My sister Margie gave me a copy of Think Again by Adam Grant for Christmas. She kept insisting that I would really like the book. She said she thought it might be useful for the Innovation and Disruption class I teach at Wayne State Engineering school in the summer, so I downloaded the audible version. It took me less than two days to get through the book. I couldn’t put it down. Who would have guessed that someone else would be as obsessed as I was with SQB (Status Quo Bias). I know I just made the book sound terrifically interesting, right? Adam Grant used the subtitle “The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know”, which is much more promising.
When I decided to pursue a PhD, I wanted it to be in the area of SQB. Having spent much of my career in the technology field, I had been frustrated with the condition for decades. I was sure it was a contagion and was hoping to contribute to a cure. Thanks to Adam Grant, we now have some solid treatments. Status Quo Bias was featured in a previous blog post. It is one of the factors in the innovation/disruption cycle. It keeps us from seeing the possibilities of an invading innovation. Since I was dealing with SQB in a technology change cycle, my research indicated that the phenomenon was caused by simple fear. Grant’s research demonstrates that it is much more complex than people afraid of losing their jobs. He breaks down how people get stuck in their comfort zones AND (the really great part) strategies on how to unstick them!
How Can We Break Free of Old Ideas?
Grant’s breakthrough strategies include ideas like “think like a researcher” and “motivational interviewing”. The book has been lauded by Brene Brown and M. Night Shyamalan as being extraordinary. Adam Grant attended Harvard as an undergraduate and got his PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan. He is an organizational psychologist. He gives some great thoughts on helping people abandon “comfort zone” thinking.
I wanted to explore some of his ideas. We will begin with my favorite one: “think like a researcher”. Adam Grant, a researcher himself, knows well the value of open-minded thinking and exploration. As researchers, we are bound to build the knowledge base of our subject of interest. When we write, it is our responsibility to add a thin layer to the foundation of existing knowledge and to fully examine competing ideas with an open and curious mind. We must evaluate why our hypothesis is different from previously published work. We use historic research to build a case for why our new idea/experiment adds more validity or refutes the existing research.
As researchers, we cannot publish unvalidated opinions. When we submit papers with tons of validation and rigorous methods, one of the most important things we do is to write a section on “limitations of the research”. The idea behind limitations is to give the next researcher something to build on. It would include areas that the author would love to see further explored. A typical limitation is the size of the study. Whether there were 250 participants or 2,000 participants, it is a fraction of a population, so that is a limitation. Other limitations might be that all the participants were women, that would be a gender bias. Maybe the participants were over 50, which might mean that the results would be different for younger people. Were the participants from Detroit or India? This might mean that the results may be based on a cultural practice or the result of geography or climate. All these things impact the research and if the next researcher can expand past the current limitations, it increases our knowledge; the ultimate goal.
How Do Our Personal Biases Cloud Our Judgment?
As researchers, we also have a responsibility to report honestly on our personal biases. If I were to do research on a neurological disorder, or palm trees, I would have few biases since I know very little about the subjects. In technology, however, I have many biases, which influence the way I look at research. It is important and ethical that I let the readers of my work understand my underlying perspectives.
Do we report on our biases when we make corporate decisions? Or are they the elephant in the room? Everyone else knows why we lean the way we do but do we acknowledge it? Do we bow to the “highest paid person” in the room? There are politics everywhere, of course, but as researchers, we respect legitimate findings regardless of who they upset. We expect the body of knowledge to change over time and so we applaud (literally, Universities make money when works are published) new findings brought to light.
Limitations force us to embrace humility (we all have our limits after all) and encourage others to continue exploring the subject. Even if the next researcher disproves our original hypothesis, we have all contributed to the development of knowledge.
Imagine if corporate decision makers thought like researchers? How would that change the way we make decisions now? What do you need to rethink?
