The Exchanges

Q Let's dive into givers and takers a little bit, because I think there was actually three types of people, right? Givers, takers, matchers. Can you, can you walk me through the differences just so everybody starts on the same playing field here?

A Yeah. I think about these as, as styles of interaction and, you know, they're kind of grounded in the motives that we bring to the table every time we talk to another person. So givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you? Um, they're excited to add value and help other people. And, you know, sometimes that means knowledge sharing or mentoring or, you know, just showing up early or staying late to support other people. The opposite of a giver is the taker, and that's somebody who's, you know, constantly trying to figure out, what can you do for me? Come out ahead in every interaction, and takers are really great at volunteering for the projects that are interesting, visible, and important, and then dumping the grunt work on everybody else. But of course, they love to walk away with the lion's share of credit for every collective achievement, which is why I know we all adore working with takers. Maybe not. And then, you know, most, what I found was most people are, they kind of hover in the middle of this spectrum as, as matters. I found that over half of people identify this as their primary interaction style at work where they say, look, I don't want to be too selfish. I don't want to be too generous. So, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to trade favors evenly. If you do something for me, I'll do something for you. It's almost like they're, they're acco…

AI assessment note: “givers are people who are constantly asking, what can I do for you?”

Q person's character? How well do they recognize the plays? How well do they, is it in intuition versus professionalism on their part? Right. And they have these ways of evaluating that special forces, the same thing. They're investing a lot in sort of Determining these recruits. And, uh, why do you think they're so variable? Like it's hit or miss, right? Like they haven't cracked that code, if you will.

A I think, I think it's, it's hit or miss for a few reasons. One is we, we don't have all the criteria that we need. I I've worked with a whole bunch of professional sports teams over the past few years on this exact problem. And they're at best assessing on, you know, maybe seven or eight attributes when there might be 200 that are going to drive people's future performance, right? So I think that's, that's the first problem. The second problem is the measures are extremely noisy. So it's one thing to say, okay, you know, if I'm trying to hire a, if I want to draft somebody to play for the Toronto Raptors, right, I can, I can figure out how tall they are. I can figure out how, how high they can jump. But when it comes to, you know, quickness and diving for a loose ball, I can't measure that as precisely as I would like. And then I'm also trying to come up with a score for grit and generosity and humility and Good luck with that, right? They're very, very intangible factors to measure.

AI assessment note: “I think it's, it's hit or miss for a few reasons.”

Q and Clearsighted. You know, often charismatic is why are we drawn to these people if we know that actually maybe the best elected official would be the one that gets up and says, I don't know how to fix this. I would just hire the best people and listen to them, but we would never elect that person. Why do you think that is? Why are we drawn to this?

A I don't know. I think, I think we have elected that person. I don't, I don't think it happens that often, but I think that in the U.S., uh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that was literally his campaign with the New Deal, right? It was, it was, uh, it was a whole campaign to say, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna run a bunch of trial and error experiments and learn from what works. I think it's hard for that person to get elected, though, because as we face crises and we grapple with uncertainty, we're drawn to people who we feel like are gonna figure it out and gonna fix it. And so if, if somebody hedges too much, if somebody shows too much humility, I think we mistake that as a sign of ignorance, right? And it's, it's the basic trap that you've, you've railed against for years, Shane, which is we should stop confusing confidence for competence, right? Just because somebody is, is sure of an opinion does not mean they actually know what they're talking about. And in fact, anybody who is, is familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect will know that the, the more sure people are of their opinions, the more Hesitant we should be to listen to them, right? But there's something very intoxicating about following someone who believes they've already found the way. Uh, and I think it, you know, it gives us a sense of coherence. It can give us a sense of purpose. It's easy to put our tr…

AI assessment note: “we're drawn to people who we feel like are gonna figure it out”

Q I thought it was going to be. I'm curious, how do you, how do you institute Rethinking or how do you help kids, not only students, but your own kids rethink like what are parents supposed to do at a young age for elementary school kids or high school kids and university students in terms of opening their mind to different possibilities and what sort of things can we do?

A One of my favorite things that I learned while I was writing the book came from Wisconsin's middle school teacher of the year, Erin McCarthy. What Erin does with her students is she gives them a section of a history textbook, and she sends them out to rewrite it. And what they do is they, you know, they look at primary sources, they interview people, and they realize how much information is missing from the way that we've narrated past events. And what that does is it allows them to think a little bit more when they encounter new information, like fact checkers, right? Whereas where instead of, you know, I, I read something in, you know, in the news, or I heard it on TV, it must be true to say, well, what are the sources of that information? And how do we really know? And I think we should all be lucky to lucky enough to have a project where we get to rewrite a section of a textbook. I thought, I thought that was a brilliant assignment. A variation on that that we do occasionally at dinner is Allison and I with our kids will have a myth busting discussion. Uh, and the, I think originally it came about because our, our kids had learned interesting things at school that surprised us. Like one day, um, one of our daughters came home and said, uh, we were, we were just doing an Egypt unit. This was an elementary school. And, uh, I found out that King Tut probably did not die in a c…

AI assessment note: “A variation on that that we do occasionally at dinner is Allison and I”

Q One of the stories from the book that I liked was Daniel Kahneman teaching you about how to respond to a surprise. Can you tell us that story?

A I went to give a speech at a conference, and I didn't know a lot about who was going to be in the audience, and I get up on stage, and sitting in the audience is Danny Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning psychologist, one of the giants of our field. Afterward, I, um, I ran into him, and he said, he said something like, that was wonderful. I was wrong. And those two things don't normally go hand in hand, right? Either a talk was wonderful because you were right, or it was bad because you were wrong. My first reaction was to say, holy cow, Danny Kahneman liked something I said. My second reaction was to say, this is so strange that he thought it was wonderful to have been wrong. What's behind this? And so I ended up following up with him and I asked him, you know, why I could literally, his face lit up when he talked about how exhilarating it was to be wrong. And he said, it's the only way I know I've learned something, right? If I find out I was wrong, it means I am now less wrong than I was before. And he talked very eloquently about the value of, of detaching, uh, your, like we talked about your opinions from your identities, your ideas from your identities to say, look, every idea I have, it's just a hypothesis might be true, might be false. And if I, if I'm, if I have a vested interest in it being true, Then I'm not going to discover as much as if I really want to find out if it's…

AI assessment note: “he said something like, that was wonderful. I was wrong.”

Q How do you filter which problems you work on? Like, so you walk away from students with, you know, probably hundreds of different ideas. How do you pick the ones that you're going to focus your attention on?

A So like you, I keep an idea journal. And it's a little notebook that I carry around in my pocket. And every week I transcribe the, like the little notes that are handwritten into a word document, super high tech. And then about once a month, uh, I like to just review the notes and, you know, usually I do it when I'm, I've given myself like permission or freedom to work on something new and creative. Cause I feel like I've actually finished something, uh, that was, you know, sort of more in completion mode. And then as I go through it, what I'll notice is if an idea has come up more than once, that's either a sign that it's really interesting or that I'm just depressingly consistent. Uh, and you know, I'll sort of focus on the ideas that I've, I've written about multiple times without even remembering having done it. And then I also try to filter a little bit on, you know, if we understood this problem better or if we had a way to tackle it, uh, how much of a difference would it make for people's lives, especially their lives at work? And the more important it feels of, you know, all the ideas that I find personally interesting, more likely I am to pursue it.

AI assessment note: “if an idea has come up more than once, that's either a sign”

Q And how do we do that? We have to arrange the way that we think about the problem to vary the conditions to find out when, when it replicates and when it doesn't, and to what extent they impact that.

A I think, I think that is the key. And, you know, I think that any responsible social or behavioral scientist should sit down whenever they test an effect and say, here are the boundary conditions for the effect where it should hold. Um, and here are also the moderators that can reverse the effect, and now I'm going to go investigate all of those. And, you know, that, that just means a richer understanding of the phenomenon, right? Like, do, like, let's take the power pose debate, for example. Like, do I believe that power poses can cause psychological behavior and behavioral changes in people? Sure. Do I know when those changes occur and for whom? Not a clue yet.

AI assessment note: “any responsible social or behavioral scientist should sit down whenever they test an effect”

Q When I read the book, one of the most surprising things that came across to me originally was kind of that if you think of a Gaussian almost distribution of outcomes, the givers tend to move towards the tails, uh, for more extremes kind of success or failure. Am I remembering that right?

A Yeah, it was, it was a big surprise for me, actually. I had all this evidence that, you know, that the givers in most of the organizations I happen to be studying were more successful than, than takers or matchers. And I think it was because at the time I had been studying jobs where teamwork and service were huge. And so, you know, like nobody wants to take her on their team. And over time you like, you figure out how to make sure that takers don't succeed. And, you know, I don't know about you, but like, I don't want my doctor or lawyer or real estate agent or insurance agent to be a taker either. Uh, so, you know, it was clear that in teamwork and service jobs, there was, there was a real giver advantage. Um, but there was this other body of evidence showing that, you know, that the givers often burned out and they were more likely to get exploited cause they, you know, they were too trusting and, you know, they ended up helping other people too much or they sacrificed their own goals to, you know, to be there for others. And, you know, I finally, as I took a closer look at the data, I found that, you know, for salespeople, for engineers, uh, and even medical professionals, um, the givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum. They, they made up a disproportionate number of the worst performers and of the best performers. Um, you know, which just pure…

AI assessment note: “givers were overrepresented on both extremes of the success spectrum.”

Q Yeah, I wish. In that case, would you want your identity sort of tied up with your profession a little bit? Because scientists are known to sort of think and, and change their mind and look for evidence and...

A Ooh, that, that is such an interesting reframing of my stance on identity. I think you might be right. See myself as a social scientist, right? And thinking about myself, seeing myself as someone who likes to think and talk scientifically, and who was trained to do that, what that means to me is I value truth. I'm more interested in, in getting the answer right than I am in being right. You know, that, that means lots of my opinions are still flexible, right? I have a set of tools, so I really like experiments. I really like, uh, doing, you know, carefully constructed longitudinal studies. Uh, and I think those, those tools have been rigorously tested over centuries, right? As being the, the most valid and probably independently verifiable, or at least most difficult to falsify, right? Techniques for, for reaching the truth, or at least getting closer to it. And I think as an identity scientist is helpful because it reminds me how much we don't know and how hard it is to, you know, to arrive at the truth or an approximation of it.

AI assessment note: “I think you might be right. See myself as a social scientist, right?”

Q action and I need to do something. And then you have an escalation of commitment, the more action you take, which it becomes harder and harder to rethink. You have these sunk costs building up. You have other sort of escalations. How do you balance those two things between being open and also affording yourself the choices that you need to make to exist in an organization and seize opportunity?

A I don't know that there's a way to get the best of both worlds in every situation. I do think, though, that you can create conditions that at least increase the probability that you end up both open and decisive at the same time, which is a sort of strange combination. So for me, that's really about changing the way that we reward people. So in too many organizations, people are basically counted as successful if they get a good result and failed if they get a bad result. And the problem is it often takes years to find out what the results were. It's very easy for people to persist with a failing project for a long time and convince themselves and everyone else around them that, you know, that, that they're on the right path. What a lot of the research on this suggests is that we want to shift to process accountability, not just outcome accountability, and ask people to really think seriously about, okay, how would I know that this is a thorough and thoughtful decision process as opposed to one that's driven, you know, purely by whim or intuition, um, and ends up being much more shallow. So I, I drew this little two by two that I've, I've found helpful where I cross the quality of the outcome with the quality of the process. And I think we need to stop rewarding good outcomes with bad processes because that's just luck. That's kind of a boneheaded decision that, that happened t…

AI assessment note: “create conditions that at least increase the probability that you end up both open and decisive”

Q So we've talked about sort of the individual, but how do we change the views of other people, the people we work with, our partners? This is probably the part of the conversation everybody wants because we're right. How do I change somebody else's views? How do I convince them that they're wrong and I'm right?

A Well, it helps to, to let go of that sense that you're right and say, look, if, if, if this is a one-sided exchange and you're supposed to change your mind, but I get to stand still, we're probably not going to make a whole lot of progress here. Uh, unless you are a very good prosecutor or the other person is very happy to be preached to. One of the more interesting things that psychologists have done when, when looking at, you know, disagreement and debate is what if we thought about it as a dance? There's something about dancing that says, look, we're both going to move. I think a good argument or, you know, a good debate or a good disagreement is one where neither of us has really choreographed all the steps we're going to take. And sometimes we step forward, and sometimes we step back. Other times we sidestep. But ultimately, we're actually trying to get in rhythm or in sync, which is a very different goal from trying to change somebody else's mind.

AI assessment note: “it helps to, to let go of that sense that you're right”

Q Not only that, but you glorify your, your achievements, right?

A Yeah. Which, you know, which, which just ends up sort of creating a nice little fun house mirror for other people to look at you in, which is totally distorted. Um, I think that, You know, at the same time, I understand that, you know, people, especially if, if they haven't achieved, you know, what they think are their major goals. I understand why do people don't just want to come out there and say like, yeah, here are all the, you know, the, the bad ideas that I worked on and, you know, all the, uh, the jobs that I applied to that I got rejected for. Um, and that, you know, that, that, that requires some, some real courage to put it out there. But I think there, there ought to be, uh, some middle ground where we can say like, Hey, Here are the kinds of things that I'm toying with right now, and I don't know which ones are going to work out.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. Which, you know, which, which just ends up sort of creating a nice little fun house mirror”

Q Do you practice that now or do you do that only when you're in kind of situations of adversity or is it something you do more regularly now?

A You know, it's something that I've, I've started doing, um, also for, uh, I guess for, for occasional accomplishments. So I, like, I remember, I remember publishing give and take. It was, it was a really amazing feeling to write a book. Like I, I've loved books since the day that I could read. And, you know, I remember growing up, my mom would take out 30 books every week from the library and, you know, I would like tear through them and, Like a lot of my, my happiest moments in life have been either the direct result of reading or happened while I was reading a book. Um, and also a lot of the thoughts that have most, I guess, shaped my worldview have come from books. And so the idea of actually becoming an author was such a meaningful, I guess, life transition. And then originals came out and it was like, yeah, I wrote another book. And the funny thing is, you know, if I had to choose, Dan Pink once told me that choosing a favorite book is a little bit like choosing a favorite child. So I'm, I'm not going to do that, but I will say, you know, like I wrote give and take first because it's the set of ideas that I am most passionate about. It's my most core set of values. Um, I think originals is a better written book. I think I, I became a better writer, uh, you know, over the few years in between. And so, you know, it's like, it's not like I should have been, you know, less, uh…

AI assessment note: “it's something that I've started doing, um, also for, uh, I guess for, for occasional accomplishments”

Q I like that. Switching gears, so your second book you wrote, uh, was Originals, which is kind of what we can learn from great creators. Um, so what's the high level, um, that you got out of that in terms of what we can learn about great original creators?

A So I noticed after, after I wrote Give and Take that a lot of the, the questions I was getting from executives and sort of Emails from readers were around like, if I have a culture of takers, how do I change it into a culture of givers? And as I, you know, as I worked with this question more, I realized it was sort of a special case of a broader question, which is, you know, if I, if I want to change my culture, how do I do that? And, you know, I, I, I sort of had that, I guess, in the back of my mind. And I also started getting a lot of questions from my students about, you know, like I, I come into a, you know, to an organization and I'm kind of at the bottom of the hierarchy. But I have a, I have an idea or suggestion that I think is really important. How do I get heard when I don't yet, you know, have the authority to, to drive real change? And then on the flip side of that, I had a lot of leaders asking, well, how do I fight groupthink and, you know, get people to, you know, to challenge their own assumptions and, you know, think creatively. I I'd been doing this body of research on, on proactivity, which was all about, you know, being the kind of person who takes initiative and champions change and, you know, says, look, like I'm not going to be a conformist. Uh, I'm not going to follow other people just for the sake of it. Uh, I'm going to advocate for the ideas that I b…

AI assessment note: “I eventually decided that what we needed was we needed a book”