Originals

question of when to take original action. When you’re preparing to row against the tide, you have choices about whether to start at the crack

This chapter considers the question of when to take original action. When you’re preparing to row against the tide, you have choices about whether to start at the crack of dawn, wait until midday, or hold off until twilight. My goal here is to overturn common assumptions about timing by examining the unexpected benefits of delaying when we start and finish a task, as well as when we unleash our ideas into the world. I’ll discuss why procrastination can be as much of a virtue as a vice, how first-mover entrepreneurs frequently face an uphill battle, why older innovators sometimes outdo younger ones, and why the leaders who drive change effectively are those who wait patiently for the right moment. Although it can be risky to delay, you’ll see that waiting can also reduce risk by preventing you from putting all your eggs in one basket. You don’t have to be first to be an original, and the most successful originals don’t always arrive on schedule. They are fashionably late to the party.

Recently, an unusually creative doctoral student named Jihae Shin approached me with a counterintuitive idea: procrastination might be conducive to originality. When you procrastinate, you’re intentionally delaying work that needs to be done. You might be thinking about the task, but you postpone making real progress on it or finishing it to do something less productive. Shin proposed that when you put off a task, you buy yourself time to engage in divergent thinking rather than foreclosing on one particular idea. As a result, you consider a wider range of original concepts and ultimately choose a more novel direction. I challenged her to test it. Shin asked college students to write proposals for a business on a university campus to fill a lot vacated by a convenience store. When they started the task immediately, they tended to propose conventional ideas—like another convenience store. When Shin randomly assigned some of the participants to procrastinate, putting off the task to play computer games like Minesweeper, FreeCell, and Solitaire, they produced more novel business ideas, like a tutoring center and a storage facility. Independent raters evaluated the final proposals, without knowing who procrastinated and who started immediately. The proposals from the procrastinators were 28 percent more creative.

Employees who procrastinated regularly spent more time engaging in divergent thinking and were rated as significantly more creative by their supervisors. Procrastination didn’t always fuel creativity: if the employees weren’t intrinsically motivated to solve a major problem, stalling just set them behind. But when they were passionate about coming up with new ideas, putting off the task led them to more creative solutions.

By delaying the task of fleshing out and firming up the speech, King allowed Jones to benefit from the Zeigarnik effect. In 1927, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik demonstrated that people have a better memory for incomplete than complete tasks. Once a task is finished, we stop thinking about it. But when it is interrupted and left undone, it stays active in our minds. As Jones was comparing his early draft to the topic of that evening’s discussion, “something worked its way up from the depths of my subconscious.”*

Along with providing time to generate novel ideas, procrastination has another benefit: it keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of

Along with providing time to generate novel ideas, procrastination has another benefit: it keeps us open to improvisation. When we plan well in advance, we often stick to the structure we’ve created, closing the door to creative possibilities that might spring into our fields of vision.

In both cases, the most successful organizations were run by executives who admitted that they often wasted time before settling down to work and sometimes failed to pace themselves to get things done on time. Although these habits could impede progress on tasks, they opened leaders up to being more strategically flexible.

Settlers are often branded as copycats, but this stereotype misses the mark. Instead of conforming to the existing demand, they bide their time until they’re ready to introduce something new. They’re often slow to enter because they’re working on revolutionary products, services, or technologies within the category. In home video-game consoles, the pioneer was Magnavox Odyssey in 1972, which mostly featured rudimentary sports games. A settler, Nintendo, acquired the Odyssey’s distribution rights for Japan in 1975, and then blew Magnavox out of the water in the following decade by creating an original Nintendo Entertainment System that featured games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. Nintendo transformed gaming with a user-friendly controller, sophisticated characters, and interactive role-playing. Being original doesn’t require being first. It just means being different and better.

Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support.

Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at age forty-nine using a “trial-and-error method,” scholars note, and “discovered his pliable plot as he went along, writing without a definite resolution or plan in mind.” Twain himself commented, “As the short tale grows into the long tale, the original intention (or motif) is apt to get abolished and find itself superseded by a quite different one.”

Harriet Taylor Mill to publish a famous essay on the enfranchisement

Simon Sinek argues that if we want to inspire people, we should start with why. If we communicate the vision behind our ideas, the purpose guiding our products, people will flock to us. This is excellent advice—unless you’re doing something original that challenges the status quo. When people championing moral change explain their why, it runs the risk of clashing with deep-seated convictions. When creative non-conformists explain their why, it may violate common notions of what’s possible.

Our instinct is to sever our bad relationships and salvage the ambivalent ones. But the evidence suggests we ought to do the opposite: cut our frenemies and attempt to convert our enemies. In efforts to challenge the status quo, originals often ignore their opponents. If someone is already resisting a change, the logic goes, there’s no point in wasting your time on him. Instead, focus on strengthening your ties with people who already support you. But our best allies aren’t the people who have supported us all along. They’re the ones who started out against us and then came around to our side.

While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship.

When someone always supports us, we take it for granted—and can discount it. But we regard someone who began as a rival and then became an enthusiastic supporter as an authentic advocate. “A person whose liking for us increases over time will be liked better than one who has always liked us,” Aronson explains. “We find it more rewarding when someone’s initially negative feelings toward us gradually become positive than if that person’s feelings for us were entirely positive all along.” While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be

When someone always supports us, we take it for granted—and can discount it. But we regard someone who began as a rival and then became an enthusiastic supporter as an authentic advocate. “A person whose liking for us increases over time will be liked better than one who has always liked us,” Aronson explains. “We find it more rewarding when someone’s initially negative feelings toward us gradually become positive than if that person’s feelings for us were entirely positive all along.” While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship.

Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along. In one of Aronson’s studies, people were most persuaded to change their opinions by those who had started out negative and then become more positive. And more recently, corporate executives were subtly influenced by board members who argued with them initially and then conformed—which signals that their

Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along. In one of Aronson’s studies, people were most persuaded to change their opinions by those who had started out negative and then become more positive. And more recently, corporate executives were subtly influenced by board members who argued with them initially and then conformed—which signals that their “opinion

When someone always supports us, we take it for granted—and can discount it. But we regard someone who began as a rival and then became an enthusiastic supporter as an authentic advocate. “A person whose liking for us increases over time will be liked better than one who has always liked us,” Aronson explains. “We find it more rewarding when someone’s initially negative feelings toward us gradually become positive than if that person’s feelings for us were entirely positive all along.” While we’ll have an especially strong affinity toward our converted rivals, will they feel the same way toward us? Yes—this is the second advantage of converting resisters. To like us, they have to work especially hard to overcome their initial negative impressions, telling themselves, I must have been wrong about that person. Moving forward, to avoid the cognitive dissonance of changing their minds yet again, they’ll be especially motivated to maintain a positive relationship. Third, and most important, it is our former adversaries who are the most effective at persuading others to join our movements. They can marshal better arguments on our behalf, because they understand the doubts and misgivings of resisters and fence-sitters. And they’re a more credible source, because they haven’t just been Pollyanna followers or “yes men” all along.

The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity, which capitalizes on the mere exposure effect we covered earlier. On average, a novel starting point followed by a familiarity infusion led to ideas that were judged as 14 percent more practical, without sacrificing any originality. As Berg points out, if you started the experiment with a pen rather than an in-line skate, you’d probably end up with something a lot like a conventional

According to Berg, the starting point in generating ideas is like the first brushstroke that a painter lays down on a canvas: it shapes the path for the rest of the painting, constraining what we imagine. Beginning with a three-ring binder led Berg’s participants down the path of proposing obvious products like a folder with pockets for résumés and business cards—hardly a game-changing idea. To come up with something original, we need to begin from a more unfamiliar place. Instead of the three-ring binder, Berg gave some participants a more novel starting point: an in-line skate for roller blading. They were no longer captives of the conventional: they generated ideas that scored 37 percent higher in originality. One participant observed that during job interviews, it’s often difficult to know how much time has passed, and you don’t want to appear rude by looking at your watch, breaking eye contact with the interviewer. The proposed solution was to build a watch that tracks time by touch, with physical elements like the wheels on roller skates that change shape or texture as time passes. Although a novel starting point does help foster the originality of our ideas, it doesn’t necessarily make them palatable and practical to our audiences. While the Rollerblade led to a creative idea for subtly tracking time, squeezing your watch is an odd behavior. To solve this problem, Berg gave people the novel starting point of the in-line skate, but added a twist: after they developed their ideas, he showed them a picture of products that people typically use in job interviews, then asked them to spend a few additional minutes refining their concepts. For the person who wanted a polite method of timekeeping, this made all the difference. Instead of a watch that tells time by touch, after taking a look at the kinds of products that were familiar in job interviews, the same inventor designed a pen that tells time by touch: The most promising ideas begin from novelty and then add familiarity, which capitalizes on the mere exposure effect we covered earlier. On average, a novel starting point followed by a familiarity infusion led to ideas that were judged as 14 percent more practical, without sacrificing any originality. As Berg points out, if you started the experiment with a pen rather than an in-line skate, you’d probably end up with something a lot like a conventional pen. But by starting with something unexpected in the context of job interviews, like an in-line skate, and then incorporating the familiarity of a pen, you can develop an idea that is both novel and useful.

“Originality is what everybody wants, but there’s a sweet spot,” Rob Minkoff explains. “If it’s not original enough, it’s boring or trite. If it’s too original, it may be hard for the audience to understand. The goal is to push the envelope, not tear the envelope.”

Yet this initial career advantage vanishes by age thirty. Laterborns have faster salary growth, because they are willing to switch to better-paying jobs sooner and more often. “Firstborns are more risk averse than laterborns,” the economists write, noting that the laterborns were also more prone to bad drinking and smoking habits, and were less likely to buy retirement accounts and life insurance packages. Psychologist Dean Simonton explains: “It is not inferior ability that inclines later-borns to perform poorly on standardized tests, to achieve less in school, and to disfavor prestigious occupations. Rather, later-borns may find these first-born preoccupations to represent distasteful quests for authority and conformity.”

There are two dominant explanations for the laterborn tendency to take risks. One concerns how children themselves handle sibling rivalry; the other, how parents raise younger children differently. Although we can’t control birth order, we can influence how it plays out.

Adler argued that because firstborn children start life as only children, they initially identify with their parents. When a younger sibling arrives, firstborns risk being “dethroned” and often respond by emulating their parents: they enforce rules and assert their authority over the younger sibling, which sets the stage for the younger child to rebel.

This rational approach to discipline also characterizes the parents of teenagers who don’t engage in criminal deviance and originals who challenge the orthodoxies of their professions. In one study, parents of ordinary children had an average of six rules, like specific schedules for homework and bedtime. Parents of highly creative children had an average of less than one rule and tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” psychologist Teresa Amabile reports. If parents do believe in enforcing a lot of regulations, the way they explain them matters a great deal. New research shows that teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner, by yelling or threatening punishment. When mothers enforce many rules but offer a clear rationale for why they’re important, teenagers are substantially less likely to break them, because they internalize them.

In Donald MacKinnon’s study comparing America’s most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, a factor that distinguished the creative group was that their parents exercised discipline with explanations. They outlined their standards of conduct and explained their grounding in a set of principles about right and wrong, referencing values like morality, integrity, respect, curiosity, and perseverance. But “emphasis was placed upon the development of one’s ethical code,” MacKinnon wrote. Above all, the parents who raised highly creative architects granted their children the autonomy to choose their own values.

There’s a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers’ parents, they found that they tended to give “explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others.” While the bystanders’ parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers’ parents encouraged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.* Highlighting consequences for others directs attention to the distress of the person who may be harmed by an individual’s behavior, fueling empathy for her. It also helps children understand the role that their own actions played in causing the harm, resulting in guilt. As Erma Bombeck put it, “Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.” The dual moral emotions of empathy and guilt activate the desire to right wrongs of the past and behave better in the future.

Robinson was hurling dirt at cars and rocks through windows, stealing golf balls and selling them back to players, and pilfering food and supplies from local stores. After one offense, the sheriff took him to jail at gunpoint. Seeing the gang in action, a mechanic named Carl Anderson took Robinson aside. “He made me see that if I continued with the gang it would hurt my mother,” Robinson wrote. “He said it didn’t take guts to follow the crowd, that courage and intelligence lay in being willing to be different. I was too ashamed to tell Carl how right he was, but what he said got to me.” Once he considered how his behavior would affect his mother, Robinson didn’t want to let her down, and he left the gang.*

Assuming that parents decide to give children the freedom to be original, what does it take to foster a sense of right and wrong? Values aren’t formed only by how parents react when children misstep. In the study of Holocaust rescuers and bystanders, when the Oliners asked about the values they learned from their parents, the rescuers were three times more likely than the bystanders to reference moral values that applied to all people. The rescuers emphasized that their parents “taught me

After children shared some marbles with their peers, a number of them were randomly assigned to have their behavior praised: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others received character praise: “I guess

Moral standards are forged in part by what parents say after children do the right thing. The last time you saw a child engage in good behavior, how did you respond? My guess is that you praised the action, not the child. “That was really nice. That was so sweet.” By complimenting the behavior you reinforce it, so the child will learn to repeat it. Not so fast, says an experiment led by psychologist Joan Grusec. After children shared some marbles with their peers, a number of them were randomly assigned to have their behavior praised: “It was good that you gave some of your marbles to those poor children. Yes, that was a nice and helpful thing to do.” Others received character praise: “I guess you’re the kind of person who likes to help others whenever you can. Yes, you are a very nice and helpful person.” Children who received character praise were subsequently more generous. Of the children who were complimented for being helpful people, 45 percent gave craft materials to cheer up kids at a hospital two weeks later, compared with only 10 percent of the children who were commended for engaging in helpful behavior. When our character is praised, we internalize it as part of our identities. Instead of seeing ourselves as engaging in isolated moral acts, we start to develop a more unified self-concept as a moral person.

But even among very young children, an appeal to character can have an influence in the moment. In an ingenious series of experiments led by psychologist Christopher Bryan, children between ages three and six were 22 percent to 29 percent more likely to clean up blocks, toys, and crayons when they were asked to be helpers instead of to help. Even though their character was far from gelled, they wanted to earn the identity. Bryan finds that appeals to character are effective for adults as well. His team was able to cut cheating in half with the same turn of phrase: instead of “Please don’t cheat,” they changed the appeal to “Please don’t be a cheater.” When you’re urged not to cheat, you can do it and still see an ethical person in the mirror. But when you’re told not to be a cheater, the act casts a shadow; immorality is tied to your identity, making the behavior much less attractive. Cheating is an isolated action that gets evaluated with the logic of consequence: Can I get away with it? Being a cheater evokes a sense of self, triggering the logic of appropriateness: What kind of person am I, and who do I want to be?

In light of this evidence, Bryan suggests that we should embrace nouns more thoughtfully. “Don’t Drink and Drive” could be rephrased as: “Don’t Be a Drunk Driver.” The same thinking can be applied to originality. When a child draws a picture, instead of calling the artwork creative, we can say “You are creative.” After a teenager resists the temptation to follow the crowd, we can commend her for being a non-conformist. When we shift our emphasis from behavior to character, people evaluate choices differently. Instead of asking whether this behavior will achieve the results they want, they take action because it is the right thing to do. In the poignant words of one Holocaust rescuer, “It’s like saving somebody who is drowning. You don’t ask them what God they pray to. You just go and save them.”

When psychologists Penelope Lockwood and Ziva Kunda asked college students to list what they hoped to achieve over the following decade, they came up with perfectly ordinary objectives. Another group of students was instructed to read a newspaper article about an outstanding peer and then list their goals; they aimed much higher. Having a role model elevated their aspirations.

The paradox of encouraging children to develop strong values is that parents effectively limit their own influence. Parents can nurture the impulse to be original, but at some point, people need to find their own role models for originality in their chosen fields.

Unlike biographies, in fictional stories characters can perform actions that have never been accomplished before, making the impossible seem possible. The inventors of the modern submarine and helicopter were transfixed by Jules Verne’s visions in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Clipper of the Clouds. One of the earliest rockets was built by a scientist who drew his motivation from an H. G. Wells novel. Some of the earliest mobile phones, tablets, GPS navigators, portable digital storage disks, and multimedia players were designed by people who watched Star Trek characters using similar devices. As we encounter these images of originality in history and fiction, the logic of consequence fades away. We no longer worry as much about what will happen if we fail.

Along with giving a generation of children role models for originality, J. K. Rowling embedded a moral message in her novels. Recent experiments show that reading Harry Potter can improve children’s attitudes toward marginalized groups. As they see Harry and Hermione face discrimination for not having pure wizard blood, they empathize and become less prejudiced toward minority groups in their own lives.

When employees are committed to a shared set of goals and values, they can execute effectively in predictable environments. But in volatile settings like the computer, aerospace, and airline industries, the benefits of strong cultures disappear. Once a market becomes dynamic, big companies with strong cultures are too insular: They have a harder time recognizing the need for change, and they’re more likely to resist the insights of those who think differently. As a result, they don’t learn and adapt, and don’t have better or more reliable financial results than their competitors.

My goal isn’t to analyze Bridgewater’s brilliant financial decisions, but to take a deeper look at the culture that underlies those decisions. It starts with Bridgewater’s billionaire founder, Ray Dalio. Although he has been called the Steve Jobs of investing, employees don’t communicate with him as if he’s anyone special. Here’s an email that Jim, a client adviser, sent to Dalio after a meeting with an important potential client: Ray— you deserve a “D-” for your performance today . . . you rambled for 50 minutes . . . It was obvious to all of us that you did not prepare at all because there is no way you could have and been that disorganized at the outset if you had prepared. We told you this prospect has been identified as a “must-win” . . . today was really bad . . . we can’t let this happen again. At a typical company, sending an email this critical of a boss would be career suicide. But instead of reacting defensively, Dalio responded by asking others who attended the meeting to give him honest feedback and grade him on a scale from A to F. Then, instead of hiding Dalio’s shortcomings or attacking the author of the note, Bridgewater’s co-CEO copied the email trail to the entire company so that everyone could learn from the exchange. In many organizations, people give negative feedback only behind closed doors. As Jack Handey advised in one of his “Deep Thoughts” on Saturday Night Live, before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes. At Bridgewater, employees are expected to voice concerns and critiques directly to each other. “Don’t let ‘loyalty’ stand in the way of truth and openness,” Dalio writes in the principles. “No one has the right to hold a critical opinion without speaking up about it.” In a typical organization, people are punished for raising dissent. At Bridgewater, they’re evaluated on whether they speak up—and they can be fired for failing to challenge the status quo.

If assigning a devil’s advocate doesn’t work, what does? The researchers formed another set of groups with two managers who favored Peru. For the third member, instead of assigning a devil’s advocate to argue for Kenya, they picked someone who actually preferred Kenya. Those groups selected 14 percent more articles against the majority preference than for it. And now, they were 15 percent less confident in their original preference. While it can be appealing to assign a devil’s advocate, it’s much more powerful to unearth one. When people are designated to dissent, they’re just playing a role. This causes two problems: They don’t argue forcefully or consistently enough for the minority viewpoint, and group members are less likely to take them seriously. “Dissenting for the sake of dissenting is not useful. It is also not useful if it is ‘pretend dissent’—for example, if role-played,” Nemeth explains. “It is not useful if motivated by considerations other than searching for the truth or the best solutions. But when it is authentic, it stimulates thought; it clarifies and it emboldens.” The secret to success is sincerity, the old saying goes: Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. In fact, it’s not easy to fake sincerity. For devil’s advocates to be maximally effective, they need to really believe in the position they’re representing—and the group needs to believe that they believe it, too.

Dalio loved the cacophony, which provided an opportunity for both sides to learn. Instead of assigning a devil’s advocate, Dalio was uncovering actual areas of disagreement. “The greatest tragedy of mankind,” Dalio says, “comes from the inability of people to have thoughtful disagreement to find out what’s true.” Through the process of open-minded debate, Dalio expects employees to reconcile their differences. Instead of reaching consensus because some people are overconfident or others are afraid to speak up, the staff get on the same page by duking it out. In the language of futurist Paul Saffo, the norm is to have “strong opinions, weakly held.” To get people in sync about their conflicting views of the poll, Dalio hosted a discussion. In an effort to foster a balanced dialogue, he selected three people with strong negative opinions and three who were extremely enthusiastic. Dalio turned to one of the critical employees and asked for his point of view. The employee expressed concerns about “creating an indictment culture, something where it felt McCarthyist.” Another employee agreed, arguing that “the naming names feels pretty tone-deaf.” A leader pushed back: “I think it’s tone-deaf not to share that info.” The poll data revealed that 40 percent of people who had critical thoughts about others hadn’t shared them—while every single employee wanted to know others’ critical thoughts. With a few dozen people in the room, the debate raged for more than an hour. As founder of a firm that manages investments, why would Dalio spend so much time on a conversation about naming names? If employees can get in sync about making sure that everyone speaks up, they don’t need to worry as much about groupthink. Dalio can be confident that members of his staff won’t feel pressured to nod and smile whenever he presents an opinion; his whole team will be radically transparent in challenging his assumptions about markets, and they’ll be the same with one another.* Decisions will be made based on an idea meritocracy, not a status hierarchy or democracy. When all was said and done, 97 percent of Bridgewater employees were more worried about too little accountability than too much. By devoting more than an hour to the debate on that matter, employees reached consensus that they needed to push one another to share original ideas. That transparency would shield them against groupthink, enabling them to avoid countless bad decisions over time. By building a culture in which people are constantly encouraging one another to disagree, Dalio has created a powerful way to combat conformity. Yet the kind of disagreement he seeks is the opposite of what most leaders invite.

But when it comes to groupthink, there’s a dark side to encouraging solutions. Hofmann is one of the world’s preeminent authorities on creating organizational cultures that detect, correct, and prevent errors. After the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon reentry into the atmosphere in 2003, Hofmann’s research was instrumental in assessing and documenting improvements in NASA’s safety culture. The culture survey he helped create was completed by every NASA employee and has since reached over two hundred thousand employees across more than a thousand companies. Hofmann found that a culture that focuses too heavily on solutions becomes a culture of advocacy, dampening inquiry. If you’re always expected to have an answer ready, you’ll arrive at meetings with your diagnosis complete, missing out on the chance to learn from a broad range of perspectives. A day after the Columbia shuttle took off, a “mystery object” was seen floating away in orbit. If an inquiry had been launched, the team might have discovered that the mystery object had caused a hole in the left wing, and been able to repair it before hot gas eventually entered the ship. Advocacy is fine if you’re on the jury at a courtroom trial. Since all twelve members get to hear the entire case, when it’s time to deliberate, they can start debating about whether the defendant is innocent or guilty. But organizational life doesn’t work like a courtroom, Hofmann admonishes. It’s more like sitting through a twelve-hour trial where each juror hears only one hour of testimony, and no two jurors listen to the same hour. When every member of a group has different information, inquiry needs to precede advocacy—which means you have to raise the problems before pursuing solutions. To make sure that problems get raised, leaders need mechanisms for unearthing dissenters.

Ray Dalio doesn’t want employees to bring him solutions; he expects them to bring him problems. One of his first inventions was the issue log, an open-access database for employees to flag any problem they identify and to rate its severity. Getting problems noted is half the battle against groupthink; the other is listening to the right opinions about how to solve them. The Bridgewater procedure for the latter is to gather a group of credible people to diagnose the problems, share their reasoning, and explore the causes and possible solutions.

Although everyone’s opinions are welcome, they’re not all valued equally. Bridgewater is not a democracy. Voting privileges the majority, when the minority might have a better opinion. “Democratic decision making—one person, one vote—is dumb,” Dalio explains, “because not everybody has the same believability.”* At Bridgewater, every employee has a believability score on a range of dimensions. In sports, statistics for every player’s performance history are public. In baseball, before you sign a player, you can look up his batting average, home runs, and steals; assess his strengths and weaknesses; and adjust accordingly. Dalio wanted Bridgewater to work the same way, so he created baseball cards that display statistics on every employee’s performance, which can be accessed by anyone at the company. If you’re about to interact with a few Bridgewater colleagues for the first time, you can see their track records on seventy-seven different dimensions of values, skills, and abilities in the areas of higher-level thinking, practical thinking, maintaining high standards, determination, open-mindedness yet assertiveness, and organization and reliability. During regular review cycles, employees rate one another on different qualities like integrity, courage, living in truth, taking the bull by its horns, not tolerating problems, being willing to touch a nerve, fighting to get in sync, and holding people accountable. Between cycles, employees can give real-time, open feedback to anyone in the company. At any time, employees can submit dots, or observations—they assess peers, leaders, or subordinates on the metrics and give short explanations of what they’ve observed. The baseball cards create a “pointillist picture” of staff members, aggregating across review cycles and dots, and incorporate various assessments that employees take. The cards’ display changes over time, revealing who’s best suited to play each position, and flagging areas to “rely on” and “watch out for” with green and red lights. When you express an opinion, it’s weighted by whether you’ve established yourself as believable on that dimension. Your believability is a probability of being right in the present, and is based on your judgment, reasoning, and behavior in the past. In presenting your views, you’re expected to consider your own believability by telling your audience how confident you are. If you have doubts, and you’re not known as believable in the domain, you shouldn’t have an opinion in the first place; you’re supposed to ask questions so you can learn. If you’re expressing a fierce conviction, you should be forthright about it—but know that your colleagues will probe the quality of your reasoning. Even then, you’re supposed to be assertive and open-minded at the same time. As management scholar Karl Weick advises, “Argue like you’re right and listen like you’re wrong.”

meritocracy, which holds that people should fight for right and seek the truth. But Bridgewater’s methods of adjudicating which idea wins fall short of my own standards of rigor. Dalio’s default approach to resolving problems like the disagreement between Greg and Trina is to unearth three believable people with strong opinions from each side, and have them discuss and debate until they’re in sync.

In the centuries since the Roman Catholic Church assigned the promotor fidei to argue against the advocatus Dei, humanity has developed a tool more powerful than debate for resolving disagreement. It’s called science. In the field of medicine, I told Dalio, there’s widespread consensus among experts that the quality of evidence can be classified on a scale of strength from one to six. The gold standard is a series of randomized, controlled experiments with objective outcomes. The least rigorous evidence: “the opinion of respected authorities or expert committees.” The same standards are part of the growing field of evidence-based management and people analytics, in which leaders are encouraged to design experiments and gather data instead of relying solely on logic, experience, intuition, and conversation.

And in preparing a mental math test that required adding and subtracting in their heads (calculations like 23 - 68 + 51), defensive pessimists scored about 25 percent higher when they made a list of the worst things that could happen in the test and how they would feel than when they distracted themselves. “Defensive pessimism is a strategy used in specific situations to manage anxiety, fear, and worry,” Norem explains. When self-doubts creep in, defensive pessimists don’t allow themselves to be crippled by fear. They deliberately imagine a disaster scenario to intensify their anxiety and convert it into motivation. Once they’ve considered the worst, they’re driven to avoid it, considering every relevant detail to make sure they don’t crash and burn, which enables them to feel a sense of control. Their anxiety reaches its zenith before the event, so that when it arrives, they’re ready to succeed. Their confidence springs not from ignorance or delusions about the difficulties ahead, but from a realistic appraisal and an exhaustive plan. When they don’t feel anxious, they become complacent; when encouraged, they become discouraged from planning. If you want to sabotage the performance of chronic defensive pessimists, just make them happy.

Physiologically, we have a stop system and a go system. “Your stop system slows you down and makes you cautious and vigilant,” explains Quiet author Susan Cain. “Your go system revs you up and makes you excited.” Instead of hitting the stop switch, we can motivate ourselves to act in the face of fear by pressing the go switch. Fear is marked by uncertainty about the future: We’re worried that something bad will happen. But because the event hasn’t occurred yet, there’s also a possibility, however slim, that the outcome will be positive. We can step on the gas by focusing on the reasons to move forward—the sliver of excitement that we feel about breaking loose and singing our song.

Around the world, resistance movements have helped people overcome

Around the world, resistance movements have helped people overcome fear by turning on the go system with small actions that signal the support of a larger group. When Popovic trained the Egyptian activists, he shared a story from 1983 of how Chilean miners had mounted a protest against the country’s dictator, Pinochet. Instead of taking the risk of going on strike, they issued a nationwide call for citizens to demonstrate their resistance by turning their lights on and off. People weren’t afraid to do that, and soon they saw that their neighbors weren’t, either. The miners also invited people to start driving slowly. Taxi drivers slowed down; so did bus drivers. Soon, pedestrians were walking in slow motion down the streets and driving their cars and trucks at a glacial pace. In his inspiring book Blueprint for Revolution, Popovic explains that prior to these activities: People were afraid to talk openly about despising Pinochet, so if you hated the dictator, you might have imagined that you were the only one. Tactics like these, Chileans used to say, made people realize that “we are the many and they are the few.” And the beauty was that there was no risk involved: Not even in North Korea was it illegal for cars to drive slowly.

Effective displays of humor are what Popovic calls dilemma actions: choices that put oppressors in a lose-lose situation. In Syria, activists emblazoned slogans like “Freedom” and “Enough” on thousands of Ping-Pong balls and dumped them onto the streets of Damascus. When they heard the sound of the bouncing balls, Popovic observes, the people of Syria knew “the nonviolent opposition was sticking its finger into the eye of Assad’s regime.” Soon enough the police showed up. “Huffing and puffing, these guys scoured the capital, scooping up Ping-Pong balls one by one. What the police didn’t seem to realize,” Popovic explains, “was that in this slapstick comedy, the Ping-Pong balls were just the props. It was they themselves, the regime’s enforcers, who had been cast to star as the clowns.”

If you want people to modify their behavior, is it better to highlight the benefits of changing or the costs of not changing? According to Peter Salovey, one of the originators of the concept of emotional intelligence and now the president of Yale, it depends on whether they perceive the new behavior as safe or risky. If they think the behavior is safe, we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it—they’ll want to act immediately to obtain those certain gains. But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work. They’re already comfortable with the status quo, so the benefits of change aren’t attractive, and the stop system kicks in. Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t. The prospect of a certain loss brings the go system online.

At the pharmaceutical giant Merck, CEO Kenneth Frazier decided to motivate his executives to take a more active role in leading innovation and change. He asked them to do something radical: generate ideas that would put Merck out of business. For the next two hours, the executives worked in groups, pretending to be one of Merck’s top competitors. Energy soared as they developed ideas for drugs that would crush theirs and key markets they had missed. Then, their challenge was to reverse their roles and figure out how to defend against these threats.* This “kill the company” exercise is powerful because it reframes a gain-framed activity in terms of losses. When deliberating about innovation opportunities, the leaders weren’t inclined to take risks. When they considered how their competitors could put them out of business, they realized that it was a risk not to innovate. The urgency of innovation was apparent.

To counter apathy, most change agents focus on presenting an inspiring vision of the future. This is an important message to convey, but it’s not the type of communication that should come first. If you want people to take risks, you need first to show what’s wrong with the present.

In deep acting, known as method acting in the theater world, you actually become the character you wish to portray. Deep acting involves changing your inner feelings, not just your outer expressions of them. If you’re the flight attendant in the above example, you might imagine that the passenger is stressed, afraid of flying, or going through a messy divorce. You feel empathy for the passenger, and the smile comes naturally to you, creating a more genuine expression of warmth. Deep acting dissolves the distinction between your true self and the role you are playing. You are no longer acting, because you are actually experiencing the genuine feelings of the character.

To channel anger productively, instead of venting about

On New Year’s Eve at midnight in 2000, when Otpor! shut down the concert, turned off the lights, and played sad music, only one sight was visible: a gigantic screen, on which a slide show of pictures was being played, none of which featured the despised Milosevic. The images instead were of Serbian soldiers and police officers who had been killed under Milosevic’s rule. To channel anger productively, instead of venting about the harm that a perpetrator has done, we need to reflect on the victims who have suffered from it.

Triple the number of ideas you generate. Just as great baseball players only average a hit for every three at bats, every innovator swings and misses. The best way to boost your originality is to produce more ideas.

1. Run an innovation tournament. Welcoming suggestions on any topic at any time doesn’t capture the attention of busy people. Innovation tournaments are highly efficient for collecting a large number of novel ideas and identifying the best ones. Instead of a suggestion box, send a focused call for ideas to solve a particular problem or meet an untapped need. Give employees three weeks to develop proposals, and then have them evaluate one another’s ideas, advancing the most original submissions to the next round. The winners receive a budget, a team, and the relevant mentoring and sponsorship to make their ideas a reality.

Welcome criticism. It’s hard to encourage dissent if you don’t practice what you preach. When Ray Dalio received an email criticizing his performance in an important meeting, copying it to the entire company sent a clear message that he welcomed negative feedback. By inviting employees to criticize you publicly, you can set the tone for people to communicate more openly even when their ideas are unpopular. Parent and Teacher Actions: 1.

Welcome criticism. It’s hard to encourage dissent if you don’t practice what you preach. When Ray Dalio received an email criticizing his performance in an important meeting, copying it to the entire company sent a clear message that he welcomed negative feedback. By inviting employees to criticize you publicly, you can set the tone for people to communicate more openly even when their ideas are unpopular.

2. Link good behaviors to moral character. Many parents and teachers praise helpful actions, but children are more generous when they’re commended for being helpful people—it becomes part of their identity. If you see a child do something good, try saying, “You’re a good person because you ___.” Children are also more ethical when they’re asked to be moral people—they want to earn the identity. If you want a child to share a toy, instead of asking, “Will you share?” ask, “Will you be a sharer?”

Explain how bad behaviors have consequences for others. When children misbehave, help them see how their actions hurt other people. “How do you think this made her feel?” As they consider the negative impact on others, children begin to feel empathy and guilt, which strengthens their motivation to right the wrong—and to avoid the action in the future.