One of the starting points of your book,
you say that people when they think when we think when we engage with each other often tend to
fall into certain mindsets we become preachers sometimes prosecutors other times politicians
other times and you say well all three of those things are perfectly good ways of not thinking
again of not learning of not kind of challenging our ideas and you would like us all to think more
like scientists can you tell us more about what you have in mind with that um i think that the
danger of getting into the mindsets of preachers prosecutors and politicians is that we don't stop
to question ourselves when i'm in preacher mode i believe that i found the truth and my job is to
spread it and proselytize it to everyone else and i need to enlighten them when i'm in prosecutor
mode and i spend way more time in that mode than i would like i am convinced that somebody else
is wrong and i have to win the argument and prove my case and it's pretty easy to see why those two
modes stand in the way of rethinking right because if i'm a preacher and a prosecutor i've already
decided that i'm right and you're wrong you're the one who needs to think again but i get to
freeze my beliefs where they are politician mode i think is a little bit more complex when you're in
politician mode you're trying to get the approval of an audience so you're going around lobbying
and campaigning and that may mean you tell them what they want to hear but it doesn't mean you're
actually changing what you really think deep down and so it's you know it's much more about trying
to read the audience and then manipulate them then it is about questioning your own
convictions or opinions or knowledge and i think one of the most compelling alternatives
to preaching politicking and prosecuting is to think like a scientist and i don't mean
that that requires anyone to own a microscope or a telescope or a lab coat for me thinking like
a scientist means valuing the pursuit of knowledge instead of foolish consistency or pride uh or
conviction and i think that thinking like a scientist means that you're excited to discover
why you might be wrong not just reasons you must be right it means you surround yourself with
people who challenge your thought process not just the ones who agree with your conclusions and it
means you listen to opinions that make you think hard not just the ones that make you feel good
the falsifying what we hold dear is a wonderful endeavor but it's not an easy one everybody who
has a phd spends many years learning to think like a scientist and even after all those years many of
us find ourselves not thinking like scientists we know we become captive of the biases even though
we are trained to fight them the example that is near and dear to our canadian audience is example
of blackberry and our friend mike lazaridis who was amazingly scientific for a really long long
with the majority of his career but then kind of almost regressed and it allowed the usual biases
to take over what can we do to stop that obviously the blackberry was a major rethinking of how we
communicate on the go and it was basically saying look you know what you can use this handheld
device to send messages to people you work with and i think what what i saw happen there and i
think what the data would support is that pretty soon you start to be proud of your baby right we
love this product and you develop conviction that the very things that have made you successful are
always going to keep you successful and that makes you basically that locks you into confirmation
bias or it's it's evil cousin desirability bias where you don't just see what you expect
to see you see only what you want to see and that makes you at risk of overconfidence
and i think that's what happened in the case of the blackberry i think that you know it's not just
mike right it's a whole organization of people who said look the purpose of this device is to send
work emails um it's not for home entertainment we want the keyboard who would who in the world would
consider a touch screen there's there's a always a tension that we we experience between doubt on one
hand that leads us to to question and then revisit and challenge our ideas and on the other hand
confidence without which nothing happens because you don't have the guts and the impetus to take
action and what you say in the book i thought it was really important for us to really get is that
humility actually allows you to achieve both doubt and confident at the same time can you say a
little bit more about how that works because it's it's a secret to a lot of this ability to indulge
in the experiment you need both the doubt and the confidence i got to know sarah blakely who started
spanx and reed hoffman who started linkedin and in both of their cases i had the same question
how in the world did you have the confidence to start your own company when you hadn't been an
entrepreneur before and you really didn't know that much about the new you know the
new industry that you are entering sarah said you know what i did not have confidence
in my ability to be a great entrepreneur i didn't know anything about retail or fashion or
making products and reid said yeah you know we didn't even our competitor maybe was myspace
and friendster i linked it we didn't know anything about social networks and neither of them had the
traditional kind of confidence that i picture in an entrepreneur which is i know i know i can
do this and i know this is going to be great and i believe in my knowledge and skills what they
both had was confidence in their ability to learn and sarah said i know all these things that i
don't know but i believe i can figure them out um and i think that confidence in yourself as a
learner is is part of what confident humility is it's it's recognizing you know what i believe in
my own capability to grow but that doesn't mean i have the perfect strategy or the right plan or
all the expertise i need today to be successful and that to me is just a it's a simple mindset
shift it allows you to to not wait until you have confidence there are people in the education
world that say that the learning how to learn is also an acquired skill a good teacher you
know basically teaches you what they know a good teacher teaches you how to or excuse me a
great teacher teaches you how to think and rethink and the idea of not just teaching knowledge but
ways of knowing you say that people uh should think like a scientist can they lead to analysis
paralysis i think that's a risk i've definitely seen some students go through it i always have
a few caveats at that point the first one is rethinking does not mean you have to change your
mind it just means being open to reconsidering knowing that the world around you changes and
you evolve and the images of who you wanted to be and what you wanted to do that you got
attached to when you were a less wise version of yourself might not make sense anymore i
think you know there's there's probably for any given decision or opinion there's probably
a sweet spot of the ideal amount of rethinking and i don't think that you have to do that much
of it i just think we need to move a little bit to the right because we're too far to the left
on that curve one of the things i suggested and think again was that that we could all in the
career domain do career checkups where just like you would go to the doctor or the dentist
couple times a year even if there's nothing wrong it's helpful to have a reminder on your calendar
just to say all right let me consider is this still the job that i want it takes a lot of belief
in yourself to question things it's not easy when you're feeling shaky and it's so comforting to
have certainty so it's something you can lean on so how do we help people because not everybody
is is feeling so sure of their ability to learn or their ability to change one is we can
teach and the other is we can role model when it comes to teaching i think the best
conversation i've had and i've had this in in lots of different workplaces i also have it in
the classroom most years um is to say i actually don't think this is about confidence i think it's
about security versus insecurity and i i've told my students i've told founders and ceos and junior
employees that a mark of security is being willing to say i don't know and i think the modeling of
that is critical right so as you know as a teacher one of the things i do is i want to i want to be
wrong about something in one of my first classes or i want to admit something that that i'm just
unclear on so that the students know they're free to challenge me and that i don't have all the
answers and the hope is that when they see me do that that they're a little bit more comfortable
admitting what they don't know and i think in leadership it's the same thing right i think the
the most powerful leaders are the ones who who are secure enough to say you know what i have a lot
of unanswered questions but here's the confidence part the confidence humility is saying i believe
in our collective capability to figure this out and i think we we need to create that norm of
confident humility that that allows people to reframe what they think is an admission of
weakness or ignorance as actually a show of strength i really like your role modeling idea
really in any power relationship he has to come from the top when the role model is absent what
can people do to break this cycle ask for advice number one you flatter the person and then number
two you invite them to take your perspective and because you know they think you have a lot of
wisdom because you knew to come to them because they've seen why this is an important issue from
your vantage point they're more likely to help you or at least give you some good suggestions in the
in the allison wood brooks data people are seeing it as smarter but there's also the risk of being
seen as insecure how do we balance that right um lo and behold asking for advice
doesn't really necessarily make you look stupid but what i find very interesting
from when you go from the bottom up is to be very conscious of what the people in
the higher power position want what they value because they have insecurities themselves you
have to understand why is it that the boss is so insecure as to need to behave like that uh
and so you simply you know you you treat your parent in them at some level and you can do
that from the bottom our children parent us all the time we over rely on the lovable fools as
opposed to the competent jerks um when i whenever i ask leaders or students who they go to they
always tell me that and by always i mean 80 to 90 of them that they privilege somebody's confidence
over whether they're likable or friendly um why why are they wrong and why do they not realize
their own habits and and how can we overcome that they think they go to the more competent person
i think it's that there's an over reliance on rationality and um expertise and so we all want
to look like we want to believe that we don't leave competence on the table because we allow
these emotional irrelevant things to distract us and they take us away from from the goodness so
you know it's a rationality by us we all want to look rational and we don't necessarily want
to acknowledge that we need the interpersonal affection and the love and reassurance really
you talk about agreeableness which is one of the the the big personality characteristics
that we human beings have two different degrees and canadians are standouts
when it comes to agreeableness you know the kindness the polite response not
wanting to push back and be aggressive but you say the disability is critical the the pushing back
how do you think of that when the cultural norms around you have developed to protect people
against that kind of behavior and there's there's value in that protection too the starting point
is just to say you can disagree without being disagreeable the clearest examples of this are you
know all the times when you give somebody advice and they reject it not because they disagree with
the advice but because they don't respect you or they didn't necessarily want to have their
behavior controlled by you and so i think one of the things i've um i've found really helpful
is when when i want to disagree with someone as a highly agreeable person uh i'll start out
by saying you know i've noticed that i've shied away from from bringing ideas to the table
because i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings and i know you're not somebody whose feelings are
easily hurt and please let me know if you know if you think this is not a useful viewpoint and and
i'll stop and what i'm doing is i'm inviting them to be open and the the principle that i'm trying
to draw on here is it's about me it's not about you that that to me is a pretty soft strategy in
a in a high-powered distance culture what do you make of that well i i like i like the fact that
you give people the benefit of the doubt actually um even more than it's me it's my i have issues
and i'm trying to solve them here i i like that you you're giving people credit for for being
capable of responding a certain way when you know when people hurt their feelings to not be hurt
i love the section of motivational interviewing in the book uh because rarely do you see real
potential to make a breakthrough in that kind of situation when it's so polarized uh people really
have a hard time coming to some common ground and that technique is beautiful so i like to answer
this question but maybe if you can weave in the the motivational interview that would be great
do you want to pick an issue that you have strong views about that some people disagree with you
on okay let's talk about trump one of the things that's happening a lot on social media is you know
people are just dismissing anybody who voted for donald trump as immediately a bad human being do
you think that when when somebody casts a vote for a politician um they necessarily agree with them
on all the issues that they happen to to stand for certainly not certainly not people who
need something and they're not finding it i i completely agree and i i guess i wonder have
you have you avoided a conversation with a trump supporter but i had because when i've tried i
did not have your technique we are really are told by many scientists and many practitioners
that you have to ask questions but not every question is conducive so what you're doing what
you're modeling is a certain kind of question can you can you say what what are the features
of the questions you gotta ask you sound very open to questioning right you you allow me to
question myself is that is that what's happening yeah that that's my goal so what i'm trying to
do here is to say look i'm not here to change your mind i'm here to understand your thinking
better and so you know tell me about what do you think about trump supporters do you think
they're all bad um and you know if you said they were all bad i wouldn't immediately argue back
i would say that's interesting like have you have you talked to all 74 million of them
i haven't talked to the 74 million right i don't know and so i'm trying to bring the humility
and the curiosity i'm trying to invite you to to not only use what's called sustain talk which
are you know the reasons for for maintaining your you know your reluctance to engage with quote
unquote the other side but also to show us change talk where you say well you know here here are
those situations where i might be more open to you know to finding some common ground with somebody
who did something that i find objectionable the goal is to have no agenda but i i don't think
it's that easy especially when we care about an issue or have strong views of our own it's a
great place to start the conversation for both of us to put our biases on the table and say look
you know i would prefer to just be curious here you mentioned a particular study that i went and
read about how people understand news articles that talk about science and the fact when you add
caveats you don't lose their interest they remain there with you which was very comforting but i
wonder if all that's happening there is people are not reading the damn caveats they just read the
headline and they're not they ignore the caveat because simplification is lovely for for people
for the most part how do you think about that i'm this is actually something i'm rethinking
right now i think i might have created a false dichotomy between simplicity and complexity so
there's a there's an oliver wendell holmes quote that i love where he said for the simplicity on
this side of complexity i wouldn't give a fig but for the simplicity on the other
side of complexity i would give anything and i think that he's talking about the difference
between ignorant simplicity and elegant simplicity i think elegant simplicity is about recognizing
the complexity but still finding clarity within it and it immediately cues to you oh well knowledge
is always evolving that doesn't mean the knowledge isn't valid it means it's the best evidence we
have available today but it might it might evolve tomorrow right we might want to update our views
based on what we learned from the new science and i think what that means is we need to we need
to get comfortable talking in confident humility it means i need to say the best evidence i've seen
on this topic is or the most informed opinion i can share right now is which signals both hey this
is credible information but also uh there it might not be complete there's more to learn it's a combo
question and you decide what to answer and how one is you know you talk about all these
biases that we are all vulnerable to and they're always lurking if you had a magic wand
and you could change one thing about human nature to make us better at rethinking what would
that be and the and the twin question is what are you hoping that we rethink next
okay i'll try to answer both of those that i i have to object to the first question because
it's so interesting but the simplicity of just choosing one goes against the whole idea of
complexifying all right all right i take it back no don't take it back i think i think
sometimes rank ordering is is helpful for getting us to think about what's really important
and i i've always encouraged leaders and students too to rank order their values and so i think
this is this is a good prompt to do that i think if i were going to change one thing
about human nature would it would probably be the meta bias that governs a lot of the
problems we've been talking about and it's it's the bias blind spot which i like
to think of as the i'm not biased bias i'm just stunned by how quick we are to recognize
other people preaching prosecuting and politicking how easy it is to see somebody else's confirmation
bias or desirability bias but no not me right i i'm objective i see things with perfect
rationality it's the rationality bias you talked about earlier yeah i think that's that's the first
one to change because it it sort of stands in the way of recognizing all the specific biases that
cloud our judgment um and that make our thinking flawed so yeah how's that for one it's fantastic
lovely i yes the other one you have uh do you have a quick one that we should really rethink one
thing we should really rethink well since we're at Rotman i would say i think we should rethink the
purpose of universities i thought for too long that higher education was about teaching skills
and i get that if you're a medical school right you actually have to teach people to practice
medicine if you're a law school you have to teach people to practice law i think overall though the
poor the importance of a university and society is much more about teaching the the the meta skill
of critical thinking and rethinking and that i think that we're not actually about imparting
knowledge right because knowledge is always evolving what we are about is teaching people to
continue pursuing knowledge and trying to build a generation of lifelong learners who are interested
in pursuing truth or at least getting closer to it with an attitude of humility and curiosity and
in that sense i think the fundamental principle and this is a major moment of rethinking for me
the fundamental principle of higher education is not actually teaching knowledge it's building
character well this could not have been a better conclusion