re risk averse, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. It seems that many originals create a portfolio approach to risk taking. They take a big chance on one part of their lives and balance that with a large dose of basic status quo. In one study of 800 adults (including some entrepreneurs) were given a choice between three risk/reward situations. The entrepreneurs were much more likely to select the low payout/low risk choice. The study concluded that entrepreneurs are significantly more risk-averse than the general population.

This section has discussed a range of “personality” elements associated with creative or original people, but Grant emphasizes that we should not think that some people are born to be original and others are born to be ordinary. Most of the behaviors of originals are learned or adopted over time. Originals choose to be original, an idea summed up by a statement made by WEB Dubois who described Abraham Lincoln like this, “He was one of you and yet he became Abraham Lincoln.”

Ideas

There is a common complaint that people don’t have enough creative ideas. This is incorrect. There are creative ideas everywhere. People can deliver creative ideas at the drop of a hat and usually lots of them. The problem is that not all ideas are equally good (meaning suitable for a particular purpose) and it is hard to sort the great from the ordinary. Failures occur on both sides to the selection process. People falsely predict that it will succeed; for example, many venture capitalists and Silicon Valley leaders were sure that Segway was going to be a huge consumer product, incorrectly. On the other side, the Seinfeld pilot was rejected by test audiences and network executives as one of the worst they had ever seen. It went on to be one of the most successful television programs yet.

This section of the book suggests that recognition of an original and useful idea is hard because we usually ask the wrong people to evaluate ideas. One of the worst people to ask is the originator of the idea. It’s their baby and, of course, it’s great. But part of this problem is that entrepreneurs and inventors have to be overconfident about the odds of their ideas succeeding, or they wouldn’t have the motivational fuel to pursue them. What’s more, they may not recognize when they have a great idea either. Examination of the working papers of various artists and scientists show how creators often initially reject ideas that later become core to the creation. Using Picasso’s Guernica as an example, there were 79 drawings created during preparation. Many of the final images came from early in the drawing process with rejected attempts to improve on those drawings. If Picasso had been able to judge his “ideas” well, he would have been getting warmer as time went on rather than randomly walking into blind alleys.

For a creator, the overall pattern seems to be consistent. If you have enough new ideas, a percentage of them will be special even if you don’t know which initially. Edison, Einstein, Picasso, Bach and Shakespeare created large volumes of work – some of which are very good. There is no pattern present either, like becoming better over time. For example, 6 out of nearly 600 Mozart pieces are considered masterpieces.  Picasso created almost 18,000 works over his lifetime, Bach about 1000. Einstein had 248 scientific papers, most of which were unimportant. Of Edison’s 1093 US patents, less than 10 were really important. The idea that you have a choice between quality and quantity is probably false. “Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas – especially novel ideas.” When people get into the habit of creating lots of ideas, it gets easier to do that which is important. Individual creators have far better odds over a lifetime of ideas. When we judge their greatness, we focus not on their averages, but on their peaks. If really useful original ideas depend on volume and the ideator is a poor judge of quality, then how can the better ideas be identified?

Managers are no better, though for a different reason. They are overly conscious of the costs and risks of an idea and insufficiently conscious of the potential benefits. If creators are excessively positive about an idea, managers are excessively negative. In the face of uncertainty, our first instinct is often to reject novelty, looking for reasons why unfamiliar concepts might fail….To protect themselves against the risks of a bad bet, they compare the new notion on the table to templates of ideas that have succeeded in the past….the more expertise and experience people gain, the more entrenched that they become in a particular way of viewing the world.

In some domains, it is possible to test ideas on users. For example, television programs can be tested an audiences or new products tested with consumers. These groups typically act like managers in that they compare the new offering to what they are used to. Both these groups may lack the ability to judge the potential of the idea.

The group of people who has the best shot of identifying good ideas is other creators working in the same or similar domains. If you want to judge a performance, ask other performers. People who are immersed in a field understand what is useful and useless, conventional and novel, and are able to express what is interesting about an idea. But Grant suggests that not all practitioners have this ability – just the creators. This group is not committed to the status quo and thus is open to new ideas.

The problem for managers may be that they arrive with what Grant calls an “evaluative mindset”. As an illustration, a group of people was assigned to two tasks. In one group, they were told that they would be evaluating a group of ideas and should spend 6 minutes writing down some criteria for judging. The other group had the same situation except they were asked to spend the time writing down ideas instead. The first group had about 50% success in picking successful products while the second group had 77% success (I assume that the success of the ideas was already known, but not to the subjects). Apparently, the process of thinking like a manager establishes conservativism and depresses the ability to see the potential of ideas. Given time to become normalized, even former creators who move into management roles can’t equal the performance of pure creators in picking winners.

Power and Status

Ideas that challenge the status quo face an uphill battle. Managers like when employees take initiative on most fronts. But there’s one form of initiative that gets penalized: speaking up with suggestions. In one study across manufacturing, services, retail, and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two-year period. Speaking up carries distinct, tangible risks for the speaker. But managers do take suggestions and people are promoted because they make suggestions. How can this be explained?

It helps to understand the distinction between power and status. Power is the authority or control over others. Status is respect or admiration. Making a suggestion is an attempt to exercise power and people will punish those who make this attempt – unless they have status. Status is earned from contributions and provides “idiosyncrasy credits”. Essentially, the more that you do ordinary things well, the more license you accumulate to do things differently. People with high status can make suggestions even though they may have no power.

This presents a challenge to people who are presenting new ideas. Do they have enough status to support their idea? One way to navigate this situation is to present your idea with a focus on its deficiencies. This works on a couple of levels. First, managers are used to hearing nothing but the positives; they spend their time listening to the idea and coming up with weaknesses and problems. By presenting weaknesses early, the managers have more thinking time to devote to overcoming the problems rather than diagnosing them. Second, acknowledging problems suggests that "you" and “they” have lots in common. By listing the issues that they were coming up with – you show how smart they are (and how smart you are too = status points). Third, presenting a balanced picture increases trust. If you can freely present the problems, the benefits are probably correct too.

This approach uses availability bias to its best effect. Availability is the ease by which we can come up with thoughts about something. For example, if I ask you to come up with three things that are great in your life, you will do this easily and conclude that you have a good life. If I ask you to come up with 15 great things, you will struggle and conclude that your life is not that great. The same works in reverse. If I ask you for 3 issues with an idea, you will do this easily and conclude the idea is weak. If I ask you to come up with 10 issues OR provide you will the three biggest issues with the idea, you will struggle to find additional issues and conclude that the idea has potential. Obviously, one of the first three issues can be fatal to an idea and it would properly be set aside. But this approach gets the listener past their default resistance to the novel idea.

Another barrier to a novel idea is the novelty itself. It is hard to understand a new idea (it can be just as hard for the person creating the idea as the idea hearing the idea). Getting an idea to be accepted might be easier if it is not made into a big deal. Presenting the idea is a casual way, but not asking for action, introduces the idea but does not force judgment. Repeating the idea occasionally and in slightly different ways makes the idea familiar. Over time, the idea does not seem so new and is more easily heard. This can be a powerful tactic for a person with low power and status. By sharing the idea with others, it may become widespread and potentially repeated by those with higher status. When you finally present the idea for action, it has lost it shock value and can be considered more fully. It is possible that others will get credit for your idea, but the odds are that your status will rise as your idea is normalized. You are better positioned for your next idea and the organization may be better off sooner rather than later.

We tend to lose track of our own familiarization compared to others. Typically, by the time that a new idea is being presented to others for action, an originator has spent a long time thinking about it – especially compared to anyone else. What is perfectly clear to them is murky to anyone else. They’re [the ideas] already so familiar to us that we underestimate how much exposure an audience needs to comprehend and buy into them. Grant uses the analogy of tapping out a song on a table. Imagine tapping out the rhythm to “Happy Birthday” and asking someone else to name that tune. As you tap out the song, you sing it silently to yourself. The conclusion is perfectly clear. Using a variety of songs to test this recognition, the rate that listeners identify the song is 2.5% (97.5% failure). When you are describing your idea to others, it may be a lot like tapping out the rhythm to a song that you wrote. The more novel the idea for that group, the greater the leap they face in imaging the “song” and the greater your need to communicate.

[The book makes a number of interesting digressions. Related to idea familiarity and communication, was a discussion of managers trying to introduce a change to an organization. Some research has suggested that managers undercommunicate by a factor of 10 – they spoke about the direction of change ten times less than their stakeholders needed to hear it. In one three-month period, employees might be exposed to 2.3 million words and numbers. On average during that period, the vision for change was expressed in only 13,400 words and numbers: a 30-minute speech, an hour-long meeting, a briefing and a memo. Since more than 99 percent of the communication…does not concern the vision, how can they be expected to understand it, let along internalize it? The change agents don’t realize this, because they’re up to their ears in information about their vision. Whether an idea going up the chain or going down, the problem of undercommunication can doom a novel idea whatever the quality of the idea.]

The ideal communication approach seems to involve regular repetition mixed with other communications. Research suggests that ideas become more likeable the more we hear them – at least for the first 20-30 times. Sharing an idea 5-10 times may seem like overkill, but that is only because of your relationship to the idea. For others, it remains new for a while. Research on the approach to communication also suggests that short exposures work better. Elevator speeches are a good model for the communication rather than off-site workshops.

Original thinkers may find that the organization does not want to hear original ideas. The dissatisfied person has 4 basic choices: exit, voice, persistence and neglect. Persistence and neglect maintain the status quo, but neglect is a negative for the organization. Exit and voice change the status quo with exit being negative for the organization. Circumstances have a big impact on the choice being made, but this boils down to the degree of commitment and control available. If you believe that you can create the required change, and are determined to create improvement, then you will seek to raise your voice. If you feel helpless to make a change, and accept that outcome, you will probably choose neglect and decrease your engagement. Unsurprisingly, the largest influence on our choice is our direct supervisor. This doesn’t mean that the relationship is comfortable. Instead it may mean that that supervisor will create opportunities for ideas to be heard in the organization, that they will back up their subordinates’ efforts and defend them against others’ effort of suppression. In other words, a good boss is unafraid of conflict. When an original idea is proposed, the idea will make waves and a supportive boss must be OK with the waves.

A person, presenting an original idea, benefits from seeking out audiences that create original ideas. They will be both more receptive and more critical of the idea, often providing feedback to advance the idea. More agreeable audiences, like more agreeable bosses, will let weak ideas go unchallenged. Grant regularly refers to the role of status in the book and status has a key role in who and how criticism is given. Good criticism will come from groups with idiosyncratic criticism, but studies have shown that groups of people with middle status, in either structural or idiosyncrasy, provide the least effective feedback. Many middle managers have middle status in both dimensions, and this makes them more conservative because they have the most to lose.

Productive procrastination

The phrase, “he who hesitates is lost” is widely used in business to encourage urgency. However, there are many advantages to holding back a bit. One source of advantage is the possibility of seeing and avoiding others’ mistakes and misfortune. This highlights one feature of the application of procrastination. Tasks that are routine do not benefit from procrastination, so procrastination decreases productivity. But when the situation is uncertain or you are seeking a creative solution, procrastination yields benefits.  The greater advantage of procrastination comes when you are figuring something out. Interviews with scientists “used procrastination as a form of incubation to stave off premature choice of a scientific problem or solution”….”ideas need time to mature”. It seems counter-intuitive to find that avoiding focus leads to better thinking, but this ignores the potential of the unconscious mind. Studies have shown that people have a better memory for incomplete than compete 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.

Procrastination leaves us open to improvisation (see the comments below for a fascinating example). Advance planning, completed early locks us in and we tend to stick with the original plan. When you are working to the last moment, the work seems less fixed and easier to modify. This improvisational ability might be very valuable. A study of pizza store profitability revealed that the managers of the most profitable stores rated themselves as the least efficient or prompt. Similar results were found among Indian companies. These people don’t skip planning, but they are not bound by it. Plans may be more emergent that settled or they may be more provisional.

The other advantage of procrastination is that is allows the idea to flower when the time is right. The book describes start-up companies in terms of pioneers and settlers, where pioneers are first movers. Settlers follow pioneers.   About 50% of pioneers fail while closer to 10% of settlers fail. Settlers get more market share than pioneers that survive. There are many examples of first movers that get outsized market share, but they are the exception. When uncertainty is high, as it is with many innovations and start-up efforts, procrastination gives you a chance to be different and better. It offers a chance to contrast your refinement with the unpolished problems of the first mover. Being first does pay when there is a protectable position (patented technology) or network effects that benefit the first mover. Your position allows you to iterate to correct initial flaws, but this is not normal. It is usually better to be second. The key lesson here is that if you have an original idea, it’s a mistake to rush with the sole purpose of beating your competitors to the finish line.

Grant looked at the idea that really creative work is the domain of the young: once you pass some certain age, you don’t have “it” anymore. It seems that this is incorrect. Big advances can be categorized as “conceptual” or “experimental”. Conceptual breakthroughs seem to be more common among the young and experimental among the old. Conceptual thinkers work with concepts first, and only begin trying them after they have the idea firm in their minds. Experimental thinkers build up from observations and experiments towards an understanding. To some extent, they do not know where they are going until they get there. The success of conceptual thinkers may come in a flash, while success for the experimental thinkers comes over the long term. Part of what makes conceptual thinkers powerful is their lack of information and understanding. As they accumulate this understanding, they could lose their ability to make a big conceptual breakthrough and gain the ability to make experimental breakthroughs. Many breakthrough creators try to repeat their earlier magic rather than change mindsets - and few succeed. Experimental thinkers may have more sustainability because their thinking is less conceptually constrained.

Working together

Grant writes a chapter about the effort to enfranchise women as an example of collaboration to get things done. It provides some interesting historical context, but what is more interesting is the application to modern life. Two things stand out. The people who set out to make big changes need to be fanatics about their cause. The fanaticism is needed to withstand the pressure to maintain the status quo. That very fanaticism repels less fanatic people who support the general goals of the change. For an idea to become implementable, it must be softened enough to be acceptable to supporters, but radical enough to be acceptable for fanatics. It is like the Goldilocks’s story – it needs to be just radical enough. The second problem is that groups of people with a common goal for change usually break up over their plans to achieve the goals. Their fanaticism about their goal gets attached to a fanaticism about the methods. You might hear a rival described as not being “serious enough” because they advocate a different path. Such rivalries can be very intense. Sigmund Freud observed, “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of strangeness and hostility between them.” Rivalries can be much more intense within groups than between groups.

In the women’s emancipation story, the breakthrough for the movement came when they began to form alliances with the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement. The goals of the two groups were quite different, and there were many potential conflicts between them. But they had similar approaches to creating change and ultimately the Temperance movement created the path for women to get the vote (I am simplifying the story considerably).

To achieve success, people with an original idea may need to become “tempered radicals”. They believe in values that depart from traditions and ideas that go against the grain, yet they tone down their radicalism by presenting their beliefs and ideas in ways that are less shocking and more appealing to mainstream audiences. Very often, thinking about how to practically achieve something leads people toward a more tempered view. A focus on why they want to achieve that goal usually forces them to defend it further. Grant points to the Occupy Wall Street movement for an example. Most Americans supported parts or all of the movement according to polls, but the movement could not temper its more radical members and fell apart. Another way to make a novel idea more acceptable is to add familiar elements to the idea. This creates a familiarity effect that puts a halo around the new elements.

Friends, Families and their effects

In some cases, your allies are also rivals in some sense. The book makes a few observations about these relationships. We tend to see relationships in a positive-negative axis. Positive and negative may be two different axes, and we may have relationships that are both positive and negative. These ambivalent relationships are really tough on people because inconsistency requires a lot of energy to manage. From that perspective, friends are easy to manage because they are consistent. Enemies are easy for the same reason. It is the sometimes friend – sometimes enemy that is hardest to manage. Our instinct is to sever bad relationships and salvage the ambivalent one. But the evidence suggests we ought to do the opposite: cut our frenemies and attempt to convert our enemies.

Beginnings

How do originals become originals? Birth order offers one clue. Studies have suggested that first born children are more likely to seek high status careers, while later born children seek less conventional careers. First-borns appear to be more conservative than later siblings. For example, later-born people are more likely to believe new scientific ideas than first-born. First-born tend to follow rules and later-born are more likely to break them. On this basis, later-born are more likely to be original.

Part of the difference may come from the logic used to make decisions. First-born often use a “logic of consequences” which guides decisions based on seeking the “best” outcome. An alternative logic, called the “logic of appropriateness”, guides decisions based on the question, “What would a person like me do?” If I identify as a rebellious person, I will decide based on how I imagine rebellious people would decide. The idea of appropriate is attached to the identity chosen. When we use the logic of consequence, we can always find reasons not to take risks. The logic of appropriateness frees us up. It is more common to find later-born people using the logic of appropriateness. Part of the career choices of later-born may come down to finding a niche that is not occupied by an older sibling or parent, which means rebelling against the existing patterns. First born learn from adults; later-born learn from children. They take risks inappropriate for their ages and lose their fear of consequences. This can explain the average behavior, but the exceptions are interesting.

Young children receive a lot of correction, perhaps as many as 50 corrections a day (that is 15,000 per year) for years. This correction is how we all learn. But correction comes in different forms. Examination of more independent thinking people reveals that an important mode of correction is explanation. “It is in their reliance on reasoning, explanation, suggestions of ways to remedy the harm done, persuasion, and advice that the parents…differed most….Reasoning communicates a message of respect….It implies that had children but known better or understood more, they would not have acted in an inappropriate way”  Independent children get much more explanatory correction. This shows up in the form of the rules a child must obey. Creative children have few rules. Parents of ordinary children might have 6 rules, but those of creative children have at most one rule. The children receiving explanation together with few rules tend to internalize both the applications and exceptions to rules. Good explanations enable children to develop a code of ethics that often coincides with societal explanations; when they don’t square up, children rely on the internal compass of values rather than the external compass of rules.

An interesting application of this is seen in driving compliance where that is needed. For examples, hospitals struggle to get staff to wash their hands between patients. One hospital decided to put up signs by sinks as reminders. One sign said “Hand hygiene prevents you from catching disease”. An alternative sign said, “Hand hygiene prevents patients from catching disease.” The first sign had no effect on washing behavior, but the second increase the frequency and effort put into washing. The explanation is that the rule had no impact on people surrounded by rules, but the reminder was very effective for people whose first rule is “do no harm”. What is the appropriate behavior for a medical professional – washing hands is. The logic of appropriateness in this case leads to following the rule. The book made much of the fact that people who help Jews escape capture by the Nazis in World War II also used a logic of appropriateness. In both cases, people reached their own conclusions about how a person should act and did so.

The previous description covers negative messages, but as important are the reinforcements that children receive for appropriate behavior. The evidence suggests that different kinds of reinforcement have different effects. You might praise the act – for example, “that was very kind”. This is beneficial. More beneficial is to praise the character - for example, “you are very kind.” In an experiment related to sharing craft materials, children receiving character praise shared 4x more than children receiving behavioral praise.

Altogether, original thinkers may get their start at a young age when they were corrected with explanations with reinforcement of desired character strengths. It is an interesting to apply this concept to teaching adults or in implementing policies. Behavior is widely discussed in business organizations, but character is not. 

Culture

People rarely act in a vacuum. People around them influence how people think. From an originality perspective, the real problem with culture is its potential to overwhelm the individual. On a smaller scale, the fear is that groupthink will lead to bad decisions. An explanation for groupthink developed around the belief that individual’s drive for belonging and cohesion suppressed their individual uneasiness with a decision. This explanation, while popular, appears to be ungrounded in reality. Cohesiveness seems to promote dissent rather that suppress it. Groupthink does occur, but the explanation may be different.

Organizations have a small number of “templates” for how they hire and interact. With respect to groupthink, the most important template is one called “commitment”. In the commitment template, they key thing is belonging to the organization. A company using this model seeks people who will commit to the organization and its mission. This commitment is a huge benefit to a young company facing considerable uncertainty. Such companies can be strikingly diverse, except with respect to the commitment. Members of the organization may identify more with the organization than their profession. One study showed that start-up companies organized using the commitment template were much less likely to fail than companies with other templates. So the choice of this template has important benefits. It is easy to imagine the importance of commitment to a range of non-profit organizations and the misfit between a leader and non-profit organization with different perspectives on commitment.

The weakness of commitment is that such organizations fail over longer time periods. Commitment start-ups may survive, but they also grow slowly on average. Other templates having higher failure rates, but survivors grow faster. The problem is that organizations dedicated to commitment become more homogenous over time. New hires look like existing employees. People with novel ideas that differ from the norm are pushed out or marginalized. Such companies become insular and inflexible. More importantly, they are proud and confidant. They are proud of their common perspective and high commitment. They identify with their past success. They become less sensitive to change in their external environment. It is the pride that enables groupthink, combined with a desire to maintain the status quo. This is a bad environment for original thinkers.

Grant cites an example of a high commitment company that is also highly adaptive – Bridgewater Associates. This company is a successful hedge fund organized around the principle of complete candor. Almost everything is shared with almost everyone in the company in an attempt to use “radical transparency”. Success depends on thinking differently from the market and that means that there must be a lot of productive conflict. While in most organizations, dissenting views are suppressed, in Bridgewater –“No one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it.”  Bridgewater has high turnover because many people struggle with the candor, direct feedback and empowerment they are given. People who stay are comfortable in this culture. Strong cultures exist when employees are intensely committed to a shared set of value and norms, but the effects depend on what those values and norms are. If you’re going to build a strong culture, it is paramount to make diversity on of your core values. Bridgewater is committed to promoting dissent; employees are held accountable for dissenting and for fighting for better outcomes.

Some organizations appoint a person to play the role of a devil’s advocate. Studies of such cases show that the devil’s advocate changes the process. But not the outcome. In other words, the dissent was practically ineffective. This may be because the person was just playing a role or because the others thought of them just playing a role. In contrast, when an advocate for an alternative was discovered within the group, the impact was significant. Real expression of an alternative view had impact. At Bridgewater, the expectation is that people won’t reach consensus because some people dominate over others; people debate their positions until they agree on the facts and implications. The founder of Bridgewater says, “The greatest tragedy of mankind… comes from the inability of people to have a thoughtful disagreement to find out what’s true.”  Maintaining this culture is quite hard, but the organization does not experience groupthink. People are not hired because they will think and say the same thing as others, but because they will stand up for their perspective. However, they can’t have their ideas set in stone. They must be able to advocate a position and be flexible enough to change their mind. This can be expressed as ‘having strong opinions that are weakly held’.

Bridgewater’s founder established a set of principles to guide the company. The application of these principles are constantly under debate and thus evolve as people understand them. What is interesting is that there are 210 principles (some with sub-principles) that cover management. Grant thought this was way too many and wondered why they didn’t have fewer or more clearly prioritized principles. The founder’s reply revealed that many of these principles were directed at specific situations. If most organizations have fewer more general principles to cope with all situations, Bridgewater was gone in the opposite direction. It defines principles for repeated situations that employees face. This would seem really restrictive, which is part of the reason that these principles are vigorously debated in the full view of the company. But the overriding principle is that everyone must think for themselves.  The founder, Ray Dalio, has been studying what he calls shapers- the people whose activities seem to change the world. In his view they all share three characteristics: curiosity, non-conformance, and rebelliousness. If you are going to make a difference, you must be different.

Fears

Being original is not easy. Pressures to conform are powerful and many original efforts fail. People who persist in their originality appear to have two basic strategies: strategic optimism and defensive pessimism. The optimists assume that they everything will work out so that they will succeed - and just carry on. The pessimists imagine all the things that can go wrong assume that they will go wrong, and become anxious about the result. These two strategies work equally well. The pessimists use their anxiety to fuel preparation and contingency planning that allows them to overcome obstacles that appear.

For example, people hate public speaking. Before a talk, people get very nervous and this can carry over into the talk. The most common advice is to be calm. The speeches of a group of students were studied for their quality of persuasion and speaking confidence. Before speaking, some students were told to say either “I am calm” or “I am excited”. The excited students outperformed the calm students.  Excited students spoke longer, more confidently and more persuasively. Similar effects were observed with math tests, singing a song in public showing that being excited is a general benefit. This excitement may explain the effect of strategic optimism. The book does not explicitly say this, but there is a kind of flight-or-flight element to this comparison. The excitement is analogous to fight, while the planning is analogous to flight. Both involve an increase in emotion that is then applied to overcome the problem.

In fact, the two systems work together fairly well. Doing something original is kind of a two-step process. First, you decide to do it. Second, you do it. In stage one, strategic optimisms gets you to the point of commitment. Once committed, defensive pessimism motivates you to plan and prepare. Combined, the two approaches help you take a chance and then execute it.

The point of being original is to do or make something different – to change the status quo. Changing the status quo involves changing people – who are generally inclined to resist change. People who wish to change something, like an organization, are often coached to create a vision of the future that inspires people to make the change. This is probably not the best approach. Better is to show people what is wrong with the present. When people become convinced that the present is undesirable (a guaranteed loss), they will be motivated to change to a different situation that may be better. Their dissatisfaction allows them to accept the risk of changing. To cite one example, the first 11 minutes of Martin Luther King’s speech described the unsatisfactory status quo; it was after that time that he presented his vision of the future. Applied to yourself, your best chance to change requires that you become dissatisfied with the current state. Real change probably requires strong emotion – probably anger.

There are social limits to the expression of anger, and we often tune out angry people. Consequently, it may be important to hide the anger in favor of a cooler approach. This is called “surface acting” and is the sort of behavior you see when a customer shouts at a service employee. The employee appears calm, but is not. It is clear to all parties that the calm is a fake – because it is. The contrast is to “deep acting” where the inner and outer view become the same. So-called method actors prepare by “becoming” their character which makes their performance much more authentic. For a service employee, the equivalent would be to recognize that the customer is not angry at you but having a hard day. The empathy allows the inner state to match the outer state making the reaction authentic. In this case, the inner adjusted to the outer state.

Anybody trying to lead a change must master their own emotions and help others manage theirs. Role play can be used to achieve deep acting practice. During the civil rights movement, civil rights advocates role-played riding on a segregated bus. Some people played white passengers while others played black ones. The goal was to generate enough anger for the black passengers to keep their seats, but not so much that they became violent. There have been studies on the best way to handle anger. The popular choice of venting is the least effective. Venting raises aggression. If the goal is to be cool on the outside and hot on the inside, then venting is not useful. In contrast, it seems that thinking about the harm that others experience is much more effective in harnessing anger. We are very accepting of the expression of anger on behalf of others. We are apparently braver when motivated by the harm done to others and thus willing to challenge more powerful people.

Being an original, or helping others increase their originality is both simple and hard. It is simple because everybody has a drive towards uniqueness. It is hard because we face pressures to conform and maintain the status quo. It helps to find something unsatisfactory in the present that should be changed and then simply changing it. A subtext throughout the book was that the biggest barrier we face is our own perception of the difficulty of being original.

Comment and interpretations:

• Everybody thinks they are original (I do), so one of the interesting aspects of a book like this is the chance to ask, “Compared to who?” Because these books focus on extreme cases, this can be tough, but it also offers a chance to see how you might be somewhat like some of these people. I find the comparisons and contrasts helpful. What should I keep doing and what I should start doing? Most of all, some stories help humanize various icons which makes it seem more possible for me to accomplish something meaningful. They are not aliens with superpowers but people striking at the right time or persisting against the odds.
• I had a classmate in high school who was on track to be valedictorian after our junior year. In her senior year, she decided to drop from advanced placement English to conventional English because of the tough grading reputation of the teacher. Her chief competitor chose to take the tougher class. By avoiding the challenge, she successfully won her prize when her main competitor did not get a perfect grade. I think this was the first time I saw a good student act out of fear in order to obtain an “honor”. From my position way down the ladder, what was the difference between numbers one and two? At the top of the pyramid, the difference was much bigger and the risk of loss was salient. I knew both classmates just well enough to understand that the more original person put her status at risk. I realize now, after reading this book, that the most creative and original people were mostly clustered right below the elites. They were good, but not great students. They often coasted along indifferent to the process, grades or others’ expectations. But when their interest would be engaged, they would shine like novae. I wonder how much this behavior appears in the business world. Do original thinkers hide their ideas in order to fit in? Do they hide their original ideas in order to focus on low-risk work that increases their achievement? This would not need to be conscious behavior at all. As the book indicates, we have been getting this training from a young age and most of us have absorbed some of the attempt to suppress our originality.
• The idea that people who found companies don’t embrace risk goes counter to stereotype. There are a number of aspects to this false stereotype. For example, the majority of startups are founded by people over 45 (most startups are not in IT); they are not fresh young adventurers. But I think there is a tendency to confuse the financial risk that founders take with the risks that they feel. They may feel the loss of money, but the real risk they must face up to is their fear of failure. Our society is schizophrenic on the question of failure. On the one hand we celebrate “trying”, but on the other we view people who fail as losers. We all internalize this understanding and unconsciously avoid situations where we might fail. If so, it might be part of balancing the “lifetime risk” portfolio for a person to become successful in a career and then create their company. If the company does not work out, they know they have succeeded in the past and can again. They may view the failure less in terms of personal failure and thus less scary.
• Many people fail to achieve originality because they generate a few ideas and then obsess about refining them to perfection. Many idea creation protocols put a lot of emphasis on idea building or refinement. Can these two approaches be reconciled? I imagine a few things apply. (1) No idea expresses all the required information for its execution, and overcoming barriers to implementation requires refinement. (2) Some ideas will never be perfect, so some refining may be needed to find out if an idea is good enough –even if imperfect. (3) Idea development in a group setting differs from solo ideation. This brings the attention of peers with differing perspective to bear on an idea. Still, there is something useful about the main statement. Obsessing about perfection is probably an overshoot of the need during ideation. In the beginning, there needs to be enough refinement to clearly express the idea and no more. Refinement can be done later and in stages
• One of the most famous speeches in American history is the “I have a dream speech” by Martin Luther King given in August of 1963. King with some colleagues began preparing for the speech weeks before but did not begin to write it down until late the night before. At that point, King decided to start over. The next day they had a draft that King was modifying right up until he walked to the podium. Here is the amazing thing: the words “I have a dream” did not appear it that text. The most famous phrase that seemed like the centerpiece of the speech was not yet present. If you listen to recordings of the speech, you hear one of the guests (Mahalia Jackson) say as King speaks “Tell them about the dream”. King continues with his script and a few minutes later she repeats herself, and a moment later King went off script to present one of the most gripping speeches in history off the top of his head. This improvisation did not appear out of the blue. King had been using the “I have a dream” construction in numerous speeches over the preceding summer. He had tried it in different contexts and combinations. In other words, he had practiced with it. On this occasion, he combined that preparation with the speech that was more “consciously” prepared to create a masterpiece. This improvisation doubled the length of his speech (which had been scripted to fit a packed agenda), but that apparently was not a real problem.
• One of the reasons that I started reading about innovation, creativity and so forth was that I had heard that people lose their creativity with age and I was getting older. It did not take long to learn that my specific fear was unfounded. The key to maintaining my creative potential was to be flexible in my thinking. This is not the easiest thing to do because it is much simpler to think in a more fixed manner. But this means that you are constantly challenging your own thoughts - and others. This is not always comfortable. When I read about the experimental thinkers who depended on learning together with a collaborative partner, I recognize something that has helped me. Some of my partnerships are regular and some are intermittent. What makes all of them useful is that they provide me with alternative perspectives on issues. But what is also interesting is that we are often working on different things. These people help me get my work done, by making me better at doing it – they don’t necessarily help me do it.
• Grant suggest that some people make major decisions based on their “identity” rather than probable outcomes or rules. There is a lot of attention paid to behavior and expectations in companies. Might it be better to pay attention to identity? It is a bit like the question, “What would ____ do?” Companies that focus only on their internal “Heroes” risk insularity in identity. People, who choose only historic figures, risk looking backwards. It makes me wonder if part of the utility of the Bridgewater principles is the “identity” this creates. A Bridgewater person does ­­­___, and this helps people react to ambiguous situations in a practical way.
• Grant makes an interesting implication about character. I wonder if conversations about ethics take a different path when the guiding idea is to set rules versus select character. Is character mutable in adults? Can a company hire and develop character or must they select for it?
• I could not figure out how to work this into the flow of the summary so here this is. You may be familiar with the phrase, “Don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions”. It is widely known and preferred by managers. The problem is that this silences people who see problems but have not figured out a solution. But perhaps more importantly, a solution-oriented culture becomes a culture of advocacy, dampening inquiry. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from abroad range of perspectives. People come to most issues with different quantities and qualities of information. The get the best perspective before making a decision, you must listen before reaching conclusions. This means that premature solution discussions cut off the potential to understand the problem better and devise or choose better solutions.
• Ray Dalio’s principles are available at: priniples.com and comprise a discussion of principles in general, his personal principles and his management principles.
• Unsurprisingly, this book does not comment on how people who are successful originals differ from those who are not. We all know people who are definitely unique and who do not succeed, and also know people who seem to lack any originality who succeed. The book pays the most attention to those who are original and successful, but it would be helpful to understand whether they were successful because they were original or despite being original. Was it actually that they brought a small dose of originality to a largely conventional approach?
• The book mentions that it may take 5-10 times for someone to “hear” a new idea. Since we are all someone, it is probable that we are rejecting many new ideas because we have not heard them enough – they aren’t really registering. Is this low quality communication due to a cognition barrier, poor expression, poor listening or excess complexity? Many ideas are really complex and I wonder if the task is to build that complexity in our own brains, which takes a long time because of the low bandwidth of speaking or reading. Conversely, what if it is bad listening behavior than inhibits us?

*Text in italics is directly quoted from the book