Think Again

Grant argues that the ability to reconsider what you believe is a distinct skill from intelligence, that it is not correlated with intelligence and may be negatively correlated with it, and that individuals and organisations can be trained in it.

His framework contrasts four modes: the preacher who defends a position, the prosecutor who attacks another's, the politician who seeks approval, and the scientist who holds beliefs as hypotheses and looks for disconfirming evidence. He argues most people default to the first three and that the scientific mode must be deliberately adopted. He draws on the confidence and competence literature, on Philip Tetlock's forecasting research, on his own studies of negotiation and of entrepreneurs trained in scientific method, and on cases including the Iridium satellite venture and firefighters who died holding their equipment.

The practical material covers how to change other people's minds, where he argues that motivational interviewing, asking questions and finding the small number of points of agreement work while argument and evidence generally do not; how to build organisational cultures of psychological safety where challenge is expected; and how to hold career and identity loosely enough to update. He introduces the practice of rethinking cycles and the recommendation to define yourself by values rather than by opinions.

The book is readable and the practical advice is usable. Its weakness is the usual one for this genre: it assembles studies selected to support the thesis, several of the cited effects are modest or contested, and the entrepreneurial training study it leans on is a single trial. Grant is also more confident that rethinking can be taught than the evidence establishes.

Organisational psychologist and professor of management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Give and Take presents evidence that people who default to helping others cluster at both the bottom and the top of performance distributions, and identifies what separates the two groups - directly useful for anyone designing incentives or picking partners. Think Again and Originals cover how people revise beliefs against new evidence and how unfamiliar ideas get championed inside established organisations.