As a renowned organizational psychologist and best-selling author, Adam Grant has made a career out of reexamining political, economic, and cultural assumptions about how things should work and people should think.
Most humans suffer from flaws in their logic and reasoning, or what Grant calls the “‘I’m-not-biased bias,’ which is the belief that you might have flaws in your thinking, and holes in your reasoning, but I am perfectly rational and neutral and objective.”
The challenge is how to dismantle such faulty assumptions, Grant, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, told a rapt audience of 160 at the Collis Center in a Dialogue Project talk on March 6.
He described an incident in his own teaching career, when a student told him he had a good idea for a start-up company, and did Grant want to invest in it? Grant listened to the pitch and told the student the idea would never work. “You just can’t sell glasses on the Internet. So I declined the investment. And now Warby Parker is worth over a billion dollars, and my wife is in charge of our investing decisions.”
While it was “once true that you could not sell glasses on the Internet, it was now false. I should have been faster to think again,” Grant said.
Dartmouth launched the Dialogue Project last year to encourage a respectful and open exchange of ideas on campus. Grant’s talk was moderated by Kristi Clemens, executive director of dialogue initiatives.
Addressing the students in the room, Grant said, “Throughout your life, you’ve gotten a ton of positive reinforcement that you are smart and that you are often right. And that means it is harder for you to see your own limitations. And so you could say intelligence is not a cure. It may even be a curse. We need a broader notion of intelligence. We need to think about intelligence not just as your capacity to think and learn; we should also think about it as your ability to rethink and unlearn.”
The process of scrutinizing long-held premises typically consists of four to five steps, said Grant, who also hosts the TED original podcast WorkLife and is the author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know and Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.
The first is to rethink your mindset and the second is to create an atmosphere of psychological safety, in which people feel encouraged to express dissenting viewpoints, rather than keeping quiet out of fear of being judged.
The third is to build a “challenge network,” such as a network of readers and thinkers who are frank but constructive in analyzing your work. “You begin to surround yourself with people who challenge your thought process, not just the ones who agree with your conclusions. But it is often hard to get people to do that,” Grant said.
The fourth step is to make the unfamiliar, familiar; and the fifth is to treat a debate like a dance. Otherwise, Grant said, “When I act like a prosecutor, the other person brings their best defense attorney to the courts, and we basically just butt heads.”
Clemens noted that Grant’s recommendations and observations “resonated with what we’re trying to do on campus with (Dartmouth) Dialogues.”
Grant noted that when he’s called on to consult with a university, company, nonprofit organization, or a branch of government, he tries to correct a common error, which is that employees only tell the boss what the boss wants to hear.
“It turns out that’s a dangerous philosophy, because if people can only speak up when they have a solution, you will never hear the biggest problems, which are too complex for any one person to solve. The foundation of building psychological safety is encouraging people to poke holes in ideas, and raise concerns and problems, even if they don’t know how to face them yet,” Grant said.
After the discussion, Zhuangzhuang Tan ’25 said she found Grant’s talk “very informative.”
Lorenzo Rodriguez, Thayer, said that Grant was in the top three of speakers he has heard at Dartmouth. “He communicates his message very well, and is very structured.”
Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies PhD candidate Zhuoya Zhang said that she has been a long-time fan of Grant’s writing, work, and podcasts and was happy to have him on campus.
“I felt like he introduced a new way of thinking to me. In the future, I want to question my assumptions and be more mindful when I listen.”
