Idea generation
Executing on a new idea
Building new ideas in organizations
Nurturing new ideas in organizations
Childcare
The first necessary quality for originals is to question the status quo, and generate concepts that are both novel and useful. Much of modern life is built around conformity - the structure and rules of schooling, uniform career tracks, the social recognition of status and accomplishment. However, this can be suppressive, pushing people into guaranteed success instead of venturing into the unknown, dreading failure instead of aiming for innovation. Possibly for this reason, child prodigies who show mastery at an early age tend not to become agents of massive change - they are very good at learning established rules, but not at breaking them or designing a totally new game.
(Unfortunately, studies suggest that the poor tend to accept the status quo more readily. This might be a defense mechanism termed “system justification” - if the system exists for a good reason and people deserve their fate, then life becomes a bit more bearable and sensical.)
And so the reason that many innovative companies aren’t started earlier is that many people simply don’t take the time to question why the status quo exists, and how it could be better. (Shortform note: This is one antidote to the common criticism, “if it’s such a good idea, why doesn’t it exist already?)
There are a few things originals are not, contrary to popular belief. Originals do NOT take extreme, uncontrolled risks. Rather, they hedge their risks - often keeping a source of stability (like their fulltime job) while working on their idea on the side.
This doesn’t mean they take moderate risks in all dimensions - instead, having one foot in stability allows more radical risks in the other, creating a balanced risk portfolio. The stability prevents the pressure of desperately launching half-baked ideas and publishing manuscripts that aren’t ready. In general, entrepreneurs prefer calculated, managed risks, rather than wild, dangerous, reckless risks.
Originals do NOT fearlessly go forward, as much as the media (and they) want you to believe. They face fear of failure and anxiety. Martin Luther King, Jr and Copernicus alike felt concern over taking on the duties expected of them.
Originals are NOT natural non-conformists who ignore social approval. Studies of entrepreneurs suggest concern for pleasing others wasn’t a predictor of success.
To start being an Original, consider why the world exists as it does, and how you might improve it with a new idea.
How do you come up with good ideas?
By far the most important way is to generate LOTS of ideas. Most of them won’t be very good, but some of them will be gems. You increase your chances of getting a gem by creating more ideas. Despite being widely known for just a few seminal works, Mozart, Picasso, and Edison each had thousands of compositions/pieces/patents. This is much better than generating few ideas and trying to perfect them.
You can also increase your creativity by having a breadth of experience in orthogonal fields (like engineering x art) over a sustained period of time. The more different, the better. A popular study found that Nobel prize winners were more likely to be thespians and creatives than non-Nobel-winning professors.
But if you generate lots of ideas, you have limited resources and you can’t pursue them all. How do you tell which ideas are good?
First off, you’re a terrible judge of your own ideas. We generally all suffer from overconfidence in our own abilities. Like the Lake Wobegon effect, we tend to believe we and our ideas are better than they really are, and we find it hard to let go of our favorite ideas. When confronted with opposing evidence, we fall prey to confirmation bias, more readily accepting evidence that reinforce our prior beliefs. And we falsely believe that a new idea is unique and immune from criticism for previous failures - those were bad ideas, this one is different.
Instead, test your ideas with believable colleagues and with your target audience. Colleagues have the benefit of domain expertise (making them credible evaluators) and lack of a personal stake in your idea (preventing them from being risk averse and closed to new ideas). Therefore, they’re the best positioned to point out flaws in your idea, which you should openly consider without being defensive or biased.
Similarly, your target users will openly tell you how your idea will fit into their lives and whether it might be pointless. (However, it’s important that users be observed in a natural environment, rather than a focus-group like setting, where they have an artificially heightened sense of criticism.)
When inverted, the traits that make your colleagues so accurate also make others deceptively poor evaluators.
Many evaluators also suffer from analysis by analogy - comparing a new idea to previous successes. If a new idea differs from previous successes, it seems less likely to work (a false negative error). For this reason, Seinfeld was rejected for being too un-sitcom-like; Harry Potter was rejected for being too long for a kid’s book. Likewise, it’s easy to make false positive mistakes when new ideas superficially resemble previous successes (Shortform note: like the broad failure of Uber for X startups).
In this chapter of Originals, Adam Grant uses the Segway as a parable. The two-wheeled transportation product developed by repeatedly successful inventor Dean Kamen, and lauded/invested in by Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and John Doerr. All these people drastically overestimated the potential of the product. The investors suffered hubris stemming from their massive achievements in their own fields, not realizing it made them inaccurate in assessing transportation; they analogized the Segway to the success of past disruptive technologies without peering into the fundamentals of price performance and user need. Similarly, Dean was buoyed by his previous successes.
Furthermore, Kamen is considered by some to be less an entrepreneur who discovers problem spaces and more an inventor who can solve problems given to him. When developing the Segway, he became enamored with the technology and tried to find a nail for the hammer. He kept it tightly under wraps, believing it was so valuable that it needed to be kept secret. By the time they exposed it to potential customers, it was too late to reverse course.
(Shortform note: In the end, experience is a fine balance. You need enough to credibly evaluate an idea and know how to execute; you need sufficiently little to avoid getting stuck in dogmatic paradigms. You can try to walk the tightrope yourself, but you would certainly benefit from exposing it to many believable critics.)
Use this exercise to create more novel ideas and validate them.
Generating more ideas is important to finding the few good ones. What are some ways you can generate more ideas in your daily life?
Optional: spend 5 minutes writing any ideas that come to mind, in an area that you care about. Get used to the practice of writing down lots of ideas, rather than worrying about having them perfect.
Who are 2-3 credible people you can test your ideas with? Remember that they should 1) have domain expertise in what you’re doing (either as a professional or as a user), and 2) lack a personal stake in your success, so they’ll be honest.
Once you have an idea, you’ll likely need to bring other people onboard, whether as investors or teammates. How do you become most persuasive?
First, you have to earn status to exert power. Status is earned through real contributions, credibility, and reputation. Earning status gives you “idiosyncracy credits,” or the latitude to deviate from norms.
In contrast, if you try to exert power without status, you will be resented as speaking out of turn. You’ll also be punished, since you challenge others’ authority and they seek to put you back in your place. (An interesting study shows that research subjects who are told their peer looks down on them make the peer do more degrading tasks, compared to those who are told their peer admires them.)
Second, if you’re likely to get a skeptical, defensive reaction, try powerless communication. Many people, when threatened, try to bluff their way through it. They flash badges of authority, present only the best evidence, and hide their weaknesses. This actually evokes the opposite reaction - you feel like you’re trying too hard, and you must be hiding something.
Instead, do the opposite - express doubt and highlight weaknesses. Tell your audience why your idea might fail; signal that you don’t know everything. This makes listeners more receptive to your ideas because:
Third, speak to the top and bottom of the totem pole. People in different social levels have varying receptivity to new ideas. People at the top have a secure enough position that they can tolerate risk and champion new ideas. People at the bottom have little to lose and much to gain from joining high-risk, high-reward projects.
In contrast, middle managers are the most conservative. They’ve fought their way up to where they are and want to keep going; a fall back down to where they started is painful. They’ll be less willing to rock the boat.
(Similarly, if you seek the best ideas from people, get them from the top and bottom of the pole.)
Similarly, bias toward communicating with disagreeable people. Despite being less pleasant to work with, disagreeable people speak their mind and are more open to new ideas. They care more about improving the organization than about ignoring its shortcomings. They are less likely to care about personal status and see new ideas as threats. Agreeable people tend to do the opposite.
Finally, expose the new idea repeatedly. When you’ve thought about an idea endlessly for days, you lose the ability to empathize with a first-time listener. You underestimate how much exposure is needed to get a new audience to buy into your ideas.
Instead, repeat your idea over and over again. Studies suggest that liking continues to increase over 10-20 exposures. Exposures are more effective when short and mixed with other ideas. Furthermore, delay the initial introduction of the idea and its evaluation - pitch an idea briefly to your boss on Monday, then ask for feedback at the end of the week.
Why does this work? Repeated ideas become more familiar, and more familiar ideas provoke less defensive reactions. Repeated ideas are also easier to recall, and because of recall bias, people are more receptive to things they can recall more easily. (Studies show that senior managers undercommunicate critical ideas by a factor of 10.)
Supporting Example
In this chapter of Originals, Adam Grant uses the experience of Carmen Medina in the CIA. As a young employee, she was an early advocate of Internet-based intelligence sharing, but this was rejected for security concerns. With her career at risk, she decided to take a less risky job in information security. Here she built credibility by getting the job done and earned idiosyncracy credits. She found support at the extremes of the totem pole - a champion in her manager and young ambitious recruits who were excited by the mission. She exposed the idea multiple times by writing short commentaries. Eventually, she was given the resources to start a CIA wiki, and it became a widely used tool.
Females and racial minorities have special trouble when presenting new ideas - they're more expected to keep to their place and seen as violating gender/race stereotypes when bucking the trend. To counteract this bias, it's most effective to be viewed as espousing an idea on behalf of someone else or the mission, not for oneself. It's also more important for minorities to earn status before exercising power.
The silver lining: when minorities do earn status, they seem to earn a reputation premium over white men, since they are assumed to be unusually talented to overcome the barriers to earn their spot.
Fun fact: in Apple, the Macintosh team granted an annual award to one person who challenged Steve Jobs. This was a good way of promoting speaking truth to power and getting good ideas from everywhere.
Use this exercise to learn how to present ideas that might be controversial.
In the near future, are you going to present something where you expect skepticism from your audience? How could you specifically try powerless communication? Tips: express doubt, highlight weaknesses.
(If applicable) Within your organization, who are people at the top of the totem pole who might be receptive to your more unconventional ideas? Who’s at the bottom who would be receptive, because they have nothing to lose? Who’s in the middle whom you should avoid, because they have too much at stake?
Do you have an idea that you need people to support in the long-term? How could you introduce the idea in bits today, repeatedly, to get them used to the idea?
This Originals chapter deals with three loosely related themes on the benefits of waiting: procrastinating, the myth of first-mover advantage, and innovation at older ages.
The Creative Benefits of Procrastinating
The consensus around productivity states that procrastinating is a disease that should be stamped out, that we should always plan our work on timelines and get a head start.
But procrastination is useful to avoid too early of a commitment to an idea. If you lodge a problem in the back of your mind and give it time to marinate, you attack it from a variety of angles. You consider it in relaxed states, free from time pressure, which allows divergent thinking (hence the pattern of coming up with best ideas in the shower or on the toilet). You make incremental progress by testing and refining different possibilities.
By procrastinating, you also allow for greater input from your colleagues. If you decide early and set a strict timeline, there’s little strategic flexibility.
Then, as you near the deadline, you assemble the breadth of options you’ve considered, and then you can then focus down on the best one.
Importantly, for procrastination to have these creative benefits, you need to be intrinsically motivated to solve the problem. Procrastinating when you hate the problem and feel little urge to solve it likely doesn’t end up with better ideas.
(Shortform note: You might also get the best of both worlds through structured creativity - enforce a timeline of activities that will take you to your deadline, but force yourself to have midpoint brainstorming to broaden your possibilities.)
The Myth of First-Mover Advantage
An entrepreneurial myth is that the first mover will seize the spoils. Businesses that move first should seize brand recognition, gain size quickly, and ward off new entrants. The myth is also confounded by its truth in select industries, like patent filing priority and academic publications, both requiring novelty.
The data suggest otherwise - “pioneer” companies failed at a rate of 47%, compared to “settler” companies at 8%. Furthermore, pioneers captured just 10% of market share, compared to 28% for settlers. (Shortform note: To be specific, from the original paper, failure means the end of sales for a product. It wasn’t clear if the market share was only for surviving pioneers, or also included failed pioneers (thus counting as 0% share).)
Settler companies benefit from the path that pioneers pave, by:
Further, the types of people that start pioneer vs settler companies may differ. Pioneer founders may tend to be excessively risk-seeking and impulsive. Risk-controlling entrepreneurs may have better chances (remember from Chapter 1 how many famous founders started their companies while employed in their day job?)
Notable exceptions to this are businesses that are protected from new entrants by patents, and businesses that benefit from network effects. (Shortform note: But remember that even Facebook was a latecomer to the social network scene, toppling earlier Myspace and Friendster.)
Innovation at Older Ages
Is it impossible to innovate at older ages? Grant argues, it depends on what type of innovation you practice.
Innovation seems to happen in two modes: conceptual and experimental.
Conceptual innovators resemble the stereotypical brilliant young mathematician, who comes up with a groundbreaking insight. Conceptual innovation tends to happen earlier in age since the youngster is unfettered by custom and dogma. They have fresh perspectives. However, age becomes a curse. As this person gains experience, her thinking becomes more codified. She becomes part of the establishment, unable to regain the plastic radicalism of her youth. Einstein opposed the new disruptive theory of quantum mechanics in his later age.
Experimental innovators instead solve problems through trial and error, tweaking continuously and improving. Instead of setting out on a single plan, experimenters have no end goal in mind, and may stumble on great ideas. This benefits from time, since you’re able to generate a greater count of ideas and experiments as you age. (This echoes Adam Grant’s earlier point about coming up with great ideas by generating more ideas prolifically.)
Experimental innovators are more likely to continue innovating at older ages.
When you try to gather support for your new idea, you need to strike a Goldilocks zone in radicalism - radical enough to stand for something and not be tepid, but conservative enough to avoid alienating a mainstream audience. People external to the movement tend to identify it with its most radical position, not its median. As the originator of a movement, you’ll tend to be on the radical side, and you may need to temper the cause, or at least how you present it to the outside world.
Occupy Wall Street largely faded out, partly because its insistence on the disruptive,radical behavior in its name alienated many who otherwise would have aligned with the cause. Not many people want to camp out to effect change, nor might they think it the most effective method. Instead, if they had instead rallied around the “we are the 99%” theme, it would unify groups of people using their own preferred tactics, and the movement might still be ongoing.
Being just right in radicalism can be a difficult balance. The more radical people within the group tend to accuse the more moderate ones of selling out or not doing enough. Counter-intuitively, the radicals dislike moderates (who largely agree on the fundamentals) more than they dislike people on the other side of the spectrum. To wit, members of the black community sometimes pull down others for not being black enough, radical environmental activists decry Greenpeace for being too corporate, vegans dislike vegetarians more than meat-eaters. In the extreme, this can splinter your group into separate factions.
When trying to find allies for your cause, find overlap between your desired outcomes. Instead of trying to change someone’s ideals, present your values as a means of pursuing their goals. The women’s suffrage movement found an unlikely ally among the temperance movement, who were mostly female but socially conservative and preferring traditional gender roles. The overlap was this: women’s suffrage would allow temperance voters to be a greater advocate for alcohol abuse. Achieving suffrage would allow temperance supporters to better achieve their own aims.
Furthermore, as you try to build partnerships with other causes, don’t overlook shared tactics, even if your missions are orthogonal. Coalitions who can learn methods from each other band together, perhaps with one teaching fundraising and the other political advocacy.
If at the end your cause is too radical, try focusing on the how instead of the why. The why may clash with deep-seated convictions and cause automatic defensiveness. Consider uBeam founder Meredith Perry, who recruited engineers to build a wireless battery charger. When leading with the desired outcome of wireless charging, engineers rejected it as implausible. Instead, she had much better success when she focused on the specifications - “build a transducer with these performance characteristics.” When the purpose was hidden from sight, the engineers had less bias about its chance of success.
(Shortform note: The inverse might also work if the means are what is controversial. Here, talk about the why first - entice the listener with a vision of the future they can get behind, then describe what it’ll take to get there. In Carmen Medina’s case, she could have tried first describing the benefits of instantaneous information sharing in the CIA; with their curiosity piqued, the managers might have become less hostile to the Internet, to which they had heavy preconceptions.)
Largely unrelated point - turning your enemies into followers is especially helpful. They tend to be more loyal and genuine in their support, since they had to overwrite their prior beliefs to follow your ideals. They are also more persuasive to non-followers, since they have been in the position of skepticism before and can relate their experience of conversion.
Msc: an interesting experiment where participants were asked to develop a new tool that would help people interviewing for a job. One group was shown a binder and told to use that as a starting place for something novel. They came up with banal ideas. Another group was asked to first think of a rollerblade, then brainstorm ideas. This group was deemed more more creative. The starting parameters of brainstorming and solution finding can therefore have a huge difference. This suggests a brainstorming method of using very orthogonal inspirations to come up with new solution concepts.
Do you need to attract followers to your idea? Think about how to best approach them.
Which person or group of people would be a valuable partner for what you’re trying to do? How does your mission allow them to reach their own goals? Can you explain this to them to recruit them?
An idea consists of a how and a why. Which is the more controversial and more likely to make your audience defensive? How could you change your presentation so you focus on the less controversial point first?
Here Originals takes a turn away from how to execute as an original, to how originality is cultivated. How do our childhood environments affect our tendency for rebelliousness and risk-seeking?
Birth order has a very strong effect - firstborn children tend to be conscientious and dominant, showing achievement along classical lines - income, academic achievement, Nobel Prize winning (but apparently only until age 30, when the differences even out). Lastborn children are more likely to be risk-seeking, rebellious, and unconventional. (Middle children tend to be more diplomatic, having to negotiate between the extreme members of the sibling group.) This tends to be true regardless of child gender.
Suggestive observational studies:
A few models try to explain this pattern. First is niche picking. Like animal species in ecology, children try to find a niche to thrive in, avoiding direct competition with their siblings when there’s little hope of outshining them. Free of competition, the firstborn child models after the parents, based on rules and authority. This child performs well in school and traditional structure. When a new child arrives, the older child, risking being dethroned, emulate their parents, enforcing rules and authority over the younger sibling. The younger child, seeking an identity, finds it difficult to compete with the firstborn child and attract commensurate attention. Thus the younger child seeks niches like humor and rebellion to attract attention, and this becomes ingrained in identity.
(The effect seems to be strongest in a middle range of age distance. If separated by just a year, the younger child can hold her own; if separated by 10 years, the firstborn’s niche is open again.)
Another explanation comes from caretaker effects. The firstborn is usually cared for strongly by parents, who have the anxiety of firsttime parents as well as the energy of youth. As the parents have more children, they relax due to more experience and declining energy with age. The older children also then take up a greater share of the care, but they enforce fewer rules than parents would. Finally, older children become more responsible and capable of handling chores, leaving the youngest kids free to roam. For all these reasons, the lastborn thus experiences relatively more freedom.
These are general trends, because most parents probably react to birth order predictably in the ways stated above. But some unique situations may contravene this trend - for instance, if the parents exert even more pressure on laterborn children.
Parenting Style
(Shortform note: It feels like Adam Grant shoehorned this section in, since it doesn’t directly relate to originality. He connects it to birth order by asking, “if the younger kids are rebellious, how do you avoid them from straying?” but it feels more like he wants to discuss parenting style research.)
When teaching moral behavior to children, your style of feedback seems to make a difference in how successfully the morals are upheld. Integrating morality as part of the child’s identity is more successful than rewarding the behavior.
Focusing on identity gives the child an ideal to live up to, which seems to be better ingrained than a behavior that isn’t explicitly justified.
This distinguishes the logic of consequences from the logic of appropriateness. The former weighs courses of action and tries to find the best outcome. The latter asks, “what does a person like me do in a situation like this?” which theoretically causes action that’s the right thing to do.
Regarding cheating, the former tempts a calculus of the risks of getting caught and the benefits of cheating. The latter evokes a sense of self: “am I the type of person who cheats? Who do I want to be?”
As it relates to originality, the former logic finds it difficult to take risks. The latter frees us up - “I am the type of person to do what I believe in, even if I can’t justify the outcome right now.” (Shortform note: One might instill this identity by praising children for being noncomformists and the type of person to do what they believe in.)
Furthermore, justify both positive and negative feedback with the underlying principles. Rational explanations of why (good behavior is good) and (bad behavior is bad) seem to be more effective than merely setting unexplained rules. If it affects other people, explain the impact on other people.
This helps children understand why what they did was wrong and instills empathy, instead of provoking rebellion against seemingly arbitrary rules.
(In one study, doctors were shown one of two signs related to hand washing. One said “hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases”; the other said “hand hygiene prevents patients from catching diseases.” The latter caused a 10% increase in hand washing with 45% more soap use. Adam Grant suggests this arises from invoking the identity of being a caretaker responsible for others’ well-being, rather than the ineffectual calculus of one’s own sickness.)
More creative children tend to grow up with fewer rules, and emphasize moral values rather than specific rules. Furthermore, they were encouraged to choose their own values, instead of adopting their parents’.
Finally, find role models for the children other than the parents. Parents are limited in what they can represent for their children, due to limitations in their achievement and misalignment of what parents have achieved and what children want. Instead, introduce children to a range of role models, non-parental mentors who represent ideals beyond what the parents have achieved.
These role models can also come from books or media. There are great originals throughout history to be followed. For originality, fiction seems to be helpful here, since they push the bounds of possibility (e.g. Star Trek might inspire original technology better than reports of current technology can).
Groupthink suppresses dissenting opinions, for the sake of social harmony and conformity. In organizations, this can become toxic. The best ideas should always surface, regardless of what fraction of people believe it and how threatening it can be to any portion of the company.
Company culture is cheered as pivotal in company success. In reality it can be a mixed bag.
How does groupthink occur?
At one point, organizational theory experts had a consensus was that groupthink came from team cohesion - too-friendly relations between teammates. The theory proposed: if people became too chummy, they’d resist voicing dissent to avoid upsetting their friend. So for some time, managers distances coworkers from one another. But this idea wasn’t supported by research - cohesive groups weren’t more likely to dismiss divergent opinions; cohesive groups were more likely to be secure enough to challenge one another. So this theory fell out of favor.
Others proposed that groupthink came from the practice of withholding criticism during brainstorming. This, too, was rejected: a study found that groups that debated generated more unique ideas than those that didn’t, since even incorrect dissenting opinions can be useful.
Instead of a desire for social cohesion, the more important cause of groupthink seems to be overconfidence, and how actively dissenting voices are encouraged and rewarded in the company. The more you suffer from confirmation bias, the more susceptible the company is to decay.
In contrast, Ray Dalio’s hedge fund Bridgewater Associates is famous for its principles of radical transparency. In finance, markets don’t care about ego or popularity - whoever’s right will make money, and nonconsensus opinions have the potential for greater profit. Thus surfacing unpopular and controversial, but possibly accurate, opinions is vital to success.
Bridgewater employs a number of tactics, like:
[For much more about Bridgewater’s work practices, read my full summary of Ray Dalio’s Principles.]
To prevent calcification, employees should be welcomed to dissent against cultural values. The best time to ask them for opinions is when they first join - they have the organization’s well-being in mind, but they haven’t been indoctrinated enough to be incapable of weeing otherwise.
Another tactic: assigning devil’s advocates to take up the other side is less effective than discovering true believers. Devil’s advocates who are assigned don’t argue forcefully enough for the minority viewpoint, and they’re perceived as insincere by group members.
Another tactic: reject the maxim “don’t bring me problems; bring me solutions.” While this rewards self-initiative, it also risks premature optimization when the problem is poorly understood. People who identify important problems but don’t have clear solutions are suppressed. Encourage people to identify problems, even if they’re not sure how to solve it.
Another tactic: instead of just discussing options one at a time, force the group to rank order the alternatives. Discussing options one at a time tends to cause a public majority preference too early. Rank ordering requires weighing alternatives one against the other, allowing even the 3rd and 4th options to be debated earnestly and yielding insights that might affect the entire decision.
Refer to this checklist the next time you need to practice brainstorming.
When espousing original ideas, you’ll face opposition, setbacks, and anxiety about failure. How do you best cope with this?
The final chapter of Originals teaches a variety of tactics to manage uncertainty and anger. The better you can manage your emotions, the more effectively you’ll push your original ideas.
The Benefits of Pessimism
People seem to deal with stress and uncertainty in two ways - strategic optimism and defensive pessimism. Strategic optimists reinforce the belief that things will work out; defensive pessimists predict the worst that could happen in excruciating detail.
The popular belief is that optimism is preferable, but studies suggest that defensive pessimists do not perform worse than optimists. Despite having more anxiety and less confidence, pessimists visualize all the things that could go wrong, and by controlling their risk, they feel in control. They don’t become paralyzed by fear - once they’ve imagined the worst, they’re driven to avoid it. In a state of anxiety, uncertainty is actually worse than fear or failure. If you want to sabotage a defensive pessimist, just make her happy.
More subtly, optimism and pessimism are optimal with different levels of commitment. When uncommitted to a particular action, defensive pessimism can be destructive - you visualize the failure conditions and can paralyze. It’s better to be optimistic about your chances and reconsider the reasons you’re doing it. Once you’ve committed to an action, it’s better to think defensively and confront them directly.
Framing Your Emotions
Anxiety and excitement provoke the same sympathetic nervous system responses - elevated heart rate, shaking, faster breathing. How you feel about it can change your performance.
In short, telling yourself “I am nervous” makes you perform worse than when you tell yourself “I am excited.” The former reinforces that you’re afraid and applies the brakes. The latter recognizes your uncertainty, but propels you forward.
Strength in Numbers
When working on controversial ideas, there is strength in numbers. “The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader.”
No one wants to be the lone dissenter, castigated by all. In the famous Asch experiments, people who worked independently made errors was less than 1%. When confederates unanimously gave the wrong answer, 37% of responses became incorrect. 75% of participants gave at least one incorrect answer. But when a single confederate dissented, the error rate dropped down to 5.5 %.
Make people feel less alone when supporting an unpopular idea. In dictatorship overthrows in the Middle East, dissenters guarded their opinions, scared of being disappeared if they became too public vocally. To combat this:
Outsourcing Inspiration
When communicating the vision of your company or organization, bring in the people affected by your work, rather than relying solely on the company leaders. An experiment related to college fundraisers showed that bringing in a student who benefited from scholarships raised motivation and funds raised significantly.
Similarly, when the Skype founder stressed the need for video calls on a tight timeline, the team questioned the technical feasibility and felt anxious. But they framed the problem around connecting people. Each week they brought in people whose lives were made possible only by Skype - a couple who rekindled their relationship, a serviceman who was with his family virtually over Christmas. This transformed anxiety to excitement.
Miscellaneous Tactics
Strike Urgency: People don’t just need a reason to act - they need a reason to act now. Environmental campaigns were more successful when they conveyed a sense of urgency. Without urgency, people won’t make the needed sacrifices.
Hijack Loss Aversion: Loss aversion is an irrational bias toward weighing losses of an amount more heavily than gains of the same amount. Instead of presenting your arguments as gains, message them as potential losses. For instance, for climate change, emphasize not the gain of sustainable energy, but rather the loss of millions of homes through coastal elevations.
Red Team Attacks: Instead of directing people to come up with innovative ideas to defend the company, direct them to imagine they’re outsiders hellbent on destroying the company. This shifts their mindset to consider the most vulnerable attack positions, rather than making incremental improvements on what already exists. This also triggers loss aversion energy, making them realize the potential for losing the company.
Emphasize What’s Wrong with the Present: To drive people out of apathy, cultivate dissatisfaction or anger at the current state of affairs. Make the gap between the status quo and what-could-be as large as possible. Great orators employ this technique. In loss aversion terms, this makes it a guaranteed loss.
Controlling Anger: Anger is a powerful motivator. How do you best channel it - do you vent, redirect, or slow down? Adam Grant suggests that venting - like hitting a punching bag while imagining your target’s face - causes you to obsess over the target of your anger without making any headway on feeling better. Merely distracting your anger - like hitting a punching bag without picturing the face - or taking 2 minutes to sit quietly are more productive. Even better, focus on the victim of the injustice (if it’s not you) - fight on behalf of other people to rid injustice and create a better system.
Innovation is hard. Here’s an exercise on how to manage your emotions as you try to innovate.
Strategic optimists reinforce the belief that things will work out; defensive pessimists predict the worst that could happen in excruciating detail. Do you consider yourself naturally a strategic optimist or a defensive pessimist?
Grant suggests both are helpful, but the ideal combination is optimism before you’ve committed to an action (so you don’t shoot down ideas prematurely), then defensive pessimism when you’ve committed (so you spot weak points and don’t get overconfident).
Do you agree? How would you combine optimism and pessimism to best suit your own personality?
How can you “outsource inspiration” by showcasing the lives affected by what you’re working on? How will this help people understand the impact of what you’re trying to do?