#22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind | The Knowledge Project

Welcome to The Knowledge Project, I'm your host Shane Parrish, the curator behind the Fernum Street blog, which is an online community focused on mastering the best of what other people have already figured out.

The Knowledge Project is a place where we look at interesting people and uncover the frameworks they use to make better decisions, live life, and make an impact.

On this episode I have one of my favorite people, Adam Grant.

Adam has been Wharton's top rated teacher for so many years, they should just name the award after him.

He's also one of the most influential management thinkers.

Oh, and in his spare time he's written New York Times bestselling books, Give and Take, Originals, and co -authored Option B with Sheryl Sandberg.

We talk about the differences between givers and takers, what he learned about coming up with creative ideas, and how he fosters resilience in his kids.

We also explore the replication crisis in psychology and how he manages his work life balance.

Adam's answers will change how you see yourself at work, how you parent, and how you live.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

Oh, I guess I'm an organizational psychologist, and I split my time between a bunch of different roles.

I'm a professor at Wharton.

I teach an MBA class, an undergrad class, leadership, teamwork, organizational behavior.

That's all in the fall, and then in the winter, spring, summer I'm an author, speaker, consultant, and occasional recovering data geek.

How's that? How do you find time for all of that?

I think the ... I mean, the cycling helps, right?

I don't get a lot done that's not teaching related in the fall, but a whole semester of intense engagement with students leaves me with a bunch of new questions that I'm really excited to explore in research projects and writing.

Then as I go and speak about new ideas, I get new ideas back, and it feeds into changing my class each fall.

It's really nice to juggle these different hats.

How do you filter which problems you work on?

You walk away from students with probably hundreds of different ideas.

How do you pick the ones that you're going to focus your attention on?

Like you, I keep an idea journal, and it's a little notebook that I carry around in my pocket.

Every week I transcribe the little notes that are handwritten into a Word document, super high -tech.

Then about once a month, I like to just review the notes.

Usually I do it when I've given myself permission or freedom to work on something new and creative, because I feel like I've actually finished something that was more in completion mode.

Then as I go through it, what I'll notice is if an idea has come up more than once, that's either a sign that it's really interesting or that I'm just depressingly consistent.

I'll focus on the ideas that I've written about multiple times without even remembering having done it.

Then I also try to filter a little bit on if we understood this problem better or if we had a way to tackle it.

How much of a difference would it make for people's lives, especially their lives at work?

The more important it feels of all the ideas that I find personally interesting, the more likely I am to pursue it.

Are you doing research after you start pursuing those ideas and then a book follows or walk me through that kind of process of how we actually get to consume all of your amazing thoughts?

Often what happens is I feel like a chunk of my job is basically to read all the interesting new research that's coming out in the realm of work and psychology and figure out how it can be applied to make our work lives less miserable and help organizations become less unproductive.

Then oftentimes I'll be either in the classroom with students or I'll be out doing research and consulting in an organization or I'll be speaking on stage and I'll see something or hear something or experience something that directly contradicts what I've been reading in research or that's just totally

uncaptured in research.

Then I'll start doing a bunch of digging to figure out, well, wait, is it just that I've missed the data representing this or did the data not exist?

If it's the latter, then if I'm interested enough in it and I feel like I have something important to say about it, then I'll start a research project on it.

It could be months, it could be years before the project sees the light of day.

I guess over the period of several years, I start to notice patterns like I'm revolving around some similar questions or developing a philosophy that's bigger than one study or one insight and then that might suggest that there's an article to be written or a book to be written and then eventually I

decide to do it. How long did it take you to write your first book?

Forgive and take, there are two answers.

One is that it took me about four months and the other is that it took me about a dozen years.

The four months is the actual intensive writing period.

I do a lot of my writing in bursts.

Once I have the idea and an outline together, I spent several months pulling together my research that I wanted to cover, a lot of which was collecting dust in my head.

I need to go out and find some new studies that I wasn't familiar with yet.

Then also playing journalist to find the people that I wanted to interview and observe to really bring their stories to life and try to make the data sing.

That was several months of prep.

Then I sat down and it was about four months writing the first draft of the whole thing and then several months after that editing it.

From idea to like a finished product, it was about a year.

With give and take especially, I'd spent a dozen years doing research on the topic.

The ideas were developing, I was doing the studies and I guess it was a long time coming.

Is that the one that you, correct me if I'm wrong, but you wrote a book.

It was like 105 ,000 words and then you started all over again.

Thanks for reminding me of that, Shane.

I was really looking forward to reliving that experience.

Yes, I did write over 100 ,000 words.

What happened was spring of 2011, I got tenure and a couple weeks later, a friend and colleague, Barry Schwartz reached out and asked if I wanted to work on a book with him.

I was just incredibly excited about the opportunity.

I loved the paradox of choice, which I know you're a fan of.

I hosted Barry for a few talks.

We then wrote a paper together and he was one of my favorite collaborators.

I just thought it'd be so much fun to try to take important ideas and bring them out into the world more than just in the classroom with a few hundred students per year.

I was getting ready to say yes and I happened to mention it in a lab meeting with a group of my undergraduates.

They basically refused to let me do it.

They were like, look, we will drop out of your lab, we will disown you as a professor.

I'm like, can you even do that?

What does that mean?

They just said, look, if you're going to write a book, you should start with your own ideas, not work on a new topic with somebody who you love collaborating with.

You have a worldview and it's not out there where anybody can access it.

I eventually decided that they were right and I toyed around with a bunch of different ideas, finally decided that the give and take was the idea that I was most passionate about.

Once I had a vision for it, I started working on the proposal and accidentally wrote the book over a summer.

Accidentally heard a book.

I sat down with a glass of wine and came out on the other side with a fully formed manuscript.

It definitely didn't happen that way.

I woke up in the morning and I basically wrote until it was dinnertime and then I would start the next...

Sometimes I'd have more ideas later at night and then I repeat the next day.

I had so much... I guess I had a lot that I wanted to say.

I had a lot of studies that I wanted to cover.

I finished it and I sent it to my literary agent.

He was like, yeah, no.

No one would want to read this who's not an academic.

You need to start over and you need to write like you teach, not like you write research papers.

I was like, oh, yeah.

Forgot about that. That was when I started actually organizing all the different things that I wanted to say and going out and finding stories.

That was like the false start before the real book.

Whatever the process was, I mean, Givers and Takers turned out amazing.

Maybe you should do that for all your books.

I don't know. Thank you.

I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

I definitely don't plan to do it that way again, but there was something useful about that process which was I often find I have to write a longer summary of a study before I really start to distill what the Quora has or why I care about it.

That's especially true for the areas that I know really well.

Stephen Pinker would call it the curse of knowledge where for years I didn't even teach my own research in the classroom.

I think I spent a good six or seven years literally not saying a word about Givers and Takers when I taught because I just didn't know what was interesting about it to other people and I didn't have a concise way of articulating.

What I felt was deep insight but was sort of hard to translate out of academic language.

And I found that often when I read somebody else's work, I'm like, oh, yeah.

There's a kernel of this idea that can be sort of summarized in a sentence or a paragraph and then we can start to bring in the interesting nuances.

But with my own work especially, I found that I sometimes had to write the longer summary and then buried toward the end of it was, oh, that sentence is what I was just trying to say in four pages.

Here we go. Let's dive into Givers and Takers a little bit because I think there was actually three types of people, right?

Givers, Takers, Matchers.

Can you walk me through the differences just so everybody starts on the same playing field here?

Yeah. I think about these as styles of interaction.

And they're kind of grounded in the motives that we bring to the table every time we talk to another person.

So Givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you?

They're excited to add value and help other people.

And sometimes that means knowledge sharing or mentoring or just showing up earlier, staying late to support other people.

The opposite of a Giver is a Taker and that's somebody who's constantly trying to figure out, what can you do for me?

Come out ahead in every interaction.

And Takers are really great at volunteering for the projects that are interesting, visible, and important.

And then dumping the grunt work on everybody else.

But of course, they love to walk away with the lion's share of credit for every collective achievement, which is why I know we all adore working with Takers.

Maybe not. And then what I found was most people, they kind of hover in the middle of this spectrum as Matchers.

I found that over half of people identify this as their primary interaction style at work where they say, look, I don't want to be too selfish.

I don't want to be too generous.

So I'm going to trade favors evenly.

If you do something for me, I'll do something for you.

It's almost like they're accountants in relationships and they're keeping track of credits and debits to make sure that everything is fair and square and even.

So is the default of a matcher something like go positive, go first or is it wait and see?

So that can go either way.

And I guess I would love to see some more data on this, but my intuition is that a lot of people adopt matching as the way to sort of play it safe.

And when you look at core values, people tend to gravitate more a little bit in the Taker, Giver direction.

And so I'm guessing that if somebody like deep down is more of a Taker and believes that other people are selfish and I've got to put myself first, then they would probably wait to see what the other person contributes.

Whereas if you have somebody who would prefer to be a Giver but is afraid of becoming a doormat, that person would say, all right, look, I'll start out being a Giver and then Shane, if you screw me, then I'm going to realize that I need to be a matcher all the time which is a smart habit in general.

If you're a Giver, don't be a Giver with takers.

But I think that oftentimes what happens is matchers overgeneralize that.

And they're like, I always have to have these fair trades which ends up feeling really transactional and shortsighted.

Right and optimizing for the short term, usually almost never optimizes for the long term.

Bingo. Actually, to what extent does organizational culture play a role in, I mean, even if we're predisposed to have some sort of war on the spectrum between, say Givers on one end and Takers on the other, and say matchers are in the middle, we're all predisposed to probably somewhere in there.

But then we have an environmental impact which would be culture or organizational norms.

To what extent do you think that impacts our ability to receive feedback and change styles or switch our defaults?

I mean, culture is huge.

We know that. We know that, for example, if you start out in a really competitive team, and then you try to shift the norms to become more cooperative, it doesn't work.

And you end up with this pattern of cutthroat cooperation where I'm pretending to help you, but I'm really looking for ways to stab you in the back.

Whereas if you go the reverse, if you start out cooperative and then you say, all right, we're going to move more competitive, people naturally fall into this pattern of friendly competition, where it's like, yeah, we're going to – I'm going to try to beat you, but I'm really hoping that you push me

to raise my game and afterward we'll go out for drinks and maybe the loser buys the winter dinner.

And it's so interesting that trying to get to that same place, it doesn't work if you start out with more taking than giving norms.

And I think that a lot of what we see with the impact of culture is around the theories that people have about what it takes to be successful.

And I guess the tragedy that I've seen in a lot of organizations across sectors is you have these leaders who say, look, we want people to be collaborative.

We want them to help each other and problem -solve together, and then we're only going to measure and reward individual performance.

And so you end up basically disincentivizing people to act like givers.

And so a lot of people then check their values at the office door and they say, look, this is not a safe way to operate here.

And if you see that happen systematically over time, you'll build a culture where every new person who walks in the organization will look up the hierarchy and say, I don't see any givers who are extremely successful here.

And that may not mean that I have to be a taker, but it sure means I have to be careful not to be generous.

And I guess to me, it's one of the great tragedies of organizations that we end up, even in organizations that have match or give our cultures, oftentimes, if they're not strong, if those cultures aren't strong, you end up with successful takers still being the most visible people.

I can kind of see that happening.

I mean, I've worked in organizations that definitely feel along those lines.

Do you think there's a way to change that?

How do you go about changing a culture where it might be negatively competitive?

Well, I think the first thing that you do is you actually do have to think about your reward system.

So it's tempting to say, look, this is all about culture, but culture is influenced by structure.

And I don't want to incentivize any taker to become a better faker and say, look, now we're going to measure all your helping behaviors in the hopes that now you will get better at fooling people into thinking that you're really passionate about making other people successful.

What I want to see organizations do is take away the disincentives to being a giver and say, look, of course, we value this behavior, and it's not going to be punished.

It's not going to hurt your career.

It's not going to, as I saw at one elite consulting firm, result in a situation where people tell you, you have to be more selfish if you want to make a partner here.

And I think there are lots of interesting examples.

The most fascinating one I've seen is at Corning, where they made the Gorilla Glass for the iPhone and the iPad.

And they had this whole Corning Fellows program where they say, look, if you're a scientist or an engineer and you're a great innovator, we want to motivate you to stay by giving you a job for life and a lab for life.

And then the question is, how do you become a Corning Fellow?

And one of the first criteria is, are you the first author in a patent that's worth at least 100 million US dollars?

And a lot of companies would stop there, right?

If you can drive 100 million US in revenue, then we're going to lock you up for life, throw away that key, right?

But Corning says, we're worried the competent takers will pollute the culture.

And we also recognize that their contributions will dwindle over time, especially when they have lifetime job security.

So we're going to say there are other criteria too, which include, are you a supporting author on other people's patents?

Hmm. And I think this is genius because it often takes about a decade to get a patent in the world of glass.

Yeah. And there aren't a lot of takers who are willing to have the patients say, you know, Shane, I'm going to pretend to help you for the next nine years in the hopes that you will reward my generosity by making me the 43rd author on your path, right?

It's the people who day in and day out are helping each other and solving problems for each other and sharing their knowledge who, you know, who, who support each other's innovation.

And the key for Corning is they say, look, you got to do both.

You have to show that you can drive your own success, but you have to also show that you can elevate the success of other people.

And, you know, the question that I love to work with leaders on is what is your equivalent of later patent authorship?

Right. That's, you know, that's, that's a real indicator of who the day in, day out givers are.

When I read the book, one of the most surprising things that came across to me originally was kind of that if you think of a Gaussian almost distribution of outcomes, the givers tend to move towards the tails, uh, for more extremes, kind of success or failure.

Am I remembering that right?

Yeah, it was, it was a big surprise for me actually.

I had all this evidence that, you know, that the givers in most of the organizations I happen to be studying were more successful than, than takers or matchers.

And I think it was because at the time I had been studying jobs where teamwork and service were huge.

And so, you know, like nobody wants to take her on their team and over time you, like you figure out how to make sure that takers don't succeed.

And, you know, I don't know about you, but like I don't want my doctor or lawyer or real estate agent or insurance agent to be a taker either.

Uh, so, you know, it was clear that in teamwork and service jobs, there was, there was a real giver advantage.

Uh, but there was this other body of evidence showing that, you know, that givers often burned out and they were more likely to get exploited because they, you know, they were too trusting and, you know, they, they ended up helping other people too much, or they sacrificed their own goals to, you know,

to be there for others.

And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers, uh, and even medical professionals, um, the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum.

They, they made up a disproportionate number of the worst performers and of the best performers, um, you know, which just pure probabilistically you would expect matchers to be overrepresented on, on both of those extremes because more people are matchers than givers or takers.

Um, and yet, you know, that you, you did find pretty consistently that givers ended up either failing big or succeeding big.

And at first I thought that was, you know, really just a question of ability.

Um, you know, like givers who are extremely smart or who are, you know, extra skilled or talented in an area would, you know, would obviously quote unquote, like they would get away with it.

Um, and you know, there, there is a piece of the story that's explained by ability, but even after controlling for cognitive ability tests, uh, for various kinds of skill metrics, um, the, you know, sort of the polarization of giver performance held up and it turned out to be much more a question of strategies.

So, you know, the choices you make every day about who you help, when you help, how you help really matter in shaping whether, you know, that, that actually is detrimental or beneficial to your own career.

And how much of those are conscious would you say versus kind of like just the circumstances that were put in?

Well, I think, I think for most people initially it's not conscious, right?

They, they have a default style and, uh, you know, to borrow some, some Bob Cialdini language, they're just kind of in click were mode where like they find themselves in a situation.

It's like default habit comes out.

You can think about this in terms of heuristics and biases, right?

So givers have a, you know, like trust first, ask questions later heuristic often when they start out.

You know, you, it's hard to be generous consistently unless you believe that that's a safe way to operate in the world.

You know, takers have a heuristic that's sort of the opposite, which says like, you know, other people are always out to get you.

Or, you know, I guess Oliver Williamson, if you're a transaction cost economics person, which I am definitely not, he would say like, you know, there's, like you have to watch out for, for opportunism tinged with a guile and that anybody at any moment might be out to, you know, to screw you over.

And, you know, I think for, for matchers, it's, it starts out often as a more conscious strategy.

Um, you know, like, ah, okay.

Like I want to make sure that I, you know, I'm kind of fair to other people and, you know, I don't get more than I deserve, but I also don't get less than I deserve.

And then I think over time people get feedback and some givers get reinforced, right?

They, find that they're able to help others in ways that, that don't end up being self -sacrificing or, you know, they find that they're, you know, that they're, they're giving behaviors are just really valued and valuable to others.

And then, you know, other people just end up burning out or they get taken advantage of one too many times.

And that means you either adjust your style or you adjust your strategy.

And yeah, I never really thought about this out loud before.

Um, I've also never thought about it in my head before.

So you're only getting the out loud thoughts, but basically I think what happens to a lot of people is they, they change their style when they should be changing their strategy.

So, you know, I'm a giver, I, you know, I get exploited over and over again and then I'm like, aha, like being a giver is dangerous as opposed to, well, there's nothing wrong with being a giver.

And I should just rethink the way that I do it.

I was just thinking like, it sounds like everybody, the seeds of resentment are planted in everybody, but takers.

And so that eventually, like if you work with enough takers and, and, you know, there's probably some sort of threshold, but you, you slowly over time, it just become more and more resentful.

And like you said, you instead of changing your strategy, you maybe change your default.

And then you become even more resentful because then you become that person who's constantly looking over their shoulder going like, everybody's going to screw me over, even though you're predisposed to help people.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that.

And, you know, as I think about this idea of resentment, there was a partner at a professional services firm who read Give and Take and came to me and said, you know, it's really interesting how my views of takers have changed over my career.

He said so, you know, like, I, you know, I think of myself as a giver, which is a good qualifier.

Because if he had just said, I'm a giver, I would have been like, nope, dude, you're a taker.

A little too quick to claim the generosity label as opposed to trying to earn it.

But, you know, when he said, I think of myself as a giver, it was clear, okay, you know, he's saying like, I value helping others, I enjoy it, you know, I want to be the kind of person who does that with no strings attached.

And he said early in my career, you know, I really resented takers, because, you know, I felt like they were like, they were trying to cheat the system.

And, you know, like, a sustainable system is one where, you know, it's all givers.

Because, you know, if everybody helps everybody, then, you know, have to worry about trusting anybody.

So your relationships and, you know, even your work, they just become way more efficient.

And you also then that means if everybody's a giver, you can go to anybody you, you know, you might want to, even if, you know, you don't have a close relationship with them.

And that means you have a better shot at, you know, reaching the most connected person or the best expert.

And, you know, if if the whole system works that way, then, you know, we can all go to the people who are best poised to help us.

That's, you know, these takers are screwing us and they're forcing us to have more and more matches in the system who, you know, will kind of wield the sort of justice and punish takers.

And, you know, that that shouldn't have to be that way.

And he said, you know, now this is, you know, sort of reflecting on about a 30 year transition.

He said, now when I meet a taker, I just feel sorry for them.

Like, what kind of life do you have to have lived to believe that everybody is out to get you?

And that every single interaction you have, if you don't come out ahead, then, you know, somehow you're going to fall way behind.

And he said like it, you know, it's just got to be like really unpleasant to live in this person's head.

And it tracks with something that Bob Sutton is fond of pointing out, which is like, look, if you're, you know, if you're a taker, you know, professionally and you managed to achieve success, you're still a loser in life.

Yeah, true enough. And you're probably not very happy, right?

You, this is the people that I think went do overs at the end of their life.

And they realized that they don't have a lot of meaningful friendships or relationships.

The people who leave the organization and they seem to have a lot of friends, but then they all disappear the next day.

Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Although I am curious about, you know, the time horizon that it takes for that, you know, that regret to kick in because Jennifer Ocker has some data suggesting that, you know, sort of day to day takers experience more pleasure than givers do because they get to make like every choice is exactly what they

want. Whereas, you know, givers end up taking on more of the burden of responsibility and duty and saying, you know, look, like maybe it wasn't that fun to do this thing for another person, but you know, it's really important to me to live those values or I care about this person or, you know, yeah,

it'll cost me a little bit of time, but you know, it'll benefit them a lot more.

And so like I actually love, I love this cost benefit calculus that I found that a lot of givers use this early, which is like, it's not like to the benefits to me outweigh the cost to me, it's to the benefits to others outweigh the cost to me.

Right. And, you know, I think that that in the short term, that can be unpleasant.

And if you spend every hour of your day doing that for a few weeks, it's not surprising that takers will seem happier.

But yeah, I mean, in terms of in the long run, building meaningful lasting relationships feeling like, you know, you contributed to something bigger than yourself, I feel like takers are at a major disadvantage there.

I was gonna as you were saying that one thing that I was thinking was kind of, if you're going through that, and you're doing something that is, you know, maybe a high personal cost, but beneficial to everybody else, and you're kind of like sucking it up and doing it because right thing to do, you would kind

of internally search and find meaning in that.

And then you would connect to maybe the broader picture or the meaning of the organization or what you're trying to accomplish.

And you would attach yourself to something outside of yourself.

But I mean, I'm just thinking out loud.

I had a question I wanted to dive into which is, is there empirical evidence that a team of all givers will outperform like a team of a mixed team?

Or like, how do you think about that?

So I think you will appreciate this as a fellow Charles Darwin fan.

So Darwin wrote about this, he didn't have any data for it.

But, you know, I was going back and sort of rereading like what, you know, there's this sort of, like when we use the word Darwinian, it almost suggests that everybody's a taker, right?

Where there's this survival of the fittest mentality.

And that means like, if I don't defeat you in some way, then you might end up defeating me.

And yet Darwin himself wrote that I think the direct quote was that if you had a tribe where they were always ready to aid one another and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, they would be victorious over most other tribes and this would be natural selection.

And that, you know, that was Darwin basically hinting at the idea of group selection, which has been incredibly controversial in evolutionary psychology and biology over the last half century or so.

I think David Sloan Wilson has made a very compelling case that group selection, at least under certain conditions is real.

And, you know, it's not hard to figure out why this might be because if you have a group of all takers, it's basically every man or woman for themselves.

And you end up with these constantly suboptimal decisions and allocations of effort where instead of figuring out what's going to be best for the tribe, everybody's basically maximizing their own outcomes, which leads to all kinds of externalities and inefficiencies.

Whereas if everybody's a giver, you sit down and you can say, all right, like what does the group need to be successful?

And then, you know, you sort of match people's roles to their unique expertise or skill set or, you know, or contribution.

And that, you know, that's basically a foreshadowing of what we now have about now 35 years of evidence for, which the main way this gets studied in my field of management and organizational psychology is organizational citizenship behavior, which are, you know, all the behaviors that are not part of accomplishing

the core task, but are still relevant to the functioning of the team or the organization.

So it's, you know, speaking up with ideas and suggestions, going the extra mile with your effort, it's sportsmanship, it's showing loyalty to other people, it's helping out day to day.

And if you look at the aggregate of those behaviors, they are critical to team and organizational effectiveness.

And, you know, a lot of organizations recognize this.

We know, for example, that if you look at the meta -analyses that Padsakoff and colleagues have published, that the amount of time you spend helping others is as critical to your job performance as how well you do your actual tasks.

They carry about equal weight in the average performance evaluation.

And this is data from over 51 ,000 employees accumulated.

They also carry about equal weight in promotion decisions.

And so many organizations have evolved norms or heuristics over time that say, look, even if we're not good at rewarding individual giving behaviors and valuing those, in the aggregate, we don't want to promote people who are takers as successful, because we know that the organization depends on giving

behaviors. And where I think this gets a little more nuanced is breaking down what kind of giving behavior does the organization really need.

And this is also where a lot of givers sort of shoot themselves in the foot, because they end up in reactive mode saying, all right, I'm going to help with whatever requests I get, as opposed to starting with proactively, like, what is the organization trying to accomplish?

Exactly. What's the mission?

And then what's the most valuable, most irreplaceable contribution I can make that advances the team or the organization's mission.

And then if you align your giving with those collective goals, the behavior obviously adds a lot more value.

Did you do any work to see if those were the ones that became the positive outliers?

Not yet. I think I'd like to see somebody to do it.

I think that it seems likely that it fits into some things we do know empirically.

So we know, for example, there's some neat research by RAP and colleagues, which basically shows that if you spend a lot of time helping other people, if you have poor time management skills, that's really bad for your performance and your productivity.

But if you have good time management skills, it actually seems to contribute positively to your performance and productivity.

And what that suggests is that people who are more thoughtful about how they spend their time end up either they end up just getting more done period and they have more time to be helpful, but also they end up helping in ways that are clearly more valued by others.

And I think you could extrapolate from that, okay, there are multiple ways of being thoughtful if you care about being generous.

And one of those is to say, look, I've got to draw the Venn diagram of what the organization needs most.

And then what are my most distinctive skills?

And the overlap between those two is where I should be doing most of my giving, if not all of it.

I like that. That's a really good way to conceptualize it.

So if you were composing a team, you would be looking for all givers and not having a taker in the group.

I would definitely want to weed out takers, but I would want a mix of givers and matchers.

But wouldn't matchers just turn into givers?

They would, but if you have strong matchers who really believe in fairness and justice over compassion and generosity, then you have much more foolproof taker detection and defense mechanisms.

Because, again, givers tend to be too trusting.

Matchers tend to be, they fight fire with fire.

So they're tough on takers and they're generous with givers.

And it's just, it's a good safeguard to have some people who operate like extreme matchers in your group.

I like that. Switching gears to your second book, you wrote was originals, which is kind of what we can learn from great creators.

So what's the high level that you got out of that in terms of what we can learn about great original creators?

So I noticed after I wrote Give and Take that a lot of the questions I was getting from executives and emails from readers were around, like, if I have a culture of takers, how do I change it into a culture of givers?

And as I worked with this question more, I realized it was sort of a special case of a broader question, which is, you know, if I want to change my culture, how do I do that?

And I sort of had that, I guess, in the back of my mind.

And I also started getting a lot of questions from my students about, you know, like, I come into, you know, to an organization and I'm kind of at the bottom of the hierarchy.

But I have an idea or suggestion that I think is really important.

How do I get heard when I don't yet have the authority to drive real change?

And then on the flip side of that, I had a lot of leaders asking, well, how do I fight groupthink and, you know, get people to, you know, to challenge their own assumptions and think creatively.

And I'd been doing this body of research on proactivity, which was all about, you know, being the kind of person who takes initiative and champions change and, you know, says, look, like I'm not going to be a conformist.

I'm not going to follow other people just for the sake of it.

I'm going to advocate for the ideas that I believe in.

And, you know, I guess all of this was sort of brewing and I eventually decided that what we needed was we needed a book that was sort of a sequel to creativity, because there are tons of books out there based on volumes of evidence about how to generate more creative ideas.

And I felt like those books basically kind of left off at, well, like, what do you do once you have an idea?

Yeah. How do you know if it's any good?

How do you speak up effectively?

How do you build a coalition of advocates and allies?

And then, you know, some related questions around, like, timing.

How do you know when to act?

And, you know, ultimately, how do you build a culture that, you know, that allows people to bring ideas forward effectively?

And so, you know, that was kind of where I started.

And I walked in thinking that, you know, like, anybody who's a highly original thinker, you know, and it's comfortable being a nonconformist must be, you know, somebody who loves taking risks and who always acts in advance, you know, sort of first mover before everybody else and who has really good

judgment about ideas.

And I found that I was wrong on all three of those fronts that, you know, the most original people among us pretty consistently are extremely risk averse.

So, they really like sort of real clarity and maybe even certainty about success.

And they do everything they can once they have an idea to, you know, to de -risk it and make it, you know, something that's not going to expose them to the possibility of failure.

But they also remind themselves that, you know, it's like, yeah, it's bad to fail, but it's even worse to fail to try.

And, you know, that's how a lot of them stay motivated.

And then the first mover advantage was a total myth.

So, it turns out that, you know, if you look at the entrepreneurship realm, for example, or companies launching new products, on average, the sort of the settlers as opposed to the pioneers, the second and third movers are about seven times less likely to fail than the first movers.

Because it's, you know, it's really like, it's a huge amount of work to create a market from scratch.

And you end up making all these specific investments in, you know, in your product or service or technology that are hard to change.

It's much easier to watch somebody else create a market and then improve upon their solution.

And so, you know, it turned out like you want to be quick to start, but sometimes there's real value in being slow to finish.

And then, you know, on the judgment point, I was really stunned that the most original thinkers had more bad ideas than their peers.

And that was because they just had more ideas.

And, you know, that talk about Darwinian, you know, like, this is the easiest way to understand how to get better at idea selection is to basically say, look, the more ideas you generate, the better you're shot at stumbling on some truly great ones.

And you have to tolerate a lot of sort of dead ends and false starts in order to have a shot at doing something truly worthwhile.

I remember reading that in your book.

I think the example that comes to mind was William Shakespeare, who wrote some of his most profound work and also some of his, you know, it's widely considered to be his worst work during the same period of time when he just had this massive amount of output.

It was so funny looking at the, I mean, we don't know for sure exactly when Shakespeare wrote each of his plays, but, you know, there are plenty of experts who have kind of traced like the approximate windows when, you know, different plays were written.

And I was done looking back to see that like in the very same period that he was writing Macbeth or King Lear, he was also churning out Timon of Athens, which is, I mean, if you ask critics, it's so much worse that they have a hard time even admitting that Shakespeare wrote it.

It's like, you know, you kind of imagine this curve of expertise where the better you get, like the fewer of, you know, of those average or mediocre works you churn out.

And that's not what you see.

You do see, of course, there's a learning curve, but once people achieve expertise, they're still going on lots of random walks.

And, you know, they may have cleared some objective bar of quality where like, you know, like Shakespeare's worst play would still be better than my best one, but there's still a tremendous amount of variance in how much their work resonates with their audience.

And that turns out to be true across fields.

It's really easy to see in highly artistic fields, of course.

But you also, you can pick it up with inventors and entrepreneurs and scientists.

And I think it's, you know, it's just, it's part of, it goes back to the curse of knowledge that when you generate an idea, by definition, you are too close to it to understand how other people are going to perceive it and experience it.

And you can improve your taste over time.

You can develop all kinds of mechanisms for gaining distance from your work.

And those can help you judge it a little bit more accurately, but it's never going to be nearly as accurate as the wisdom of a crowd that didn't generate the idea.

Do you think that always holds true?

Like, I kind of want to geek out about this a little bit.

Do you think that there's, are there circumstances where the quality -quantity relationship kind of divides from that, where it's better to do more quality and maybe less quantity?

Yes. What would those be?

I say that largely because I don't believe there are any conditions for anything in human behavior or social science where the opposite isn't true.

Like there are always times where you can take the most robust relationship that you know of in behavioral science.

And if you can't find conditions that reverse it, then you're not a behavioral scientist.

So the default answer is yes.

When would that be?

So I think maybe it depends on whether we're talking about sort of the number of ideas that you generate versus the number of ideas that you develop.

I think that it's always better to generate lots of ideas because at the outset of deciding what you're going to work on, the broader the raw possibility set, the more likely it is that you're going to have carefully considered what you should invest your time in and sort of made, I guess, some good

bets about what's going to be both new and valuable.

I think when it comes to developing your ideas further then, it's probably the case that there's some kind of curvilinear relationship between quantity and quality where if you're trying to work on 19 ideas at once, you're going to end up with divided attention.

You'll have residue from one idea sort of clouding your ability to think on another idea.

If you're lucky, somehow those ideas turn out to be interconnected and there's some positive spillover from one to another.

But I think for the most part, what you need is the clarity of focus from working on a relatively small number of things, especially if you're working on something that's hard.

I think that's probably another contingency is the difficulty of the problem that you're trying to solve, which in the business world might be sort of like how crowded is this market?

How many real experts have worked on this problem already?

I think the higher the difficulty or the complexity level, the harder it is to do lots of things at once.

The one caveat I want to put on that though is we also know that very frequently sort of subconscious thought is more creative than conscious thought.

You've probably tracked the Dijkstra housework on this at some point.

I think that one of the reasons that working on at least a few ideas as opposed to just one can be useful is that it sort of keeps the wheels turning in the back of your mind on the previous idea that you were working on.

And sometimes it sort of works itself out for you, which is really convenient.

I'm thinking as you're saying that that there's probably some sort of processing going on where we have this nature that we're like predisposed to see success.

Your book, you sat down, you wrote it and we see the output of that.

We see that it's like a New York Times bestseller.

What we don't see is like all the failures that go into it, all the other ideas that you had.

All of the visibility of that is either low or so far from what we see that it doesn't consciously kind of produce it.

So we think that people only have these incredibly successful ideas.

Because we don't see the failures, I think that it gets lost that there's a process to creating anything that's probably meaningful in terms of art or literature or inventions that includes a huge cemetery of kind of projects that didn't make it.

Yeah, I think that one of the most dangerous things you can do is you can compare yourself to anybody who you don't know.

Because you're only going to have access if they've been careful about having pride and quality of work.

They're only going to put out their best work and you're going to end up just having completely unrealistic expectations of what's possible.

And how like, I guess in particular what's possible as far as consistent greatness is concerned.

Do you think that's playing out right now in broader society to like sidetrack a little bit here?

Because like we see Twitter and we see Instagram and we only see the very best of people's lives.

Nobody's taking pictures of them crying because somebody broke up with them.

We only see these kind of overwhelmingly happy, positive, and we're not being exposed to the spectrum of lives.

So I think that's starting to change in the sense that Silicon Valley is well known for celebrating failure.

Although people are usually only comfortable celebrating failure after they've achieved success, which is sort of a paradox because then you don't get to see any ordinary people failing or people who seem to be ordinary failing.

There's some really interesting new data on Facebook actually showing that we like people more on Facebook who are a little bit more self -expressive, who don't sort of live these airbrushed lives, but might even share negative information.

In particular, your friends like you more if every once in a while you share kind of like a like, yeah, I had a really bad day or here's what's going on in my life that's truly depressing.

Again, I think it's curvilinear.

We don't like people who complain every hour of every day, but I think this is a problem in the narratives that we tell about success more broadly.

You're expected to write a bio and a resume where you scrub out all of your failures.

That's a real disservice to anybody.

Not only that, but you glorify your achievements, yeah, which just ends up sort of creating a nice little funhouse mirror for other people to look at you in, which is totally distorted.

I think that at the same time, I understand that people, especially if they haven't achieved what they think are their major goals, I understand why people don't just want to come out there and say like, yeah, here are all the bad ideas that I worked on and all the jobs that I applied to that I got

rejected for. That requires some real courage to put it out there, but I think there ought to be some middle ground where we can say like, hey, here are the kinds of things that I'm toying with right now and I don't know which ones are going to work out.

Right. One fascinating part of the book was you mentioned that some people are more able to avoid emotional painkillers, which is like justifying the status quo the way it is.

Why are some people perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo and maybe they have more drive?

I mean, is this learned?

Is it culture? Is it innate?

I think like everything else in psychology, it turns out to be a mix of the above.

People who are perpetually dissatisfied with the status quo, it usually stems from having extremely high expectations.

Tim Urban is fond of saying on weight, but why?

That happiness is reality minus expectations.

The higher your expectations are, the harder it is for reality to live up to them.

If your expectations are just extremely high, you're going to walk around pissed off all the time.

Then the question is how do you channel that?

Do you channel that into constant complaining or do you channel that into trying to fix the things that you believe are broken?

I think that you often hear engineers' stereotypes sort of perpetually dissatisfied in a good way.

I remember Larry Page telling me once that he felt like the definition of an engineer is somebody who immediately has to optimize everything that he or she sees.

That can be a really good quality to have except sometimes you end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You introduce changes that are perceived as optimizing, but they're really improving the focal problem while making others worse.

Of course, systems thinking is supposed to be the general solution to that.

I think that's where you start to see, okay, if you're perpetually dissatisfied and you're looking at the world through a microscope, then it's really hard to end up solving problems in a way that's useful.

Whereas if you're good at – I guess it's hard to do that if you just have a telescope too, because you don't see them with enough detail.

What you need is the ability to zoom in and zoom out to look at things through a microscope and a telescope simultaneously or at least toggle between the two.

I think if you do that, having this disposition to be unhappy, not unhappy in the, I hate my life sense, but unhappy in the way that the world is organized could be improved and I'm going to do something about it sense, then you're probably going to end up with increasing levels of satisfaction as you

fix the things that are broken.

As a father, what do you do to nurture creativity in your kids?

I think that most of the time, nurturing creativity is mostly about getting out of the way.

I think it's really hard to raise a creative child.

It's really easy to thwart a child's creativity.

The data show that having too many rules is one way to do that.

If you look at highly creative high schoolers, for example, on average, they had about half a rule in their household, whereas they're sort of, I don't know how that works, but averages are misleading in many ways.

Two point five kids, yeah.

There you go. On average, a lot of the families didn't even have rules.

If they did, they just had one or two that were core.

Whereas kids who are rated by their teachers is more conventional in their thinking, tended to grow up in households with about six core rules.

It's not that we don't have rules, but what the data shows is that if you are going to create rules, they shouldn't be about the rules themselves.

They should be about the underlying values that they represent.

If you're going to have a rule about bedtime, like we like to put our kids to bed and have them, when it's bedtime, we basically say, look, it's reading time and then we'll tell you a lights -out time.

It's not the draconian, okay, here is your bedtime.

It's this, hey, we really value being well rested.

It's important to us that you get a good night's sleep.

You'll feel better.

You'll get along with other people better.

My life is easier the next day.

There you go. It benefits us too if all goes as planned.

We try to be really clear when we do set rules about the values behind them.

We try to not have arbitrary rules.

We try to give our kids a lot of responsibility.

One example is, I'll say to our daughters, this is coming right out of the research I've read.

I do try to be one of those psychologists who doesn't screw up our kids, but sometimes the research is too useful not to apply.

In this case, okay, so let's say you're having a dilemma around, how do you manage bedtime?

I will say to our nine -year -old or our six -year -old, all right, lights will go out at 8 .30 and I'm going to give you a choice.

Do you want to be responsible and turn them out yourself or do you want me to come in and turn them out?

Then if they choose responsibility, I'll give them a little bit extra time, but if they don't deliver on the responsibility, then they lose the privilege temporarily.

That way, they get to make all these choices and feel like they're in charge of their own destiny and they get to think for themselves a little bit about how they want to manage their time, which I think is useful.

What are your core family values then that you center around or gravitate towards or try to instill in your children?

You have three kids, right?

Yeah, we have three, two girls and a boy.

I think when it comes to core family values, we care obviously a lot about generosity and kindness.

One of the things that we discuss at the dinner table every week is the conversation about what did you do at school today is not that helpful.

What's much more helpful is what's something you did for someone else this week.

We try to talk about that knowing that, again, this is really scary, but in the data, parents say that the concern for others is their most important value, but kids think that achievement is their most important value because all you talk about is accomplishments.

How did you do on a test?

Let's talk about how the soccer game went.

So we try to bring these values to life through discussions, and we know that the questions we ask will really influence what our kids think is important.

I think generosity, kindness is a big one.

We definitely want our kids to value learning, and so one of the principles that we follow is anytime they're interested in learning about something, we'll find a book on it.

And their challenge then is to learn about it and maybe to teach it to us, which is really fun.

Then we get to have a whole discussion about it.

Beyond that, I think we have lots of specific values, but those are two of the big ones that we care a lot about in our household.

I like that. It sounds similar to what I do with my kids, which is like every day during dinner, I ask them something they did that was kind for somebody else today.

The whole point of that is to reinforce that there's no expectations when you're kind of people, but you can always be able to look at it to do something nice for other people.

How old are yours? Mine are seven and eight.

Impressive. I often find that if you do that daily, there may not be enough opportunities.

Well, I mean, the conversation isn't that like an adult level there.

It's kind of like some days are better than others.

I remember when we first started having these conversations, it'd be like, well, I didn't steal his pencil kind of thing and that was the nice thing.

I'm like, I think we need to have a broader conversation about what nice means.

I love it. So moving on to option B, which kind of just came out, which is about kind of facing adversity and building resilience, which you co -authored with Sheryl Sandberg.

I love that book. I mean, at times I was happy and sad and the emotion that it evoked in me and then the realization that I was doing things, trying to help other people through things that were just completely tone deaf to their reality.

It was incredible. What did you learn writing that book about kind of facing adversity and building resilience?

So I think one of the big takeaways for me is that I don't think we're very good at mental time travel.

I think when something goes wrong in our lives, whether it's professional or personal, when we face hardship, what we do is we basically amplify it and we catastrophize it.

It starts to feel like this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me.

In rare cases, it is, but that's pretty stiff competition.

For something to be the worst thing that ever happened to you, of all the bad things that have ever occurred in your life, this has to be worse.

The odds are that most of the time when something bad happens, it's not the worst thing.

I think that one of the skills that we all need to develop is the ability to get in touch with our past selves, and it's something that Sheryl is exceptionally good at.

It's something that I've read a lot of research on, is to imagine, okay, what would my past self have done in this situation?

When you do that, a lot of times you see that there are skills that you're equipped with now that you didn't have before.

When that's not the feeling, the next thing is to say, all right, what's an adversity that I went through that was similarly difficult or even worse?

How did I overcome it?

Remembering that you have faced difficulties in the past that you've gotten through them.

One, it boosts your self -efficacy and gives you confidence that you can do it again.

Two, sometimes it even gives you strategies that you forgot about that you might have deployed earlier in your life and have just lost sight of.

I think that that mental time travel is extremely valuable.

Do you practice that now?

Do you do that only when you're in situations of adversity, or is it something you do more regularly now?

It's something that I've started doing also for occasional accomplishments.

I remember publishing give and take.

It was a really amazing feeling to write a book.

I've loved books since the day that I could read.

I remember growing up, my mom would take out 30 books every week from the library.

I would tear through them.

A lot of my happiest moments in life have been either the direct result of reading or happened while I was reading a book.

Also, a lot of the thoughts that have most, I guess, shaped my worldview have come from books.

The idea of actually becoming an author was such a meaningful life transition.

Then originals came out and I was like, yeah, I wrote another book.

The funny thing is, Dan Pink once told me that choosing a favorite book is a little bit like choosing a favorite child.

I'm not going to do that, but I will say I wrote give and take first because it's the set of ideas that I am most passionate about.

It's my most poor set of values.

I think originals is a better written book.

I think I became a better writer over the few years in between.

It's not like I should have been less excited or proud when book two came out than book one.

Yet, I totally adapted to the idea of being an author.

It hardly even registered as something to mark and celebrate.

It's not like a transition from non -author to author.

It's like this is what authors do.

Author again. Now, I'm not like a one book wonder, whatever that means.

I think that what I've started doing to try to prevent that from happening, which is something that writing with Cheryl really imprinted on me is Cheryl said, look, moments of joy are really important.

They're part of what makes life worth living.

They're part of what we have to look forward to.

It's part of being human is being able to enjoy life.

You don't want to deprive yourself of that.

When these milestone moments do occur, what I do now is I rewind about five years and I ask myself, okay, if my five years ago self knew this was going to happen, how excited would I be?

Then it's my responsibility to be that excited now.

Then I have this annoying internal monologue about like, well, I'm not as excited.

Why am I not as excited?

Then it's just not fun anymore.

It actually does get me most of the time back in touch with the emotionist to say, wow, like if you had told me five years ago that I would have written a second book, I would have freaked out that anybody read my first book and that there was an audience for a second one.

Then also, I had an idea that I thought was worth devoting a whole book to or a question that was worth writing about for that many words and pages.

That to me has been something that transcends adversity that kind of rewinding and saying, all right, how would I look at the situation I'm in now if I could earlier in my life, usually as a way to, I guess, sustain some appreciation and gratitude and even some satisfaction.

What kind of conversations do you have with your kids about building resilience and facing adversity?

Oh, well, I think most of the time what we do is we end up asking our kids to think about this through the eyes of others.

One of the things that's hard for anybody but especially hard for kids is when you're in a difficult situation, it's hard to gain perspective on it.

Usually, the emotions are overwhelming, your ability to think.

You can say in Kahneman terms that it's all system one and not enough system two.

The way that we try to prepare our kids for that is we ask them whenever we're facing difficulty or whenever they come home and tell us about a friend at school who ran into a difficult situation, we ask, well, what should I do or what should your friend do?

We actually ask our kids for advice.

The hope is that that helps them rehearse thinking through different kinds of hardship that it gives them some go -to strategies to work with.

There's this research on how one of the, as you know from reading option B, one of the big ways to build kids resilience is to show them that they matter.

Mm -hmm. Mattering is just the belief that other people notice you, care about you and rely on you.

I think most parents are exceptionally good at the first two.

We know we're supposed to notice our kids.

That's why we have lots of rules about no smartphones at dinner.

We also go out of our way to do tons of things that show how much we care about them.

But we forget that relying on kids is also a way to build their resilience because it shows them that they're not helpless.

That they have the strength to do things for others.

The hope is that whenever we ask them for advice on navigating a dilemma or a challenge, that that makes them feel that they matter because we are willing to rely on them.

I like that a lot. I want to switch gears a little bit here.

As an organizational psychologist, what do you think of the educational theory of communities of practice internal to organizations?

I think communities of practice are one of the most, I would say, under sighted and under applied literatures in mostly in the micro sociology worlds.

I remember first reading Leven Wenger I guess probably almost 15 years ago now.

I thought the core insight was really powerful that you don't develop expertise just by reading a book because a lot of the expertise you need isn't written down anywhere yet.

It's too early or it's just tacit knowledge where people in a profession haven't yet even figured out how to articulate what they know.

They just do it. The way that you build expertise actually is by joining a community of people who share your interests, who may have the skills that you want to acquire.

You talk to them, you watch them in action, you hang out with them and then the hope is there's a group level elevation in capability.

I think it's brilliant.

I think that most organizations are not designed, most workplaces are not designed to build these.

Frankly, it's one of the things that's so valuable about Farnham Street is you've gathered this group of people who share an interest in improving their decision -making and maybe even being reasonable rational human beings.

They learn together, which I think is incredibly cool.

You think that that's an underutilized tool organization.

What would you do to foster that or bring more awareness to it?

I think the first thing I would do is I would create a mechanism where people could build their own communities of practice.

A lot of organizations now have expert databases where you can search for people who are knowledgeable about the thing that you want to learn or apply.

I think that's useful, but it's kind of backward.

What you should have are mechanisms for people to say, look, I want to learn more about this.

Who else wants to learn about it?

We can learn together instead of… Yes.

Then once you have a critical mass around a topic, either because it's just something a lot of your employees care about or it's something that has real relevance to the future of the organization, then you can start to think about bringing experts in or putting organizational resources behind it.

One of the coolest examples that I've seen of this is Jay Moldenhauer Salazar.

He's an HR leader who at the time he was at Old Navy, now he's at Riot Games.

What he did was he took on a new HR role.

He had I think about 100 people reporting to him all of a sudden.

He sat down with every one of them and he said, look, I want you to start a secret mission.

You know he's a gamer when he says secret mission.

He was like, people are going to be either totally excited about this or totally weirded out and either way, it's a good introduction to who I am.

He said, your secret mission is to find something you're passionate about that doesn't exist at this organization yet and create a group around it or an initiative around it, except it can't just be for you.

It has to be of interest to at least one other person.

He said, I'm going to meet with you about it and I'm going to ask you 90 days, what's your mission and how can I support it?

How cool would it be if every manager gave every person with them a chance to go on one of those missions?

That'd be awesome. Speaking of managers, I mean there's a trend to unmanaging or there seems to be anyway a visible kind of giving people space and freedom to be themselves rather than conform to any predetermined structure.

Maybe Holocracy would be an example of that.

What do you make of all this?

Oh, well, I saw on Twitter this morning one of your fans wanted to ask about that.

I'm curious to hear your take on this too, Shane.

I'm bothered by the fact that this interview is so one -sided and I don't get to ask you all my questions.

I like about it. It works.

I know, but then that's really selfish of you.

I'm a taker now. You know, you're doing it on your terms instead of my – I realize it's – one of us will leave this conversation feeling like we didn't get to ask enough questions.

I've resigned myself to being that person today.

I don't know. Yeah, so I mean, my answer to this would kind of be I think it can work, but it's a very hard thing to implement backwards, so going into an existing culture and changing it.

I think it can kind of work from the ground up, but there's not a lot of base cases of it being incredibly successful.

So, I don't know enough about it to say like, I would be a fan of it or not.

I mean, as a entrepreneur, I think that would give me more freedom inside of an organization to kind of identify problems and solve them, but then I think it would also be a bit of a mess, and people that I talk to in some of these organizations tend to feel like it's a bit of a mess.

Yeah, I think – I mean, I think holacracy is a really interesting idea.

I think that – you know, I'm torn because on the one hand, there was a book actually that Hal Levitt wrote.

He spent his whole career studying organizations, and the final book of his career was called Top Down, and it was about how hierarchy is inevitable for social organization, and it's basically here to stay, and the more you fight it, as opposed to figuring out how to work with it, the worse off your

organization is going to be.

But then on the flip side, I don't think we've tried that many alternatives, and the ones that have been tried probably haven't been studied.

They certainly haven't been A -B tested to try to figure out how to improve them.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

So, what I would love to do is I would love to set up an organization where – you know, I don't know whether holacracy is the right type of system, or whether you want a self -management system more like the tomato paste producer Morningstar has, where they have what they call a fluid dynamic hierarchy,

and different people are in charge in different meetings, in different projects.

But whatever the model, what we should be doing is we should be running constant experiments to try to change the way that hierarchy has evolved and see whether a flat organization works under certain conditions, or whether there are certain circumstances you need hierarchy, and then how do we best

toggle between the two.

I think, you know, as I think about the research on this so far, there was a great HBR last year by Ethan Bernstein.

I think it was called Beyond the Holacracy Hype, if I remember correctly.

It was the best evidence -based article I've seen so far on it that basically said, look, here are some benefits.

Here are some challenges.

Here's what we've learned from studying Zappos.

And I think that's the kind of dialogue we need more of.

And I would say the jury is still out.

I think it's, I agree with you that it can work.

And I think we know far too little about how to make it work.

Like Malcolm Gladwell, you use a lot of incredibly compelling stories to supplement your interpretation of social sciences.

To what extent are you afraid of creating false narratives?

And how do you guard against the mistaken correlation and causation?

How do you, think about that?

Well, I think that, I guess the first thing I would say is that you have to let the data drive the narrative rather than vice versa.

So you're in danger if you have a story you want to tell or an idea that you want to promote and then you go out confirmation bias searching for the right data.

What I think what we should do is we should start by asking questions and then, you know, search for data that inform the question.

And if you can't find any data to contradict your point of view, you haven't looked hard enough.

I think that there was a great quote from a sociologist, Gary Marks.

I don't think he's related to Carl, but he said that he was talking about the difference between a fundamentalist and a scholar.

And he said the difference is that a fundamentalist gives answers and a scholar asks questions.

And it's been actually interesting to think about this.

I think it's, you know, I'll be scholars.

And, you know, if I were to imagine, okay, there are different ways that I could have written give and take.

The pure fundamentalist would have only talked about the benefits of giving and said, look, you should help other people because it will make you more successful in your career and it will make you happier.

And a scholar's responsibility is to say, well, you know, but wait a minute, like nothing is an unmade good in life and certainly at work.

And so there have to be circumstances where, you know, we're helping others is not beneficial and even harmful.

Let's understand those.

In fact, you'll be a better fundamentalist if you're a scholar because you will know how to maximize the benefits and minimize the costs or you'll at least have more clues about how to do that.

And so, you know, that was my commitment going in.

I remember actually I had an editor who read my book proposal for give and take and said, you know, I gotta be honest with you.

I don't want to read this book.

I said, why not? Yeah.

I was like, yeah, this is maybe I'm going down the wrong path here.

But I was like, why not?

He said, well, because I already like I go to church and I'm told I have to be a giver, you know, in my community and family life and at home.

And now you're telling me I gotta be when it worked too?

That sounds awful. And, you know, I reflect on that.

What I realized was I had the whole book organized in terms of the first half was highlighting the benefits of being a giver.

And then the second half was looking at the costs and how to reduce them.

And it felt totally one sided.

And that I actually rewrote the intro chapter after that to say, look, actually the fundamental question of this book is, you know, why are some givers successful and why are some unsuccessful and, you know, how can we both achieve our own success and enhance the success of others?

And, you know, once that was the orienting question, it was, you know, it was then pretty difficult to, you know, to have sort of narrative take me in the wrong direction.

Because my goal was to capture all the evidence and try to sort out when, you know, what do we really know about when a giver is successful versus failed?

Correlation and causation is an interesting one.

It, that I guess is an issue.

It bothers me a less than it bothers a lot of people.

And I'm going to give you, let me give you three reasons for that.

And you can tell me if you agree or not.

So the first one is, you know, like most of the studies I cover are either randomized controlled trials, where we can make really strong causal inferences or, you know, careful field studies where we're looking at, there's either, you know, longitudinal data so that we can look at reverse causality,

or, you know, we have really good controls for endogeneity and we're able to, you know, sort of partial out all kinds of omitted variables and, you know, begin to estimate the effect of a variable on another variable.

And so, you know, I think the research methods take care of a lot of that.

It's hard to randomly assign people to some of the things that I study.

So, you know, that's where we do need really good econometric studies.

But the second thing that makes me less concerned about this is I think that for the most part, when we have causal effects in the social sciences, they tend to be feedback loops.

It's not that in real life, x is just causing y.

It's more that, you know, x is boosting y a little bit and then y reinforces x and they, you know, they start to, they start to fuel each other a little bit.

It's interconnected.

Yeah, totally. Like Carl Weik would call these deviation amplifying spirals.

But, you know, like the easy one is confidence, right?

Where like you, you know, you lack confidence at something, you try it, you develop your skills a little bit more and then as you have success, your confidence goes up and that leads you to try more things and that prepares you for bigger success and at some point, you run the risk of becoming overconfident

and it all falls apart.

But until that point, like, you know, the chicken and the egg question is sort of irrelevant.

Like do you need confidence to be successful?

Well, kind of. Do you need success to be confident?

Well, kind of. How does replication, like, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but the replication fit into, you know, everything right now seems to be undergoing this, doesn't replicate.

Like, how much time do you think we, or how many, you know, outside of one study, how many times does it have to replicate over how many years before we can have a significant amount of confidence that it is?

How does this affect kind of how you think about things?

Yeah. So this is actually a segue to the third point that I would make, which is I think that oftentimes people have a knee -jerk reaction that, like, well, correlation isn't causation.

And, you know, they're trained that that's how you should always look at social science data with skepticism, which you should.

Only, sometimes they overreact that way, because if you have a relationship between two variables, there are only three explanations for it.

Only three. One is that X causes Y.

Two is that Y causes X.

Or three is that there's some other variable Z that causes both Y and X, and the relationship is spurious.

And what's interesting about that is that in the replication crisis, there's this idea that, well, you know, you have a study where you show that X caused Y, but your manipulation of X is funky.

And so, you know, we can't trust it, and we're going to replicate it.

And then, aha, we found in our replication that, in fact, X, a better X, or a more carefully measured Y, we didn't get a causal effect.

And, you know, I think they're asking the wrong question there.

The question is not, does X cause Y?

The question is, when does X cause Y?

Under what circumstances?

Yeah. You didn't, I mean, circumstances, but also people.

So, you know, if you want to enter any of the debates in the replication crisis, you didn't have the same participants with the exact same personality traits and preferences and tendencies in your replication than you did with the original one.

And so, the odds that you're going to find the exact same effect with a different group of people who don't have an identical distribution of traits are pretty close to zero, in my opinion.

And, you know, there's a great quote from Bill McGuire, who is a social psychologist, who said that an experiment in the industry is a sufficiently ingenious stage manager to produce the conditions under which the effect is true.

Right. And that's what we're doing, right?

And then the challenge for us is anytime we get an effect, to vary those conditions and see, well, when is it strong?

When is it weak? When is it positive?

When is it negative?

And I think the replication crisis has kind of missed that larger point that, you know, like there are all these, I'm now seeing meta -analyses with P curves saying, well, the average effect is zero.

Well, great. I know how to get an average effect of zero.

Let's say that the effect is positive 0 .7, that doesn't mean the effect isn't real.

That means the effect is complicated and we need to understand it better.

And how do we do that?

We have to arrange the way that we think about the problem to vary the conditions to find out when it replicates and when it doesn't, and to what extent they impact that.

I think that is the key.

And, you know, I think that any responsible social or behavioral scientists should sit down whenever they test an effect and say, here are the boundary conditions for the effect where it should hold.

And here are also the moderators that can reverse the effect, and now I'm going to go investigate all of those.

And, you know, that just means a richer understanding of the phenomenon, right?

Like, let's take the power pose debate, for example.

Do I believe that power poses can cause psychological and behavioral changes in people?

Sure. Do I know when those changes occur and for whom?

Not a clue yet. Yeah, I like that.

I like that way of thinking about it.

I think that that's a helpful framework to kind of as we walk through this and kind of walk through anything in life about, you know, whether it's taking Google 20 % time and implementing it at your organization, any idea that we're trying to take out of out of one ecosystem, if you will, and put it

into another ecosystem.

Yes. Under what conditions does that survive or thrive in that ecosystem?

What are the important components of that?

And then do we have that at play here?

Yeah, you know, it's funny.

I remember, I was at a conference last year and I was doing a little session on my research and an elderly gentleman walked into the room and I didn't recognize him.

And I leaned over to somebody and whispered, who is that?

And the answer was, that's Charlie Munger.

And I tried to punt the speaker role so that we could all listen to him, but he just, you know, wanted to ask some questions and have a conversation.

And, you know, at one point, somebody brought up his, you know, his line of, you know, him wanting to know where he was going to die so he could never go there.

And I thought that was like, it's the clearest way of explaining like how much in life is conditional.

Yeah. And it's not like, okay, you know, he's assuming he's going, you know, he's going to experience an event, right?

The question is like, what are the sequences of choices that I make that will lead me to experience that event.

And, you know, especially when we study human behavior, like we're, we can affect like maybe the first move in those, those sequences of choices.

But there's this thing called free will that gets them away and affects the rest of them.

And yeah, I think it's quite remarkable that we can ever, you know, design studies where we get robust and consistent effects in different samples or different contexts, because people are incredibly complicated.

I'm super conscious of the time here.

I got one question left for you.

A personal question more so I guess is like, you're prolific, right?

You do so much. Is there a ceiling, do you think to what we can accomplish and live a balanced or harmonious life?

Oh, hello, pot I am kettle.

Tell me about this.

I mean, you're the you I'm amazed by how much you publish every week.

And, you know, I like when I open your newsletter, I'm like, okay, this is going to be the week where Shane's newsletter is only going to be other people's writing.

Because with all the reading that he does, there's no way that he's also writing.

So I'm going to fire this question back at you.

I will give you my answer, which is, you know, I think that having kids has made me much I work a lot less than I used to, you know, like I used to, I used to work basically with all of my free time.

And now I get almost all my work done when our kids are at school or camp or asleep.

And, you know, I think that it's made me more efficient with some of the things that I do, but it's also caused me to choose to do less and do less.

Well, is the hope. And I think that, yeah, of course, there's an upper bound, right?

Like, you can only work so many hours in the day.

You can only like, even if you have a million thoughts, you can only say them or take them so fast at this point.

And then you're going to want to work on, you know, making them really clear and, and sort of compelling to other people.

And so, yeah, like, of course, there's a ceiling.

I think everybody, everybody has a different ceiling based on their motivation and their capability for the particular work that they're doing.

But it bothers me a lot when people ask, well, how can I be more productive?

Because I think the question they should really be asking is, you know, how can I accomplish more meaningful work?

And for some people that may be more output, or, you know, there may be like these ideas they have, or these products they want to build that just aren't out there yet.

But I think for most people, productivity is not necessarily the answer.

And it's about, it's more about asking how do I how do I use my time and my skills effectively?

One thing that I've kind of changed my mind on I would say in the last three or four years is thinking in terms of balance, because balance implies like that you have one third, one third, one third or whatever that is.

And I think more in terms of harmony now between work and life and intermixing them, I mean, unfortunate that I can intermix them to the extent possible.

And I can travel with my kids and then meet people and do all of these things kind of together.

But the flip side of that is, you know, making time for what's important and kind of using a regret avoidant framework, I love spending time with my kids, I want to have dinner with them every night.

I want to do things that, you know, I'm willing to sacrifice other things to do that.

And I think before, I was more apt to just try and do everything.

And the other thing I'm kind of changing my mind about, personally is, you know, before, I was trying to do everything myself.

And now I'm trying to build a team to accomplish all the stuff I wanted to do.

Well, I love that. And, you know, I think the idea of harmony, Shane, really resonates.

There's a whole literature on work, family, my colleague, Nancy Rothbard, and some of the most interesting work in this area saying, look, you know, we always think about work, family conflict, and, you know, how work can deplete and, you know, detract from our lives.

But there's also such a thing as enrichment, where work can improve our lives and vice versa, too.

And I think harmony, you know, allows for those things to happen.

I think also, I think that too many people are obsessed with, sort of, when they think about balance, they think each day has to be balanced.

And if you are going to strive for balance, it's much easier to achieve at the week level or the month level.

Like, I have plenty of days that are out of balance, you know, like I try not to work on the weekends.

And so like, those are really not balanced at all.

I have like days when I travel, where, you know, I don't get a lot of time with my family.

But the goal is, over the course of a week, and then as I aggregate that up to the month level, that, you know, I'm spending a certain number of hours, you know, on each of the sort of each of the projects that I care about.

And, you know, if that, like, if that's not met, I'll try to, you know, I'll try to make more work time.

But, you know, ultimately, like, my goal is to feel like I get a lot of quality of time with my family and that comes first.

And so I guess, you know, I think that to me it's better to have like in a week, you know, two days that are work heavy, and then like some days that are all family than it is to have like five days that are a mix of the two.

I'm totally on board with that.

Listen, Adam, yeah, totally.

I think that that makes a lot of sense.

That was too easy. Yeah, we should argue.

Listen, thank you so much for your time.

This has been fascinating and incredibly insightful.

Well, it was fun to chat with you.

Next time we talk, I want to start just barraging you with questions.

Hey, guys, this is Shane again.

Just a few more things before we wrap up.

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That's F -A -R -N -A -M -S -T -R -E -E -T -B -L -O -G dot com slash podcast.

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And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to fernomstreetblog .com slash newsletter.

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[Navigating Success, Creativity, and Resilience with Adam Grant]-[#22 Adam Grant: Givers, Takers, and the Resilient Mind]

📋 Summary

Navigating Success, Creativity, and Resilience: Insights from Adam Grant

The Spectrum of Interaction: Givers, Takers, and Matchers

Cultivating Originality and Creative Risk

Resilience and Mental Time Travel

Organizational Culture and the Future of Work

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript