August 2, 2024 • 36 mins
Cautionary Conversation: Steve Jobs hated his phone so much that he smashed it against a wall. He also referred to mobile carriers as "orifices". Yet he went on to invent the world's most popular smartphone. Why did he change his mind?
Tim Harford and organizational psychologist Adam Grant (Think Again, Hidden Potential) discuss the consequences of letting our ideas become part of our identity; when it's essential to adapt; and whether frogs really do stay sitting in slowly boiling water.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Late on blistering August afternoon in nineteen forty nine,
fifteen men parachuted out of the wide Montana sky their
mission to intercept and extinguish a forest wildfire. Within minutes,
their mission had changed to just survive. These men were
(00:40):
smoke jumpers, the wildfire fighting Elite. They landed near the
top of Mangulch with the intent of digging a line
in the ground in front of the fire, shepherding it
towards an area where there was less to burn. It
wasn't long before they realized the wind had turned and
the fire was racing towards them, flames thirty feet high
and gathering speed. There was no alternative to run, and
(01:05):
on flat even ground wearing running a gear that would
have been possible, but scrambling steeply uphill through rocks and
long grass, and carrying heavy equipment it might be too
much to ask. The men were making a lung bursting
effort to reach the safety of the ridge top that
the fire was gaining and gaining. The ridge top was
(01:28):
just two hundred yards away. As the fire roared closer,
Another two or three minutes scramble was their time. The
smoke Jumper's foreman, Wagoner Dodge, realized with dread they just
weren't going to make it, and so he did something
that made his team recoil with astonishment and horror. I'm
(01:51):
Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is
(02:18):
one of our cautionary conversations. As usual, you'll hear a story,
or perhaps more than one story of disaster. In fact,
the story of Brave smoke Jumpers features in the book
Think Again, by my guest Adam Grant. He's here to
help tell this cautionary tale and to reflect on the lessons.
Adam needs no introduction, but he deserves one, so he's
(02:41):
going to get one. He's an organizational psychologist at Wharton.
He describes that as trying to figure out how to
make work not suck. He's the presenter of two brilliant podcasts,
Work Life and Rethinking, the creator of some of the
best and most loved TED talks, and the author of
several superb and best selling books, including Hidden Potential. In
(03:02):
the book we're discussing today, Think Again, Adam, Welcome to
Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Thanks. It's I have to say it's a little bit
unsettling to be in a live cautionary tales. I'm so
used to listening to it when I go to bed.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Well, I'm sure you can preserve the spirits of cautionary tales,
and I'd hopefully add a little bit of extra insight.
And this story of the fire, I mean, it's it's
an inspiring story in some ways, it's a hellish story
in other ways, And like Dante's Inferno, it's got multiple levels.
You begin your book, think again with this story. What
was it that Wagner Dodge did that so shocked his crew?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Well, you think the foreman would be trying to run
to the head of the line, right and guide everyone
else to safety, And instead of running, he stops. He
bends over and he takes a matchbook out of his pocket,
And you can only imagine what's going through the other
firefighter's minds. We're trying to escape a fire, right, not
(04:02):
start one. What could he possibly be doing? But he
starts lighting matches and throwing them in the grass. One
of the crew thinks he must have gone nuts. That
bastard Dodge is trying to burn me to death. And
then he looks over and he sees Dodge waving his
arms toward the fire and encouraging people to follow him
into his fire. What in the world is he doing?
(04:27):
The smoke jumpers don't know that Dodge has improvised a
really unusual survival strategy. He's building an escape fire. He
had no training in how to do this. It wasn't
an idea that firefighters were aware of at the time.
But out of sheer instinct in that moment, he's figured
out that if he burns the grass in front of
(04:50):
him and he lays down face down in the ashes,
that the fire will burn right over him. Because if
he burns the grass in front of him, the fire
will not have anything to burn and it'll be forced
to go around. And that's exactly what he does. He
basically removes all the fuel for the wildfire to feed on,
and he's a pouring water out of his canteen onto
(05:11):
his handkerchief. He puts it over his mouth, and he
lays face down in the charred area and survives there
for fifteen minutes. There's enough oxygen on the ground that
he can make it, and the wildfire literally runs right
over him.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I mean, it doesn't bear thinking about what it must
have been like for him as the fire runs over him.
As you say, he wasn't trained. Nobody really knew for
sure that this would work. I mean, I'm sure the
heat and the smoke must have been intense. So there's
a tremendous amount of courage there. Smoke jumpers are. I'm
sure they're all very courageous. Did any of them join him?
(05:46):
Did any of them understand or trust the idea enough
to actually get down there and join him in the
shadow of this escape fire that he'd lit.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
No, they didn't. I think one of the great tragedies
here that I didn't write about, and think again, is
that the crew didn't have much of an opportunity to
build trust. They didn't know Dodge very well. There wasn't
a long standing relationship between them, and so they see
him doing something that looks insane and they basically ignore it.
I remember in the US, we were trained as kids
(06:15):
right to stop, drop and roll in the face of
a fire, and for Dodge, all he does is stop
and drop. There's no roll, and so he just has
to lay there hoping that the fire is gonna fail
to burn him alive. The other smoke jumpers end up
basically trying to race for their lives, and of the
fourteen of them, twelve of them didn't make it. It's
(06:37):
devastating when you look back, because Dodge was able to survive.
There were two who made it because of their physical fitness.
They were able to barely outrun the fire. But the
other doesn't. I think failed because they weren't trained in
the mental fitness to let go of the very assumptions
that they brought to their job.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and you described just the horror of it, and
I think one of them had a pocket watch that
was partially melted. And it's just awful and the fact
that they could probably all have survived if they had
had enough experience or enough trust, or had it able
to understand what Wagner Dodge was doing. One of the
things that's inspiring about this story is that it's just
(07:16):
so brilliant. It's like, how on earth does anybody think
so fast in such a crisis in such an original way.
Hardly anybody could do that. But you make the point
in the book that actually there was a much simpler
piece of rethinking that it seems like anybody should have
been able to do. But but the firefighters the smoke
jumpers they didn't do that either.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, So I think Dodge's rethinking is very much out
of reach for mere mortals, right, The idea that when
you're running for your life and you only have seconds
to make a decision, you could just dream up and
escape fire and live because of it. Not I maybe
you tim could pull that.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Out, but well, I'm glad not to be in the situation.
But I sincerely doubt it.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So many of us see intelligence as thinking and learning,
But what Dodge is doing there is he's choosing to
rethink and unlike he's got a rethink fire not as
a source of danger, but as a path to safety.
He has to unlearn his assumptions right that when you're
trying to fight a fire, your job is to put
it out, not start another one. That's a vital skill
(08:23):
in a rapidly changing world, and it's a skill that unfortunately,
that crew of smoke jumpers did not have, because if
you look at the twelve who didn't survive the fire,
they failed to drop their heavy tools. And it's just
devastating when you read the reports on the accident, because
(08:43):
you literally find burned bodies still carrying axes saws, shovels.
Their packs alone weigh twenty pounds. There were investigators who
calculated later that they could have run fifteen to twenty
percent faster, and that just dropping their packs and tools
could have made the difference between life and death. And
(09:04):
the big question is why did they not think to
drop their tools?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So why didn't they because it seems it really seems
very simple.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Well, I don't think there's any way to know for sure,
But part of this is just a basic cognitive entrenchment problem.
They're so used to a certain way of doing things
that they don't even bother to question their assumptions. As
a firefighter, as a smoke jumper, your tools are just
ingrained as part of your training. But I think there's
also a case to be made that there's a deeper
(09:35):
problem at play here, which is those tools become part
of their identity. If you are a firefighter, who you
are is dependent on your tools. You can't put out
a fire without water, you can't dig a place to
deal with it without a shovel. You need all the
tools in your pack to do your job. The organizational
(09:56):
psychologist Carl Wike wrote so eloquently about this. He said
that dropping your tools required letting go of your identity.
And if you no longer have your tools, you're no
longer a firefighter. Why are you there? Job is to
put out the fire, and you let go of your tools,
you've basically given up on your entire mission. Yeah, there
was another tragic fire in Colorado where one of the
(10:21):
survivors had run about three hundred yards uphill. He realizes
that he has his saw over his shoulder, and then
he ditches it because it weighs twenty five pounds. But
then he starts looking for a place to put it
down so the saw won't get burnt. He remembers thinking,
I can't believe I'm putting down my saw. So he
(10:41):
realizes that this is an irrational behavior, and he still
can't quite get himself to rethink this ingrained habit of
taking care of his tools, and some of his peers
end up dying because of that ingrained habit.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
It was a very human thing, though. I mean, I
can think of times in my own life where, from
an outsider's viewpoint, the need to rethink instant should have
been obvious. One particular example, I was going to give
a lecture in Scotland. It's quite a big deal. And
(11:17):
I was on my way to the airport and I
got a call from a friend who was with my
wife and they were both on their way to hospital
because my wife was being taken into the emergency room.
I was very concerned and I was glad, but my
wife's friend was there with her, and I said, I'll
call you back, and then I called the office and
my colleague, who had arranged this lecture for me, said, Tim,
(11:42):
you're not going to Scotland. You're going to the hospital.
I'll sort everything out. I don't want you to think
about this for another moment. I just couldn't let go
of this fact that I was going to the airport
and I was going to give this lecture and I
was going to have to manage the logistics somehow. And
it took somebody from outside the situation to say, you
just need to be somewhere else. In hindsight, of course,
(12:03):
what was I thinking? But I wasn't thinking because I
had a plan, and I realize the planet changed.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
These moments are all around us. There's so many patterns
of thought that become habit and plan and it's so
much easier because of the forces of inertia to stick
with the plan as opposed to pausing and rethinking it.
And I worry a lot about that, fueling all kinds
of escalation of commitment. You make a plan, it doesn't
work out, and instead of abandoning the plan, you double
(12:35):
down and you invest more. And the data on this
I think you are chilling in some cases. On the
subject of cautionary tales. There's some research on mountaineers suggesting
that the grittiest ones are the most likely to die
on expeditions because they cannot let go of the goal
of getting to the summit. And it seems that in
(12:55):
the moment they forget that the ultimate goal is not
to make it to the top, it's to get back down.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'm reminded of the very first caution retail we broadcast,
which was the story of Torry Kanyon and Torrey Canyon.
As you may know, Adam was an oil tanker. It
ran aground in broad daylight, in good weather on rocks
that were visible and well marked on all the charts,
(13:22):
and just drenched the coast of southern England and of
northern France with oil. Somebody was killed also in the
attempt to salvage the tanker. So this was a catastrophe.
And fundamentally the problem was the captain, who was a
sailor called Pastrengo Rujati. He was in a hurry, and
(13:44):
he'd made a plan to take a slightly risky course
between an island and some rocks. And it was a
bit tight to take an oil tanker through there, but
it was fine. It was certainly perfectly possible. And then
a small thing went wrong, and another thing went wrong,
and another thing went wrong, and the more stuff went wrong,
the more his vision of the situation narrowed. Rather than
(14:05):
doing what he should have done, which is to say, oh, okay,
look this is actually getting risky. We need to stop,
we need to go around. I know we're in a hurry,
but we're just going to have to take the time,
he kept thinking, I can just make it. I can
just make it. I can squeeze through that gap, and
in the end the result was a catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I remember listening to that and immediately thinking about research
on threat rigidity. How when we're under stress or pressure,
we revert to our most basic, well learned instincts and
we narrow our field of vision. We're more likely to
fall into a tunnel vision at the very moment when
we most need to broaden it and rethink our definition
of the situation. It's amazingly difficult to train yourself in
(14:46):
that skill, because it's a bit like planning for the unexpected.
I had a fascinating conversation a few years ago with
Nik Wahlenda, the tightrope walker who walked across the Grand
Canyon with no safety net. Now, I thought, okay, if
you want to learn to be faster at rethinking, maybe
somebody whose life is literally hanging in the balance could
teach us something. And he told me that one of
(15:08):
the most important things he does in his training is
he's balancing on just a one foot high tightrope. Nothing
bad will happen if he falls, but he will gather
a group of people and ask them to try to
push him off at random times from behind, just to
prepare his body for all these unexpected events. And I
don't want to say that any of us should live
(15:28):
in that world, but I do wonder if more people
had been trained that way, if we might have been
more prepared for all the rethinking that the pandemic has
forced on us. How many politicians and CEOs did we
watch cling to their tools as opposed to dropping them
and saying, actually, we might need to wear masks. It
(15:49):
might be a good idea to social distance. Seems like
a lot of missed opportunity for rethinking there.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think so. And one of the things that's striking
about these different examples is the dimension of time. Sometimes
we have time. The mountaineer can stop, they can go down,
they've got some control. Pastrengo Ugiati, the captain of Tory Kanyon,
he didn't have to keep going towards the rocks. He
(16:15):
could have stopped. I mean, he was under time pressure,
but ultimately it wasn't like Wagner Dodge where the fire
was coming. Sometimes we have time to we think, and
sometimes we don't. But when we do have time to
we think, do we take advantage of that time?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Not as often as I would like. One of the
questions I've gotten a lot since Think Again came out
is what about people who think too many times or
who overthink? If you think about this as a curve,
most of us are on the opposite end of that spectrum. Yes,
there are people who struggle with overthinking, but you know what,
It's better to think too much than it is to
think too little. And I'd much rather see people grapple
(16:56):
with rumination and analysis paralysis than I would have them
never engage in the analysis at all. And I think
that when you do have the time, the big question becomes, well,
how do you know when it's worth pausing to think
again and when you should basically charge ahead? And my
favorite way to answer that question comes from studying professional
(17:17):
forecasters who you've also spent a lot of time with him.
They're amazing people, they're so fascinating. One in particular is
Jean Pierre Bougam, who's a military historian by training and
participates in forecasting tournaments for fun, and he was the
world's most accurate election forecaster in a series of tournaments.
He not only predicted the rise of Donald Trump and
(17:39):
foresaw a few other elections. He's anticipated some events that
many people thought were improbable or just didn't even give
a chance. And one of the things he does is
when he makes a prediction, he makes a list of
conditions that would change his mind, and that forces him
to stay honest. And I think we could all be
doing more of this, right to say, the moment I
(18:00):
make a decision or the moment I make a plan,
I should pre commit to the possibility that I'm wrong
and ask what would have to happen to change my mind?
How would the world have to shift? What new information
would I have to discover in order for that to
cue me? Hey, wait a minute, it might be time
to think again here. And I've landed in a framework
that I think is helpful there, which is just to
(18:22):
ask two questions. The first one is how consequential is
this decision or this forecast? How high are the stakes?
Second one is how reversible is this decision? Am I
about to walk through a locked door or a revolving door?
And where we most need to think again is when
we're dealing with highly consequential, irreversible decisions. Every decision you
make is a prediction about the future. When you choose
(18:45):
a career or when you take a job, you're making
it bad about what kind of work you're going to
find motivating and what sort of culture will be healthy
as opposed to toxic. When you marry someone, you're making
a prediction about what you're going to want in the
next few decades, and also who they're going to become.
That's when it's really worth slowing down, because it really matters,
and you can't easily change your mind tomorrow. It demands rethinking.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
After the break, I meet someone who refused to rethink
and got it very wrong when it came to making
a highly consequential, irreversible decision. Don't go away. We're back
and I'm here with Adam Grant, the author of Think
Again and Now. Adam I squirmed while reading the chapter
(19:31):
and Think Again about Mike Lazaridis. So tell us who
he is and why did he get things so wrong?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Mike Lazaridis has affected your life, even though you might
not realize it. He started out as an electronics wizard.
He was the kid in high school who fixed broken
TVs for his teacher. He'd built a computer for fun.
He'd improved the buzzer for his high school quiz bowl team,
and actually paid for his first year at college doing that,
(19:58):
and he becomes an electrical engineer. He drops out of
college to become an entrepreneur, and he ends up inventing
a little device called the BlackBerry.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
I have to explain to gen Z what the BlackBerry
is because it basically disappeared from popular views so fast.
But half the smartphone sales in the US were Blackberries
in two thousand and nine, and all of the things
that we now worry about with iPhone, addiction and doom scrolling,
it was all the BlackBerry. We used to call it
the Crackberry, and then it just went We got Android,
(20:31):
we got the iPhone, and the BlackBerry disappeared. So what happened?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
I almost wonder if you just understated the popularity of
the BlackBerry, because not only was it the dominant smartphone,
it invented the smartphone category. So Mike Lazaridi's basically said,
we're going to go from these really clunky pom pilots
to allowing you to send emails and message on the go.
(20:56):
And all of a sudden, what we thought were mobile
phones became devices for text based communication. And so if
you think that the smartphone was a revolutionary or disruptive innovation,
Mike Lazaridis is probably the single most important figure behind it.
So he is the founder, he's the co CEO of RIM,
which is a company that makes the BlackBerry. And I
(21:19):
think the standard narrative about what went wrong is that
he failed to adapt. But I think that there's something
more interesting at play. Mike Lazaridis is a scientist, and
yet he spent too much of his time as a leader,
thinking like a preacher, a prosecutor, and a politician. So
this iPhone comes out two thousand and seven, and Mike
(21:41):
does exactly what you would expect any self respecting engineer
to do. He pries it open to figure out how
it works, and he says, they put a computer inside this. Yeah,
and if your product is basically a phone with emails
and texts and somebody builds a phone with a whole computer,
(22:02):
that is a moment to pause and think again. What
Mike does instead, though, is he preaches the virtues of
his existing product. He says, what's great about this is
we have a keyboard. Everybody wants a keyboard.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
His existing customers they like the keyboard, so it's not
a crazy view. So what should he have done differently?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
A good scientist has the humility to know what they
don't know and the curiosity to seek new knowledge. They
don't let their ideas become part of their identity. Instead
of defining himself as the guy who made the phone
that had buttons on it, right, he would have been
much better off saying, well, that opinion I hold that
has become kool aid that I'm serving to everyone else.
(22:43):
That's just a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And of
course it turns out if he had tested this hypothesis,
he would have discovered that, Yes, although millions of business
and government users really liked the keyboard for work emails,
the majority of smartphone users were looking for a device
that provided home entertainment, and the touch screen was much
more effective for that. So what I would have advised
(23:04):
Mike to do is to put on his scientists goggles
and say, what are the alternative hypotheses, and then how
do you run experiments to test them?
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, I think it's great advice. But let me give
you an alternative perspective. Let me see if I can
persuade you to think again, and then you can come
back and you.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Can I'm open to it in principle.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, well, yeah, you have to pretend to be open
to it, don't you, Adam, it would.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Be ironic if I weren't. Although I mean, if you
persuade me to think again. Here, and I admit that
I was wrong in a much larger sense.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I was right, Absolutely so, Mike Lazaridis. He's so innovative,
he's so smart, and then at some point he stops
thinking like a scientist and he starts thinking like a preacher.
Fine alternative hypothesis. This happens a lot. The British Army
invented the tank and Blitzkrieg, and yet we call it blitzgreig.
The Germans took the idea, the British lost their technical lead.
(23:53):
Kodak invented the digital camera, Sony invented the MP three player,
Xerox invented the personal computer. There's all great ideas, but
they weren't taken advantage of the theory that I discussed
in One of my cautionary tales about the invention of
the tank comes from Rebecca Henderson, a Harvard professor. These
are what she calls architectural innovations, and architectural innovation is
(24:18):
an innovation that requires a change in the architecture of
the organization. So it's not just about one guy at
the top who should change his mind and can't change
his mind. The whole structure of the organization needs to change.
Kodak is built around film and chemical processing. It can't
cope with digital cameras. Xerox is a photocopier company. It
can't make pecs. Maybe you're too hard on Mike Lazaridi's
(24:42):
Maybe he just didn't have a chance because this was
an architectural innovation and they're just almost impossible. So what
am I missing?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Nothing? I think that's a complimentary hypothesis, not an alternative
fund So I think you're right. I think one of
the real struggles for RAM at the time was they
had to reinvent a lout of the company in order
to compete with the iPhone. But the question is why
didn't they do that. They could have done it, they
invented the architecture.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Or they could have tried, at least it seems didn't
even try.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean way before, right, way before.
There were missed opportunities to think again, there was a
top engineer back in the late nineteen nineties who wanted
to add an Internet browser to the BlackBerry, but Mike said, no,
focus on email. Right, that's a coding challenge. Right. That's
an example of Mike being too attached to his convictions. Now,
(25:33):
you could also argue that he knew the importance of
ruthless prioritization, and he was trying to avoid distraction, which
I think may have been true at the time. But
guess what, It's two thousand and eight. The company is
worth more than seventy billion dollars and the BlackBerry still
doesn't have a reliable browser, nor does the company have
another product. Yeah. Right, and that is a massive systemic
(25:54):
failure to think again. And if you look at the architecture,
the structure, and the culture of that organization, that architecture
was built by the leaders at the top. I guess
what I would say in response is I think that
Mike's tendency to slip from scientific thinking to preaching was
part of the reason that the architecture frozen place as
opposed to being reimagined.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Okay, you've persuaded me that Mike's decision making, the psychology
of that is certainly an important part of what's going on.
There was a lovely subplot in the way you tell
this story, which is that a few years before Lazaridis
at Research in Motion is making these decisions or failing
to make these decisions about producing a touchscreen phone. Over
(26:38):
at Apple, you've got Steve Jobs, and you know we
think of Steve Jobs. Oh he's this genius who created
the iPhone and blah blah. But Steve Jobs, he swore
him never make a phone. He hated phones, so he
had to rethink. So how do you get a man
like Steve Jobs to change his mind?
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah? I think the narrative about the renaissance of Apple
missed something vital, which is not only did Steve Jobs
hate phones, he hated cell phone carriers. He called them
the four Orifices. He often got so frustrated with his
phone that he would throw against the wall and smash it.
And he just thought that phones were clunky, they were
(27:15):
poorly designed, the tech didn't work right. He hated the
hardware and the software and the design. And some of
his engineers and designers started seeing the writing on the
wall in the late nineties, And it really began when
they rolled out the iPod, which was their first big success,
And suddenly it became clear to a group of them
that it was only a matter of time before everything
(27:37):
else you could put on a computer was also in
your pocket. And they started pitching him the idea, and
he just thought it was stupid. He kept saying, I
will never make a phone. I don't know why you
would want that, and he was very close to the idea,
and Steve Jobs was not an easy person to argue with.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
It sounds like very similar to the kind of things
that Mike Asuidi's was saying, like why would we want
why would we want a touch screen? You know, would
why do we want a browser? We don't want that
kind of stuff. It's too complicated, except, of course lasuitis
is making is saying this after Job group have already
proved it can be done.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
That's right, which makes it all the more depressing. But
I think what ultimately made Steve Jobs an effective leader.
I don't want to say a great leader, because he
violated some of my core values in the way that
he treated human beings. But he was willing to change
his mind, and he surrounded himself with people who knew
how to tempt him to think again. They tried to
(28:34):
plant the seed and let him water it. The first
thing they did was they said, we're not trying to
threaten the core DNA of Apple. We don't want to
turn Apple into a phone company. It's going to be
a computer company. We're just going to shrink the computer
and put a phone on the side of it, and
you're already putting thousands of songs in your pocket. Don't
(28:54):
you want to carry around everything else too? The research
on this is fascinating to me that people are more
willing to embrace change when they're reminded of what's going
to stay the same, right, that if you give people
a vision for change, they're less likely to resist it
if they also hear a vision for continuity. And that's
exactly what the engineers and designers did for Steve Jobs.
(29:15):
They said, we're going to take the core of Apple
our identity, and we're going to shift the form. There's
an engineer who hears that Microsoft is planning to release
a tablet and it's going to have a stylus, and
he purposely brings up this example because he knows that
Jobs hates Microsoft, and he thinks the stylus is the
(29:35):
worst invention in this smartphone industry. And immediately that fires
up his competitive juices and he says, we're going to
make a better one and you're going to be able
to operate it with your finger. And there were so
many moments like this. I'll throw out one other that
I really got a kick out of which is there
was an engineer who just casually says to Steve Jobs, look,
(29:57):
I know that smartphones are just hideous. Therefore the pocket
protector crowd, But what do you think it would look
like if Apple designed one right and activates his imagine
and Jobs basically then starts to run with the vision
and so I guess the overall lesson here is that
if you want to push someone like Steve Jobs to
(30:18):
think again, it's really helpful to make sure that you
activate their natural curiosity, that you give them a chance
to generate some ideas, because then they start to take
ownership over them. If you do that in a way
that doesn't threaten what they're already attached to, it's a
lot easier to get them to give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I guess the really deep point there is that you
can't change somebody's mind. Only they can change their mind.
And they were giving him the prompt and the space
to change his own mind because they're not going to
do it for him.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I think one of the most powerful lessons in the
last few decades of psychology research is it's very difficult
to motivate someone else to change their mind. What you
can do is try to help them find their own
motivations to change their minds.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
After the break, will return to the horrific Man Gulch
wildfire pro final twist in this cautionary tale. We're back
and I'm with Adam Grant, the author of Think Again.
(31:24):
And Adam, I've heard some of the Man Gulch story before,
but you've added a final twist. What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
I didn't know this when I sat down to write
the story. I thought that I was writing a story
about the failure to think again, about the escape fire
and about dropping tools. And as I read about Man Gulch,
I was horrified to discover that there was a deeper
and much more systemic failure to think again, which is
that the twelve smoke jumpers who died lost their lives
(31:54):
fighting a fire that did not need to be fought
in the first place. The entire field of wildland firefighting,
a whole industry, was guilty of decades of failing to
think again. I think the earliest record I can find
is the eighteen eighties, when scientists started writing about the
fact that wildfires are important in the life cycles of forests.
(32:18):
So if you think about what a fire does it
puts nutrients in the soil, it clears away dead brush.
It also opens up a path for sunlight. And if
you suppress wildlan fires, you end up with forests that
are too dense and that can lead to more explosive
wildfires and that kills force rather than allowing them to rejuvenate.
(32:39):
So that was known starting in the eighteen eighties. Man
Goulch happens in the nineteen forties, and it's not until
nineteen seventy eight that the US Forest Service finally eliminates
their policy that if anybody sees a fire, it has
to be put out by ten am the next day.
And what's crazy tim about Man Gulch is that wildfire
(33:02):
that killed the smoke jumpers happened in a remote area.
There's no human life at risk, and the smoke jumper
go in because no one in the community, the profession,
the organization has questioned the assumption that wildfires need to
be put out.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
It's a real gut punch to think about that, and
it got me thinking about cautionary tales in general, because
most of the cautionary tales that we tell are about
intense moments where someone makes a mistake and It may
be an individual, or it may be an organization, but
(33:41):
the spotlight is on a particular time and place, and
I wonder how often there's something going on in the background,
something much more diffuse, something rotten in the culture or
in the structure of a whole industry or a whole
field that should have been fixed fifty years previously, and
that we don't talk about because the cool story is
(34:02):
it happens at a much faster pace.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I mean, it's maddening when you think about it. We've
seen so many disasters that are due to this kind
of deeper cultural failure of rethinking. You know, certainly pandemic
response falls in that category. The crash of stock markets
fits that bill pretty cleanly. Almost any example of a
frog in a slow boiling pot would probably align with
(34:27):
this issue. And as you know, it turns out even
that story needs to be rethought.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Because, yeah, the frogs will move right.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I mean, the moment you heat up the water to
the point of discomfort, the frog leaps out. I read
about that and thought, it's not the frogs who can't
think again, it's us. You hear the story, you assume
it's true, and you retell it. As opposed to pausing
to rethink it. I think that's a metaphor for so
many of the mistakes that we make in our lives
and in our world, which is we make an assumption
(34:59):
it proves to be a successful one in the moment,
it helps us achieve our goals, and we don't ask
whether then the practices that we build a around that assumption,
our best practices are time honored traditions were created for
a world that no longer exists.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Thank you, Adam. It's been fantastic.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Thank you honored to be a part of it. It's always
a little nerve racking showing up on a podcast that
I've listened to.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It is our honor to have you. I should say
that Adam writes amazing books faster than we can release
podcast episodes. So while in this episode we were discussing
his book Think Again, his more recent book is Hidden Potential.
It's not only packed with interesting stories and ideas, but
practical lessons too. You canvide all of Adam's books in
good bookshops, and you can listen to Adam Grant's podcasts
(35:48):
Rethinking and Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. For
a full list of our sources see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. Sound design and original music
(36:11):
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jemmas Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
(36:33):
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot fm,
(36:56):
slash plus
Pushkin. Late on blistering August afternoon in nineteen forty nine,
fifteen men parachuted out of the wide Montana sky their
mission to intercept and extinguish a forest wildfire. Within minutes,
their mission had changed to just survive. These men were
(00:40):
smoke jumpers, the wildfire fighting Elite. They landed near the
top of Mangulch with the intent of digging a line
in the ground in front of the fire, shepherding it
towards an area where there was less to burn. It
wasn't long before they realized the wind had turned and
the fire was racing towards them, flames thirty feet high
and gathering speed. There was no alternative to run, and
(01:05):
on flat even ground wearing running a gear that would
have been possible, but scrambling steeply uphill through rocks and
long grass, and carrying heavy equipment it might be too
much to ask. The men were making a lung bursting
effort to reach the safety of the ridge top that
the fire was gaining and gaining. The ridge top was
(01:28):
just two hundred yards away. As the fire roared closer,
Another two or three minutes scramble was their time. The
smoke Jumper's foreman, Wagoner Dodge, realized with dread they just
weren't going to make it, and so he did something
that made his team recoil with astonishment and horror. I'm
(01:51):
Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is
(02:18):
one of our cautionary conversations. As usual, you'll hear a story,
or perhaps more than one story of disaster. In fact,
the story of Brave smoke Jumpers features in the book
Think Again, by my guest Adam Grant. He's here to
help tell this cautionary tale and to reflect on the lessons.
Adam needs no introduction, but he deserves one, so he's
(02:41):
going to get one. He's an organizational psychologist at Wharton.
He describes that as trying to figure out how to
make work not suck. He's the presenter of two brilliant podcasts,
Work Life and Rethinking, the creator of some of the
best and most loved TED talks, and the author of
several superb and best selling books, including Hidden Potential. In
(03:02):
the book we're discussing today, Think Again, Adam, Welcome to
Cautionary Tales.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Thanks. It's I have to say it's a little bit
unsettling to be in a live cautionary tales. I'm so
used to listening to it when I go to bed.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Well, I'm sure you can preserve the spirits of cautionary tales,
and I'd hopefully add a little bit of extra insight.
And this story of the fire, I mean, it's it's
an inspiring story in some ways, it's a hellish story
in other ways, And like Dante's Inferno, it's got multiple levels.
You begin your book, think again with this story. What
was it that Wagner Dodge did that so shocked his crew?
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Well, you think the foreman would be trying to run
to the head of the line, right and guide everyone
else to safety, And instead of running, he stops. He
bends over and he takes a matchbook out of his pocket,
And you can only imagine what's going through the other
firefighter's minds. We're trying to escape a fire, right, not
(04:02):
start one. What could he possibly be doing? But he
starts lighting matches and throwing them in the grass. One
of the crew thinks he must have gone nuts. That
bastard Dodge is trying to burn me to death. And
then he looks over and he sees Dodge waving his
arms toward the fire and encouraging people to follow him
into his fire. What in the world is he doing?
(04:27):
The smoke jumpers don't know that Dodge has improvised a
really unusual survival strategy. He's building an escape fire. He
had no training in how to do this. It wasn't
an idea that firefighters were aware of at the time.
But out of sheer instinct in that moment, he's figured
out that if he burns the grass in front of
(04:50):
him and he lays down face down in the ashes,
that the fire will burn right over him. Because if
he burns the grass in front of him, the fire
will not have anything to burn and it'll be forced
to go around. And that's exactly what he does. He
basically removes all the fuel for the wildfire to feed on,
and he's a pouring water out of his canteen onto
(05:11):
his handkerchief. He puts it over his mouth, and he
lays face down in the charred area and survives there
for fifteen minutes. There's enough oxygen on the ground that
he can make it, and the wildfire literally runs right
over him.
Speaker 1 (05:25):
I mean, it doesn't bear thinking about what it must
have been like for him as the fire runs over him.
As you say, he wasn't trained. Nobody really knew for
sure that this would work. I mean, I'm sure the
heat and the smoke must have been intense. So there's
a tremendous amount of courage there. Smoke jumpers are. I'm
sure they're all very courageous. Did any of them join him?
(05:46):
Did any of them understand or trust the idea enough
to actually get down there and join him in the
shadow of this escape fire that he'd lit.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
No, they didn't. I think one of the great tragedies
here that I didn't write about, and think again, is
that the crew didn't have much of an opportunity to
build trust. They didn't know Dodge very well. There wasn't
a long standing relationship between them, and so they see
him doing something that looks insane and they basically ignore it.
I remember in the US, we were trained as kids
(06:15):
right to stop, drop and roll in the face of
a fire, and for Dodge, all he does is stop
and drop. There's no roll, and so he just has
to lay there hoping that the fire is gonna fail
to burn him alive. The other smoke jumpers end up
basically trying to race for their lives, and of the
fourteen of them, twelve of them didn't make it. It's
(06:37):
devastating when you look back, because Dodge was able to survive.
There were two who made it because of their physical fitness.
They were able to barely outrun the fire. But the
other doesn't. I think failed because they weren't trained in
the mental fitness to let go of the very assumptions
that they brought to their job.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Yeah, and you described just the horror of it, and
I think one of them had a pocket watch that
was partially melted. And it's just awful and the fact
that they could probably all have survived if they had
had enough experience or enough trust, or had it able
to understand what Wagner Dodge was doing. One of the
things that's inspiring about this story is that it's just
(07:16):
so brilliant. It's like, how on earth does anybody think
so fast in such a crisis in such an original way.
Hardly anybody could do that. But you make the point
in the book that actually there was a much simpler
piece of rethinking that it seems like anybody should have
been able to do. But but the firefighters the smoke
jumpers they didn't do that either.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Yeah, So I think Dodge's rethinking is very much out
of reach for mere mortals, right, The idea that when
you're running for your life and you only have seconds
to make a decision, you could just dream up and
escape fire and live because of it. Not I maybe
you tim could pull that.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
Out, but well, I'm glad not to be in the situation.
But I sincerely doubt it.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
So many of us see intelligence as thinking and learning,
But what Dodge is doing there is he's choosing to
rethink and unlike he's got a rethink fire not as
a source of danger, but as a path to safety.
He has to unlearn his assumptions right that when you're
trying to fight a fire, your job is to put
it out, not start another one. That's a vital skill
(08:23):
in a rapidly changing world, and it's a skill that unfortunately,
that crew of smoke jumpers did not have, because if
you look at the twelve who didn't survive the fire,
they failed to drop their heavy tools. And it's just
devastating when you read the reports on the accident, because
(08:43):
you literally find burned bodies still carrying axes saws, shovels.
Their packs alone weigh twenty pounds. There were investigators who
calculated later that they could have run fifteen to twenty
percent faster, and that just dropping their packs and tools
could have made the difference between life and death. And
(09:04):
the big question is why did they not think to
drop their tools?
Speaker 1 (09:08):
So why didn't they because it seems it really seems
very simple.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Well, I don't think there's any way to know for sure,
But part of this is just a basic cognitive entrenchment problem.
They're so used to a certain way of doing things
that they don't even bother to question their assumptions. As
a firefighter, as a smoke jumper, your tools are just
ingrained as part of your training. But I think there's
also a case to be made that there's a deeper
(09:35):
problem at play here, which is those tools become part
of their identity. If you are a firefighter, who you
are is dependent on your tools. You can't put out
a fire without water, you can't dig a place to
deal with it without a shovel. You need all the
tools in your pack to do your job. The organizational
(09:56):
psychologist Carl Wike wrote so eloquently about this. He said
that dropping your tools required letting go of your identity.
And if you no longer have your tools, you're no
longer a firefighter. Why are you there? Job is to
put out the fire, and you let go of your tools,
you've basically given up on your entire mission. Yeah, there
was another tragic fire in Colorado where one of the
(10:21):
survivors had run about three hundred yards uphill. He realizes
that he has his saw over his shoulder, and then
he ditches it because it weighs twenty five pounds. But
then he starts looking for a place to put it
down so the saw won't get burnt. He remembers thinking,
I can't believe I'm putting down my saw. So he
(10:41):
realizes that this is an irrational behavior, and he still
can't quite get himself to rethink this ingrained habit of
taking care of his tools, and some of his peers
end up dying because of that ingrained habit.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
It was a very human thing, though. I mean, I
can think of times in my own life where, from
an outsider's viewpoint, the need to rethink instant should have
been obvious. One particular example, I was going to give
a lecture in Scotland. It's quite a big deal. And
(11:17):
I was on my way to the airport and I
got a call from a friend who was with my
wife and they were both on their way to hospital
because my wife was being taken into the emergency room.
I was very concerned and I was glad, but my
wife's friend was there with her, and I said, I'll
call you back, and then I called the office and
my colleague, who had arranged this lecture for me, said, Tim,
(11:42):
you're not going to Scotland. You're going to the hospital.
I'll sort everything out. I don't want you to think
about this for another moment. I just couldn't let go
of this fact that I was going to the airport
and I was going to give this lecture and I
was going to have to manage the logistics somehow. And
it took somebody from outside the situation to say, you
just need to be somewhere else. In hindsight, of course,
(12:03):
what was I thinking? But I wasn't thinking because I
had a plan, and I realize the planet changed.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
These moments are all around us. There's so many patterns
of thought that become habit and plan and it's so
much easier because of the forces of inertia to stick
with the plan as opposed to pausing and rethinking it.
And I worry a lot about that, fueling all kinds
of escalation of commitment. You make a plan, it doesn't
work out, and instead of abandoning the plan, you double
(12:35):
down and you invest more. And the data on this
I think you are chilling in some cases. On the
subject of cautionary tales. There's some research on mountaineers suggesting
that the grittiest ones are the most likely to die
on expeditions because they cannot let go of the goal
of getting to the summit. And it seems that in
(12:55):
the moment they forget that the ultimate goal is not
to make it to the top, it's to get back down.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
I'm reminded of the very first caution retail we broadcast,
which was the story of Torry Kanyon and Torrey Canyon.
As you may know, Adam was an oil tanker. It
ran aground in broad daylight, in good weather on rocks
that were visible and well marked on all the charts,
(13:22):
and just drenched the coast of southern England and of
northern France with oil. Somebody was killed also in the
attempt to salvage the tanker. So this was a catastrophe.
And fundamentally the problem was the captain, who was a
sailor called Pastrengo Rujati. He was in a hurry, and
(13:44):
he'd made a plan to take a slightly risky course
between an island and some rocks. And it was a
bit tight to take an oil tanker through there, but
it was fine. It was certainly perfectly possible. And then
a small thing went wrong, and another thing went wrong,
and another thing went wrong, and the more stuff went wrong,
the more his vision of the situation narrowed. Rather than
(14:05):
doing what he should have done, which is to say, oh, okay,
look this is actually getting risky. We need to stop,
we need to go around. I know we're in a hurry,
but we're just going to have to take the time,
he kept thinking, I can just make it. I can
just make it. I can squeeze through that gap, and
in the end the result was a catastrophe.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
I remember listening to that and immediately thinking about research
on threat rigidity. How when we're under stress or pressure,
we revert to our most basic, well learned instincts and
we narrow our field of vision. We're more likely to
fall into a tunnel vision at the very moment when
we most need to broaden it and rethink our definition
of the situation. It's amazingly difficult to train yourself in
(14:46):
that skill, because it's a bit like planning for the unexpected.
I had a fascinating conversation a few years ago with
Nik Wahlenda, the tightrope walker who walked across the Grand
Canyon with no safety net. Now, I thought, okay, if
you want to learn to be faster at rethinking, maybe
somebody whose life is literally hanging in the balance could
teach us something. And he told me that one of
(15:08):
the most important things he does in his training is
he's balancing on just a one foot high tightrope. Nothing
bad will happen if he falls, but he will gather
a group of people and ask them to try to
push him off at random times from behind, just to
prepare his body for all these unexpected events. And I
don't want to say that any of us should live
(15:28):
in that world, but I do wonder if more people
had been trained that way, if we might have been
more prepared for all the rethinking that the pandemic has
forced on us. How many politicians and CEOs did we
watch cling to their tools as opposed to dropping them
and saying, actually, we might need to wear masks. It
(15:49):
might be a good idea to social distance. Seems like
a lot of missed opportunity for rethinking there.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I think so. And one of the things that's striking
about these different examples is the dimension of time. Sometimes
we have time. The mountaineer can stop, they can go down,
they've got some control. Pastrengo Ugiati, the captain of Tory Kanyon,
he didn't have to keep going towards the rocks. He
(16:15):
could have stopped. I mean, he was under time pressure,
but ultimately it wasn't like Wagner Dodge where the fire
was coming. Sometimes we have time to we think, and
sometimes we don't. But when we do have time to
we think, do we take advantage of that time?
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Not as often as I would like. One of the
questions I've gotten a lot since Think Again came out
is what about people who think too many times or
who overthink? If you think about this as a curve,
most of us are on the opposite end of that spectrum. Yes,
there are people who struggle with overthinking, but you know what,
It's better to think too much than it is to
think too little. And I'd much rather see people grapple
(16:56):
with rumination and analysis paralysis than I would have them
never engage in the analysis at all. And I think
that when you do have the time, the big question becomes, well,
how do you know when it's worth pausing to think
again and when you should basically charge ahead? And my
favorite way to answer that question comes from studying professional
(17:17):
forecasters who you've also spent a lot of time with him.
They're amazing people, they're so fascinating. One in particular is
Jean Pierre Bougam, who's a military historian by training and
participates in forecasting tournaments for fun, and he was the
world's most accurate election forecaster in a series of tournaments.
He not only predicted the rise of Donald Trump and
(17:39):
foresaw a few other elections. He's anticipated some events that
many people thought were improbable or just didn't even give
a chance. And one of the things he does is
when he makes a prediction, he makes a list of
conditions that would change his mind, and that forces him
to stay honest. And I think we could all be
doing more of this, right to say, the moment I
(18:00):
make a decision or the moment I make a plan,
I should pre commit to the possibility that I'm wrong
and ask what would have to happen to change my mind?
How would the world have to shift? What new information
would I have to discover in order for that to
cue me? Hey, wait a minute, it might be time
to think again here. And I've landed in a framework
that I think is helpful there, which is just to
(18:22):
ask two questions. The first one is how consequential is
this decision or this forecast? How high are the stakes?
Second one is how reversible is this decision? Am I
about to walk through a locked door or a revolving door?
And where we most need to think again is when
we're dealing with highly consequential, irreversible decisions. Every decision you
make is a prediction about the future. When you choose
(18:45):
a career or when you take a job, you're making
it bad about what kind of work you're going to
find motivating and what sort of culture will be healthy
as opposed to toxic. When you marry someone, you're making
a prediction about what you're going to want in the
next few decades, and also who they're going to become.
That's when it's really worth slowing down, because it really matters,
and you can't easily change your mind tomorrow. It demands rethinking.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
After the break, I meet someone who refused to rethink
and got it very wrong when it came to making
a highly consequential, irreversible decision. Don't go away. We're back
and I'm here with Adam Grant, the author of Think
Again and Now. Adam I squirmed while reading the chapter
(19:31):
and Think Again about Mike Lazaridis. So tell us who
he is and why did he get things so wrong?
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Mike Lazaridis has affected your life, even though you might
not realize it. He started out as an electronics wizard.
He was the kid in high school who fixed broken
TVs for his teacher. He'd built a computer for fun.
He'd improved the buzzer for his high school quiz bowl team,
and actually paid for his first year at college doing that,
(19:58):
and he becomes an electrical engineer. He drops out of
college to become an entrepreneur, and he ends up inventing
a little device called the BlackBerry.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
I have to explain to gen Z what the BlackBerry
is because it basically disappeared from popular views so fast.
But half the smartphone sales in the US were Blackberries
in two thousand and nine, and all of the things
that we now worry about with iPhone, addiction and doom scrolling,
it was all the BlackBerry. We used to call it
the Crackberry, and then it just went We got Android,
(20:31):
we got the iPhone, and the BlackBerry disappeared. So what happened?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
I almost wonder if you just understated the popularity of
the BlackBerry, because not only was it the dominant smartphone,
it invented the smartphone category. So Mike Lazaridi's basically said,
we're going to go from these really clunky pom pilots
to allowing you to send emails and message on the go.
(20:56):
And all of a sudden, what we thought were mobile
phones became devices for text based communication. And so if
you think that the smartphone was a revolutionary or disruptive innovation,
Mike Lazaridis is probably the single most important figure behind it.
So he is the founder, he's the co CEO of RIM,
which is a company that makes the BlackBerry. And I
(21:19):
think the standard narrative about what went wrong is that
he failed to adapt. But I think that there's something
more interesting at play. Mike Lazaridis is a scientist, and
yet he spent too much of his time as a leader,
thinking like a preacher, a prosecutor, and a politician. So
this iPhone comes out two thousand and seven, and Mike
(21:41):
does exactly what you would expect any self respecting engineer
to do. He pries it open to figure out how
it works, and he says, they put a computer inside this. Yeah,
and if your product is basically a phone with emails
and texts and somebody builds a phone with a whole computer,
(22:02):
that is a moment to pause and think again. What
Mike does instead, though, is he preaches the virtues of
his existing product. He says, what's great about this is
we have a keyboard. Everybody wants a keyboard.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
His existing customers they like the keyboard, so it's not
a crazy view. So what should he have done differently?
Speaker 2 (22:22):
A good scientist has the humility to know what they
don't know and the curiosity to seek new knowledge. They
don't let their ideas become part of their identity. Instead
of defining himself as the guy who made the phone
that had buttons on it, right, he would have been
much better off saying, well, that opinion I hold that
has become kool aid that I'm serving to everyone else.
(22:43):
That's just a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And of
course it turns out if he had tested this hypothesis,
he would have discovered that, Yes, although millions of business
and government users really liked the keyboard for work emails,
the majority of smartphone users were looking for a device
that provided home entertainment, and the touch screen was much
more effective for that. So what I would have advised
(23:04):
Mike to do is to put on his scientists goggles
and say, what are the alternative hypotheses, and then how
do you run experiments to test them?
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Yeah, I think it's great advice. But let me give
you an alternative perspective. Let me see if I can
persuade you to think again, and then you can come
back and you.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
Can I'm open to it in principle.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, well, yeah, you have to pretend to be open
to it, don't you, Adam, it would.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
Be ironic if I weren't. Although I mean, if you
persuade me to think again. Here, and I admit that
I was wrong in a much larger sense.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I was right, Absolutely so, Mike Lazaridis. He's so innovative,
he's so smart, and then at some point he stops
thinking like a scientist and he starts thinking like a preacher.
Fine alternative hypothesis. This happens a lot. The British Army
invented the tank and Blitzkrieg, and yet we call it blitzgreig.
The Germans took the idea, the British lost their technical lead.
(23:53):
Kodak invented the digital camera, Sony invented the MP three player,
Xerox invented the personal computer. There's all great ideas, but
they weren't taken advantage of the theory that I discussed
in One of my cautionary tales about the invention of
the tank comes from Rebecca Henderson, a Harvard professor. These
are what she calls architectural innovations, and architectural innovation is
(24:18):
an innovation that requires a change in the architecture of
the organization. So it's not just about one guy at
the top who should change his mind and can't change
his mind. The whole structure of the organization needs to change.
Kodak is built around film and chemical processing. It can't
cope with digital cameras. Xerox is a photocopier company. It
can't make pecs. Maybe you're too hard on Mike Lazaridi's
(24:42):
Maybe he just didn't have a chance because this was
an architectural innovation and they're just almost impossible. So what
am I missing?
Speaker 2 (24:49):
Nothing? I think that's a complimentary hypothesis, not an alternative
fund So I think you're right. I think one of
the real struggles for RAM at the time was they
had to reinvent a lout of the company in order
to compete with the iPhone. But the question is why
didn't they do that. They could have done it, they
invented the architecture.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
Or they could have tried, at least it seems didn't
even try.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean way before, right, way before.
There were missed opportunities to think again, there was a
top engineer back in the late nineteen nineties who wanted
to add an Internet browser to the BlackBerry, but Mike said, no,
focus on email. Right, that's a coding challenge. Right. That's
an example of Mike being too attached to his convictions. Now,
(25:33):
you could also argue that he knew the importance of
ruthless prioritization, and he was trying to avoid distraction, which
I think may have been true at the time. But
guess what, It's two thousand and eight. The company is
worth more than seventy billion dollars and the BlackBerry still
doesn't have a reliable browser, nor does the company have
another product. Yeah. Right, and that is a massive systemic
(25:54):
failure to think again. And if you look at the architecture,
the structure, and the culture of that organization, that architecture
was built by the leaders at the top. I guess
what I would say in response is I think that
Mike's tendency to slip from scientific thinking to preaching was
part of the reason that the architecture frozen place as
opposed to being reimagined.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Okay, you've persuaded me that Mike's decision making, the psychology
of that is certainly an important part of what's going on.
There was a lovely subplot in the way you tell
this story, which is that a few years before Lazaridis
at Research in Motion is making these decisions or failing
to make these decisions about producing a touchscreen phone. Over
(26:38):
at Apple, you've got Steve Jobs, and you know we
think of Steve Jobs. Oh he's this genius who created
the iPhone and blah blah. But Steve Jobs, he swore
him never make a phone. He hated phones, so he
had to rethink. So how do you get a man
like Steve Jobs to change his mind?
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Yeah? I think the narrative about the renaissance of Apple
missed something vital, which is not only did Steve Jobs
hate phones, he hated cell phone carriers. He called them
the four Orifices. He often got so frustrated with his
phone that he would throw against the wall and smash it.
And he just thought that phones were clunky, they were
(27:15):
poorly designed, the tech didn't work right. He hated the
hardware and the software and the design. And some of
his engineers and designers started seeing the writing on the
wall in the late nineties, And it really began when
they rolled out the iPod, which was their first big success,
And suddenly it became clear to a group of them
that it was only a matter of time before everything
(27:37):
else you could put on a computer was also in
your pocket. And they started pitching him the idea, and
he just thought it was stupid. He kept saying, I
will never make a phone. I don't know why you
would want that, and he was very close to the idea,
and Steve Jobs was not an easy person to argue with.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
It sounds like very similar to the kind of things
that Mike Asuidi's was saying, like why would we want
why would we want a touch screen? You know, would
why do we want a browser? We don't want that
kind of stuff. It's too complicated, except, of course lasuitis
is making is saying this after Job group have already
proved it can be done.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
That's right, which makes it all the more depressing. But
I think what ultimately made Steve Jobs an effective leader.
I don't want to say a great leader, because he
violated some of my core values in the way that
he treated human beings. But he was willing to change
his mind, and he surrounded himself with people who knew
how to tempt him to think again. They tried to
(28:34):
plant the seed and let him water it. The first
thing they did was they said, we're not trying to
threaten the core DNA of Apple. We don't want to
turn Apple into a phone company. It's going to be
a computer company. We're just going to shrink the computer
and put a phone on the side of it, and
you're already putting thousands of songs in your pocket. Don't
(28:54):
you want to carry around everything else too? The research
on this is fascinating to me that people are more
willing to embrace change when they're reminded of what's going
to stay the same, right, that if you give people
a vision for change, they're less likely to resist it
if they also hear a vision for continuity. And that's
exactly what the engineers and designers did for Steve Jobs.
(29:15):
They said, we're going to take the core of Apple
our identity, and we're going to shift the form. There's
an engineer who hears that Microsoft is planning to release
a tablet and it's going to have a stylus, and
he purposely brings up this example because he knows that
Jobs hates Microsoft, and he thinks the stylus is the
(29:35):
worst invention in this smartphone industry. And immediately that fires
up his competitive juices and he says, we're going to
make a better one and you're going to be able
to operate it with your finger. And there were so
many moments like this. I'll throw out one other that
I really got a kick out of which is there
was an engineer who just casually says to Steve Jobs, look,
(29:57):
I know that smartphones are just hideous. Therefore the pocket
protector crowd, But what do you think it would look
like if Apple designed one right and activates his imagine
and Jobs basically then starts to run with the vision
and so I guess the overall lesson here is that
if you want to push someone like Steve Jobs to
(30:18):
think again, it's really helpful to make sure that you
activate their natural curiosity, that you give them a chance
to generate some ideas, because then they start to take
ownership over them. If you do that in a way
that doesn't threaten what they're already attached to, it's a
lot easier to get them to give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
I guess the really deep point there is that you
can't change somebody's mind. Only they can change their mind.
And they were giving him the prompt and the space
to change his own mind because they're not going to
do it for him.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
I think one of the most powerful lessons in the
last few decades of psychology research is it's very difficult
to motivate someone else to change their mind. What you
can do is try to help them find their own
motivations to change their minds.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
After the break, will return to the horrific Man Gulch
wildfire pro final twist in this cautionary tale. We're back
and I'm with Adam Grant, the author of Think Again.
(31:24):
And Adam, I've heard some of the Man Gulch story before,
but you've added a final twist. What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:31):
I didn't know this when I sat down to write
the story. I thought that I was writing a story
about the failure to think again, about the escape fire
and about dropping tools. And as I read about Man Gulch,
I was horrified to discover that there was a deeper
and much more systemic failure to think again, which is
that the twelve smoke jumpers who died lost their lives
(31:54):
fighting a fire that did not need to be fought
in the first place. The entire field of wildland firefighting,
a whole industry, was guilty of decades of failing to
think again. I think the earliest record I can find
is the eighteen eighties, when scientists started writing about the
fact that wildfires are important in the life cycles of forests.
(32:18):
So if you think about what a fire does it
puts nutrients in the soil, it clears away dead brush.
It also opens up a path for sunlight. And if
you suppress wildlan fires, you end up with forests that
are too dense and that can lead to more explosive
wildfires and that kills force rather than allowing them to rejuvenate.
(32:39):
So that was known starting in the eighteen eighties. Man
Goulch happens in the nineteen forties, and it's not until
nineteen seventy eight that the US Forest Service finally eliminates
their policy that if anybody sees a fire, it has
to be put out by ten am the next day.
And what's crazy tim about Man Gulch is that wildfire
(33:02):
that killed the smoke jumpers happened in a remote area.
There's no human life at risk, and the smoke jumper
go in because no one in the community, the profession,
the organization has questioned the assumption that wildfires need to
be put out.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
It's a real gut punch to think about that, and
it got me thinking about cautionary tales in general, because
most of the cautionary tales that we tell are about
intense moments where someone makes a mistake and It may
be an individual, or it may be an organization, but
(33:41):
the spotlight is on a particular time and place, and
I wonder how often there's something going on in the background,
something much more diffuse, something rotten in the culture or
in the structure of a whole industry or a whole
field that should have been fixed fifty years previously, and
that we don't talk about because the cool story is
(34:02):
it happens at a much faster pace.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I mean, it's maddening when you think about it. We've
seen so many disasters that are due to this kind
of deeper cultural failure of rethinking. You know, certainly pandemic
response falls in that category. The crash of stock markets
fits that bill pretty cleanly. Almost any example of a
frog in a slow boiling pot would probably align with
(34:27):
this issue. And as you know, it turns out even
that story needs to be rethought.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Because, yeah, the frogs will move right.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
I mean, the moment you heat up the water to
the point of discomfort, the frog leaps out. I read
about that and thought, it's not the frogs who can't
think again, it's us. You hear the story, you assume
it's true, and you retell it. As opposed to pausing
to rethink it. I think that's a metaphor for so
many of the mistakes that we make in our lives
and in our world, which is we make an assumption
(34:59):
it proves to be a successful one in the moment,
it helps us achieve our goals, and we don't ask
whether then the practices that we build a around that assumption,
our best practices are time honored traditions were created for
a world that no longer exists.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Thank you, Adam. It's been fantastic.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
Thank you honored to be a part of it. It's always
a little nerve racking showing up on a podcast that
I've listened to.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
It is our honor to have you. I should say
that Adam writes amazing books faster than we can release
podcast episodes. So while in this episode we were discussing
his book Think Again, his more recent book is Hidden Potential.
It's not only packed with interesting stories and ideas, but
practical lessons too. You canvide all of Adam's books in
good bookshops, and you can listen to Adam Grant's podcasts
(35:48):
Rethinking and Work Life wherever you get your podcasts. For
a full list of our sources see the show notes
at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by me
Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines
with support from Marilyn Rust. Sound design and original music
(36:11):
is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Stella Harford, Jemmas Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg,
Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric's handler, Carrie Brody, and Christina Sullivan.
(36:33):
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded
at Wardoor Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell your friends and if you want to hear the
show ad free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the
show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot fm,
(36:56):
slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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