Think Again. Especially on Launch Day.

In the first issue of this paper I admitted something. I own Think Again, I remembered it as a good book, and I could not tell you why. That is an odd thing to confess about a book on rethinking. So I reread it.

Here is why it is good.

Grant borrows a frame from his colleague Phil Tetlock. When we think and talk, we slip into one of three borrowed roles. The preacher defends what he already believes. The prosecutor tears apart the other side. The politician says whatever wins the room. All three have already decided. The fourth voice is the scientist, who treats an opinion as a hypothesis and goes looking for the test that might prove it wrong.

The uncomfortable part is that intelligence does not save you. In Grant's words, "Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking." Smart people are simply better at defending what they already think.

His cautionary tale is BlackBerry. In the summer of 2009 it held nearly half of the U.S. smartphone market. By 2014 it had less than 1 percent. The founder was brilliant. He was not a rethinker.

The passage I will keep comes from NASA. The astronaut Ellen Ochoa explains why things kept going wrong: traditionally "the same managers who were responsible for cost and schedule were the ones who also had the authority to waive technical requirements. It's easy to talk yourself into something on a launch day."

Anyone who has run a capital project knows that sentence. The person holding the budget and the date should not be the only one deciding whether the spec can slide. Every substitution request, every value engineering session, every tight turnover date is a small launch day.

Ochoa's fix fits in a pocket. She carried a three by five card with questions for every launch and every important decision. What leads you to that assumption? What are the uncertainties in your analysis? I understand the advantages of your recommendation; what are the disadvantages? Easy to ask in a project meeting. Rare to hear one.

For anyone who buys or bids for a living, chapter five is worth the price of the book. Grant walks through Neil Rackham's study of expert and average negotiators. The experts spent more of their planning looking for common ground. They gave fewer reasons, not more, because "a weak argument generally dilutes a strong one." And at least one of every five comments they made ended in a question.

I have watched that play out across a lot of bids and change orders. The side that sends twelve reasons is usually weaker than the side that sends one good one.

Grant also makes the case for productive conflict. The Wright brothers argued about the propeller for months, loudly enough that their sister threatened to leave the house. Then they switched sides, found the flaws in both ideas, and arrived at two propellers spinning in opposite directions. His line: "In a great argument, our adversary is not a foil, but a propeller." Fight about the task, not the person, and build a challenge network: people you trust to point out your blind spots.

One more tool worth stealing. Do not grade a decision only on how it turned out. A bad process with a good outcome is luck. A good process with a bad outcome might be a smart experiment. That belongs on the wall of every owner's rep office.

The book is long on stories and some of them run on. The middle chapters on classrooms and polarized politics will matter less to a reader who runs projects. And Grant has to correct one of his own examples in the epilogue, which, to be fair, proves his point.

Read it, and read it before Vibe (issue one). Think Again is about changing your own mind and other people's. Vibe is about what to do with the people once you have. Same author, same habit: treat your assumptions as hypotheses.

Try this week: before your next decision meeting, write down what evidence would change your mind. Then ask the other side the same question.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know. Adam Grant. Viking, 2021.