Embracing the Escape Fire (with Adam Grant)

Summary

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford – Episode: Embracing the Escape Fire (with Adam Grant)
Release Date: August 2, 2024
Host/Author: Pushkin Industries
Guests: Adam Grant, Organizational Psychologist at Wharton

---

Introduction

In this gripping episode of Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, host Tim Harford delves into the harrowing story of the Mann Gulch wildfire and explores the profound lessons it holds about human error, decision-making under pressure, and the critical importance of rethinking established norms. Joining him is Adam Grant, renowned organizational psychologist and author of “Think Again,” who provides deep insights into the psychological and organizational failures that led to tragedy.

---

The Battle of Mann Gulch: A Story of Survival and Tragedy

The episode opens with a vivid recounting of the Mann Gulch wildfire incident in 1949. Fifteen elite firefighters, known as smokejumpers, parachuted into a Montana forest with a mission to control a roaring wildfire. However, faced with rapidly changing winds and an unstoppable fire, their mission turned into a desperate fight for survival.

Notable Quote:
Tim Harford [00:06]: “These men were smokejumpers, the wildfire fighting elite… It wasn't long before they realized the wind had turned and the fire was racing towards them.”

As the fire intensified, foreman Wagner Dodge made a split-second, unconventional decision that both shocked and baffled his team. Instead of attempting to outrun the fire, Dodge initiated an “escape fire” by lighting controlled burns around himself, creating a safe zone in the ashes. This bold move allowed him to survive, but tragically, only two of the fourteen smokejumpers survived the ordeal.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [05:16]: “Their packs alone weigh 20 pounds. There were investigators who calculated later that they could have run 15 to 20% faster and that just dropping their packs and tools could have made the difference between life and death.”

---

Adam Grant’s Reflections: Insights from “Think Again”

Adam Grant connects the Mann Gulch story to broader themes in his work, emphasizing the dangers of cognitive entrenchment—the stubbornness to stick to established methods despite changing circumstances. He highlights how Dodge's ability to rethink the situation was both instinctual and uniquely innovative, a stark contrast to his team's inability to adapt.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [07:48]: “Why are you there? If your job is to put out the fire and you let go of your tools, you've basically given up on your entire mission.”

Grant underscores that the tragedy wasn't merely individual failure but indicative of systemic issues within the wildland firefighting industry, which for decades failed to recognize the ecological importance of controlled burns.

---

Rethinking in High-Stakes Situations

The conversation shifts to the psychological aspects of decision-making under extreme pressure. Grant discusses how high-stakes environments can lead to "threat rigidity," where individuals revert to rigid thinking, narrowing their focus instead of adapting to the evolving landscape.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [14:13]: “When you’re under stress or pressure, we revert to our most basic, well-learned instincts and we narrow our field of vision.”

This concept is exemplified through various historical and contemporary examples, illustrating how the inability to rethink can lead to catastrophic outcomes.

---

Organizational Failures: The Fall of BlackBerry

Grant and Harford delve into the story of Mike Lazaridis, the co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), the company behind BlackBerry. Despite pioneering the smartphone category, RIM failed to adapt to the touchscreen revolution ushered in by Apple’s iPhone. Grant critiques Lazaridis’s inability to "think again," attributing it to his shift from scientific thinking to a more rigid, identity-bound leadership style.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [22:12]: “A good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the curiosity to seek new knowledge.”

The discussion highlights how organizational architecture—rooted in established identities and practices—can stifle innovation and adaptability, leading to a company's downfall despite early successes.

---

The Power of Leadership in Embracing Change: Steve Jobs and Apple

Contrasting Lazaridis’s approach, the episode explores how Steve Jobs successfully led Apple through transformative changes by fostering a culture that encouraged rethinking and innovation. Jobs, initially resistant to the idea of a touchscreen phone, was persuaded by his team to envision and develop the iPhone, demonstrating effective leadership in embracing necessary change without compromising the company's core identity.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [29:12]: “If you want to push someone like Steve Jobs to think again, it's really helpful to make sure that you activate their natural curiosity, that you give them a chance to generate some ideas.”

This section underscores the importance of leaders being open to new ideas and creating environments where questioning and reimagining are not just allowed but encouraged.

---

Systemic Failures and Broader Implications

Returning to the Mann Gulch case, Grant reveals a deeper systemic failure within wildland firefighting: the long-standing policy of extinguishing all fires, disregarding ecological benefits. This reflects a broader pattern where industries and organizations cling to outdated practices due to entrenched beliefs and lack of willingness to rethink foundational assumptions.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [31:22]: “The entire field of wildland firefighting, a whole industry, was guilty of decades of failing to think again.”

The episode expands this analysis to other areas, including pandemic responses and financial crises, illustrating how systemic resistance to change can have far-reaching and devastating consequences.

---

Conclusion: The Imperative to Rethink

In wrapping up, Harford and Grant emphasize that the ability to rethink is crucial not only in life-and-death situations but also in everyday decisions and organizational strategies. They advocate for fostering a mindset that embraces uncertainty, questions assumptions, and remains open to new possibilities.

Notable Quote:
Adam Grant [34:27]: “We make an assumption, it proves to be a successful one in the moment… we don’t ask whether the practices that we build around that assumption, our best practices, our time honored traditions, were created for a world that no longer exists.”

The episode serves as a compelling reminder that survival and success often hinge on our capacity to adapt and rethink, both individually and collectively.

---

Key Takeaways

• Rethinking Under Pressure: The importance of cognitive flexibility in high-stakes situations to adapt and survive.
• Organizational Adaptability: Companies and industries must evolve their structures and cultures to embrace change and innovation.
• Leadership’s Role: Effective leadership involves fostering an environment where questioning and reimagining are encouraged.
• Systemic Change: Addressing deep-rooted practices and assumptions is essential to prevent systemic failures.

---

For Further Exploration:
Adam Grant’s books, including “Think Again” and “Hidden Potential,” offer more on these themes. Listen to his podcasts, Rethinking and Work Life, for additional insights on organizational psychology and personal development.

Listen to the full episode here.

Transcript

[Tim Harford]

Pushkin late one blistering August afternoon in 1949, 15 men parachuted out of the wide Montana sky. Their mission to intercept and extinguish a forest wildfire. Within minutes their mission had changed to just survive. These men were smokejumpers, the wildfire fighting elite. They landed near the top of Man Gulch with the intent of digging a line in the ground in front of the fire, shepherding it towards an area where there was less to burn. It wasn't long before they realized the wind had turned and the fire was racing towards them, flames 30ft high and gathering speed. There was no alternative to run. And on flat, even ground, wearing running gear, that would have been possible. But scrambling steeply uphill through rocks and long grass, carrying heavy equipment, it might be too much to ask. The men were making a lung bursting effort to reach the safety of the ridge top that the fire was gaining or gaining. The ridge top was just 200 yards away. As the fire roared closer, another two or three min scramble. Was there time? The smokejumpers foreman Wagner Dodge realized with dread they just weren't going to make it. And so he did something that made his team recoil with astonishment and horror. I'm Tim Harford.

[Adam Grant]

You're listening to Cautionary Tales. This is one of our cautionary conversations. As usual, you'll hear a story, or perhaps more than one story of disaster. In fact, the story of brave smokejumpers features in the book Think Again by my guest, Adam Grant. He's here to help tell this cautionary tale and to reflect on the lessons. Adam needs no introduction, but he deserves one, so he's going to get one. He's an organizational psychologist at Wharton. He describes that as trying to figure out how to make work, not suck. He's the presenter of two brilliant podcasts, Work Life and Rethinking, the creator of some of the best and most loved TED talks, and the author of several superb and bestselling books including Hidden Potential and the book we're discussing today. Think again, Adam. Welcome to Cautionary Tales.

Thanks Tim. I have to say it's a little bit unsettling to be in a live Cautionary Tales. I'm so used to listening to it when I go to bed.

[Tim Harford]

Well, I'm sure you can preserve the spirit of Cautionary Tales and hopefully add a little bit of extra insight. And this story of the fire, I mean, it's an inspiring story in some ways, it's a hellish story in other ways. And like Dante's Inferno, it's got multiple Levels. You begin your book. Think again with this story. What was it that Wagner Dodge did that so shocked his crew?

[Adam Grant]

Well, you think the foreman would be trying to run to the head of the line, right, and guide everyone else to safety. And instead of running, he stops, he bends over and he takes a matchbook out of his pocket. And you can only imagine what's going through the other firefighters minds. Like we're trying to escape a fire, right, not start one. What could he possibly be doing? But he starts lighting matches and throwing them in the grass. One of the crew thinks he must have gone nuts. That bastard Dodge is trying to burn me to death. And then he looks over and he sees Dodge waving his arms toward the fire and encouraging people to follow him into his fire. What in the world is he doing? The smokejumpers don't know that Dodge has improvised a really unusual survival strategy. He's building an escape fire. He had no training in how to do this. It wasn't an idea that firefighters were aware of at the time, but out of sheer instinct in that moment, he's figured out that if he burns the grass in front of him and he lays down face down in the ashes, that the fire will burn right over him. Because if he burns the grass in front of him, the fire will not have anything to burn and it will be forced to go around. And that's exactly what he does. He basically removes all the fuel for the wildfire to feed on, and he ends up pouring water out of his canteen onto his handkerchief. He puts it over his mouth, and he lays face down in the charred area and survives there for 15 minutes. There's enough oxygen on the ground that he can make it. And the wildfire literally runs right over him.

[Tim Harford]

I mean, it doesn't bear thinking about what it must have been like for him as the fire runs over him. As you say, he wasn't trained. Nobody really knew for sure that this would work. I mean, I'm sure the heat and the smoke must have been intense. So there's a tremendous amount of courage there. Smokejumpers are. I'm sure they're all very courageous. Did any of them join him? Did any of them understand or trust the idea enough to actually get down there and join him in the shadow of this escape fire that he'd lit?

[Adam Grant]

No, they didn't. I think one of the great tragedies here that I didn't write about in Think Again is that the crew didn't have much of an opportunity to build trust. They didn't Know Dodge very well. There wasn't a long standing relationship between them. And so they see him doing something that looks insane and they basically ignore it. I remember in the US we were trained as kids, right, to stop, drop, and roll in the face of a fire. And for Dodge, all he does is stop and drop. There's no roll. And so he just has to lay there hoping that the fire is going to fail to burn him alive. The other smokejumpers end up basically trying to race for their lives. And of the 14 of them, 12 of them didn't make it. It's devastating when you look back, because Dodge was able to survive. There were two who made it. Because of their physical fitness, they were able to barely outrun the fire. But the other dozen, I think, failed because they weren't trained in the mental fitness to let go of the very assumptions that they brought to their job.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. And you described just the horror of it. And I think one of them had a pocket watch that was partially melted, and it's just awful. And the fact that they could probably all have survived if they had had enough experience or enough trust or had been able to understand what Wagner Dodge was doing. One of the things that's inspiring about this story is that it's just so brilliant. It's like, how on earth does anybody think so fast in such a crisis, in such an original way? Hardly anybody could do that. But you make the point in the book that actually there was a much simpler piece of rethinking that it seems like anybody should have been able to do. But the firefighters, the smokejumpers, they didn't do that either.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah. So I think Dodge's rethinking is very much out of reach for mere mortals. Right. The idea that when you're running for your life and you only have seconds to make a decision, you could just dream up an escape fire and live because of it. Not I. Maybe you, Tim, could pull that out, but.

[Tim Harford]

Well, I'm glad not to be in the situation, but I sincerely doubt it.

[Adam Grant]

So many of us see intelligence as thinking and learning, but what Dodge is doing there is he's choosing to rethink and unlearn. He's got to rethink fire not as a source of danger, but as a path to safety. He has to unlearn his assumptions that when you're trying to fight a fire, your job is to put it out, not start another one. That's a vital skill in a rapidly changing world. And it's a skill that, unfortunately, that crew of smokejumpers did not have. Because if you look at the 12 who didn't survive the fire, they failed to drop their heavy tools. And it's just devastating when you read the reports on the accident, because you literally find burned bodies still carrying axes, saws, shovels. Their packs alone weigh 20 pounds. There were investigators who calculated later that they could have run 15 to 20% faster and that just dropping their packs and tools could have made the difference between life and death. And the big question is, why did they not think to drop their tools?

[Tim Harford]

So why didn't they? Because it seems. It really seems very simple.

[Adam Grant]

Well, I don't think there's any way to know for sure, but part of this is just a basic cognitive entrenchment problem. They're so used to a certain way of doing things that they don't even bother to question their assumptions. As a firefighter, as a smokejumper, your tools are just ingrained as part of your training. But I think there's also a case to be made that there's a deeper problem at play here, which is those tools become part of their identity. If you are a firefighter, who you are is dependent on your tools. You can't put out a fire without water. You can't dig a place to deal with it without a shovel. You need all the tools in your pack to do your job. The organizational psychologist Carl weick wrote so eloquently about this. He said that dropping your tools required letting go of your identity. And if you no longer have your tools, you're no longer a firefighter. Why are you there? If your job is to put out the fire and you let go of your tools, you've basically given up on your entire mission. Yeah, There was another tragic fire in Colorado where one of the survivors had run about 300 yards uphill. He realizes that he has his saw over his shoulder, and then he ditches it because it weighs 25 pounds. But then he starts looking for a place to put it down so the saw won't get burned. He remembers thinking, I can't believe I'm putting down my saw. So he realizes that this is an irrational behavior, and he still can't quite get himself to rethink this ingrained habit of taking care of his tools. And some of his peers end up dying because of that ingrained habit.

[Tim Harford]

It's a very human thing, though. I mean, I can think of times in my own life where, from an outsider's viewpoint, the need to rethink instantly should have been obvious. One particular example, I was going to give a lecture in Scotland. It's quite a big deal. And I was on my way to the airport and I got a call from a friend who was with my wife, and they were both on their way to hospital because my wife was being taken into the emergency room. I was very concerned, and I was glad that my wife's friend was there with her. And I said, I'll call you back. And then I called the office, and my colleague who had arranged this lecture for me, said, tim, you're not going to Scotland, you're going to the hospital. I'll sort everything out. I don't want you to think about this for another moment. I just couldn't let go of this fact that I was going to the airport and I was going to give this lecture and I was going to have to manage the logistics somehow. And it took somebody from outside the situation to say, you just need to be somewhere else. In hindsight, of course, what was I thinking? But I. But I wasn't thinking because I had a plan and I didn't realize the plan had changed.

[Adam Grant]

These moments are all around us. There's so many patterns of thought that become habit and plan. And it's so much easier, because of the forces of inertia, to stick with the plan as opposed to pausing and rethinking it. And I worry a lot about that fueling all kinds of escalation of commitment. You make a plan, it doesn't work out, and instead of abandoning the plan, you double down and you invest more. And the data on this, I think, are chilling in some cases. On the subject of cautionary tales, there's some research on mountaineers suggesting that the grittiest ones are the most likely to die on expeditions because they cannot let go of the goal of getting to the summit. And it seems that in the moment, they forget that the ultimate goal is not to make it to the top, it's to get back down.

[Tim Harford]

I'm reminded of the very first cautionary tale we broadcast, which was the story of Torrey Canyon. And Torrey Canyon, as you may know, Adam was an oil tanker. It ran aground in broad daylight, in good weather, on rocks that were visible and well marked on all the charts, and just drenched the coast of southern England and of northern France with oil. Somebody was killed also in the attempt to salvage the tanker. So this was a catastrophe. And fundamentally, the problem was the captain, who was a sailor called Pastrengo Ruggiarti. He was in a hurry and he'd made a plan to take a slightly risky course between an island and some rocks. And it was a bit tight to take an oil tanker through there, but it was fine. It was certainly perfectly possible. And then a small thing went wrong and another thing went wrong and another thing went wrong. And the more stuff went wrong, the more his vision of the situation narrowed, rather than doing what he should have done, which is to say, oh, okay, look, this is actually getting risky. We need to stop, we need to go around. I know we're in a hurry, but we're just going to have to take the time. He kept thinking, I can just make it, I can just make it. I can squeeze through that gap. And in the end, the result was a catastrophe.

[Adam Grant]

I remember listening to that and immediately thinking about research on threat rigidity, how when we're under stress or pressure, we revert to our most basic, well learned instincts and we narrow our field of vision. We're more likely to fall into tunnel vision at the very moment when we most need to broaden it and rethink our definition of the situation. It's amazingly difficult to train yourself in that scale because it's a bit like planning for the unexpected. I had a fascinating conversation a few years ago with Nick Wallenda, the tightrope walker who walked across the Grand Canyon with no safety net. I thought, okay, if you want to learn to be faster at rethinking, maybe somebody whose life is literally hanging in the balance could teach us something. And he told me that one of the most important things he does in his training is he's balancing on just a one foot high tightrope. Nothing bad will happen if he falls, but he will gather a group of people and ask them to try to push him off at random times from behind, just to prepare his body for all these unexpected events. And I don't want to say that any of us should live in that world, but I do wonder if more people had been trained that way, if we might have been more prepared for all the rethinking that the pandemic has forced on us. How many politicians and CEOs did we watch cling to their tools as opposed to dropping them and saying, actually, we might need to wear masks, it might be a good idea to social distance. Seems like a lot of missed opportunity for rethinking there.

[Tim Harford]

I think so. And one of the things that's striking about these different examples is the dimension of time. Sometimes we have time. The Mountaineer can stop, they can go down, they've got some control. Pastrengo riggiarti the captain of Torrey Canyon. He didn't have to keep going towards the rocks. He could have stopped. I mean, he was under time pressure. But ultimately it wasn't like Wagner Dodge, where the fire was coming. Sometimes we have time to rethink, and sometimes we don't. But when we do have time to rethink, do we take advantage of that time?

[Adam Grant]

Not as often as I would like. One of the questions I've gotten a lot since Think Again came out is, what about people who think too many times or who overthink? If you think about this as a curve, most of us are on the opposite end of that spectrum. Yes, there are people who struggle with overthinking, but you know what? It's better to think too much than it is to think too little. And I'd much rather see people grapple with rumination and analysis paralysis than I would have them never engage in the analysis at all. And I think that when you do have the time, the big question becomes, well, how do you know when it's worth pausing to think again and when you should basically charge ahead? And my favorite way to answer that question comes from studying professional forecasters who you've also spent a lot of time with. Tim.

[Tim Harford]

They're amazing people.

[Adam Grant]

They're so fascinating. One in particular is Jean Pierre Bougain, who's a military historian by training and participates in forecasting tournaments for fun. And he was the world's most accurate election forecaster in a series of tournaments. He not only predicted the rise of Donald Trump and foresaw a few other elections, he's anticipated some events that many people thought were improbable or just didn't even give a chance. And one of the things he does is when he makes a prediction, he makes a list of conditions that would change his mind, and that forces him to stay honest. And I think we could all be doing more of this, right? To say, the moment I make a decision or the moment I make a plan, I should pre commit to the possibility that I'm wrong and ask, what would have to happen to change my mind? How would the world have to shift? What new information would I have to discover in order for that to cue me, hey, wait a minute. It might be time to think again here. And I've landed at a framework that I think is helpful there, which is just to ask two questions. The first one is, how consequential is this decision or this forecast? How high are the stakes? Second one is, how reversible is this decision? Am I about to walk through a locked door or a revolving door. And where we most need to think again is when we're dealing with highly consequential, irreversible decisions. Every decision you make is a prediction about the future. When you choose a career or when you take a job, you're making a bet about what kind of work you're going to find motivating and what sort of culture will be healthy as opposed to toxic. When you marry someone, you're making a prediction about what you're going to want in the next few decades and also who they're going to become. That's when it's really worth slowing down because it really matters and you can't easily change your mind tomorrow. It demands rethinking.

After the break, we'll meet someone who refused to rethink and got it very wrong when it came to making a highly consequential, irreversible decision. Don't go away. We're back and I'm here with Adam Grant, the author of Think Again and now Adam. I squirmed while reading the chapter in Think Again about Mike Lazaridis. So tell us who he is and why did he get things so wrong?

Mike Lazaridis has affected your life even though you might not realize it. He started out as an electronics wizard. He was the kid in high school who fixed broken TVs for his teacher. He built a computer for fun. He improved the buzzer for his high school quiz bowl team and actually paid for his first year of college doing that. And he becomes an electrical engineer. He drops out of college to become an entrepreneur, and he ends up inventing a little device called the BlackBerry.

[Tim Harford]

I have to explain to Gen Z what the BlackBerry is because it basically disappeared from popular view so fast. But half the smartphone sales in the US were Blackberries in 2009. And all of the things that we now worry about with iPhone addiction and doom scrolling it was all the BlackBerry. We used to call it the crackberry and then it just went we got Android, we got the iPhone, and the BlackBerry disappeared. So what happened?

[Adam Grant]

I almost wonder if you just understated the popularity of the BlackBerry because not only was it the dominant smartphone, it invented the smartphone category. So Mike Lazaridis basically said we're going to go from these really clunky Palm Pilots to allowing you to send emails and message on the go. And all of a sudden what we thought were mobile phones became devices for text based communication. And so if you think that the smartphone was a revolutionary or Disruptive innovation. Mike Lazaridis is probably the single most important figure behind it. So he is the founder, he's the co CEO of RIM, which is the company that makes the BlackBerry. And I think the standard narrative about what went wrong is that he failed to adapt. But I think that there's something more interesting at play. Mike Lazaridis is a scientist, and yet he spent too much of his time as a leader thinking like a preacher, a prosecutor and a politician. So this iPhone comes out 2007 and Mike does exactly what you would expect any self respecting engineer to do. He pries it open to figure out how it works. And he says, they put a computer inside this.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Adam Grant]

And if your product is basically a phone with emails and texts and somebody builds a phone with a whole computer, that is a moment to pause and think again. What Mike does instead though is he preaches the virtues of his existing product. He says, what's great about this is we have a keyboard. Everybody wants a keyboard.

[Tim Harford]

His existing customers, they like the keyboard. So it's not a crazy view. So what should he have done differently?

[Adam Grant]

A good scientist has the humility to know what they don't know and the curiosity to seek new knowledge. They don't let their ideas become part of their identity. Instead of defining himself as the guy who made the phone that had buttons on it, he would have been much better off saying, well, that opinion I hold, that has become Kool Aid that I'm serving to everyone else. That's just a hypothesis waiting to be tested. And of course it turns out if he had tested this hypothesis, he would have discovered that yes, although millions of business and government users really liked the keyboard for work emails, the majority of smartphone users were looking for a device that provided home entertainment and the touchscreen was much more effective for that. So what I would have advised Mike to do is to put on his scientist's goggles and say, what are the alternative hypotheses? And then how do you run experiments to test them?

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, I think it's great advice, but let me give you an alternative perspective. Let me see if I can persuade you to think again and then you can come back and you can.

[Adam Grant]

I'm open to it in principle.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah. Well, yeah, you have to pretend to be open to it, don't you, Adam?

[Adam Grant]

It would be ironic if I weren't. Although, I mean, if you persuade me to think again here, and I admit that I wrong in a much larger sense, I was right.

[Tim Harford]

Absolutely. So Mike Lazaridis, he's so Innovative. He's so smart, and then at some point, he stops thinking like a scientist and he starts thinking like a preacher. Fine alternative hypothesis. This happens a lot. The British army invented the tank and blitzkrieg. And yet we call it blitzkrieg. The Germans took the idea. The British lost their technical lead. Kodak invented the digital camera. Sony invented the MP3 player. Xerox invented the personal computer. Now, these are all great ideas, but they weren't taken advantage of. The theory that I discuss in one of my cautionary tales about the invention of the tank comes from Rebecca Henderson, a Harvard professor. These are what she calls architectural innovations. And architectural innovation is an innovation that requires a change in the architecture of the organization. So it's not just about one guy at the top who should change his mind and can't change his mind. The whole structure of the organization needs to change. Kodak is built around film and chemical processing. It can't cope with digital cameras. Xerox is a photocopier company. It can't make PCs. Maybe you're too hard on Mike Lazaridis. Maybe he just didn't have a chance because this was an architectural innovation, and they're just almost impossible. So what am I missing?

[Adam Grant]

Nothing. I think that's a complementary hypothesis, not an alternative one. So I think you're right. I think one of the real struggles for RIM at the time was they had to reinvent a lot of the company in order to compete with the iPhone. But the question is, why didn't they do that? They could have done it, right? They invented the architecture.

[Tim Harford]

Well, they could have tried. At least it seems that they didn't even try.

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, way before. Right, Way before there were missed opportunities to think again. There was a top engineer back in the late 1990s who wanted to add an Internet browser to the BlackBerry. But Mike said, no, focus on email. Right. That's a coding challenge. Right. That's an example of Mike being too attached to his convictions. Now, you could also argue that he knew the importance of ruthless prioritization and he was trying to avoid distraction, which I think may have been true at the time. But guess what? It's 2008. The company is worth more than $70 billion, and the BlackBerry still doesn't have a reliable browser, nor does the company have another product.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah, right.

[Adam Grant]

And that. That is a massive systemic failure to think again. And if you look at the architecture, the structure and the culture of that organization, that architecture was built by the leaders at the top. I guess What I would say in response is I think that Mike's tendency to slip from scientific thinking to preaching was part of the reason that the architecture froze in place as opposed to being reimagined.

[Tim Harford]

Okay, you've persuaded me that Mike's decision making, the psychology of that is certainly an important part of what's going on. There is a lovely subplot in the way you tell this story, which is that a few years before, Lazaridis at Research in Motion is making these decisions or failing to make these decisions about producing a touchscreen phone. Over at Apple, you got Steve Jobs. And we think of Steve Jobs, oh, he's this genius who created the iPhone and blah, blah. But Steve Jobs, he swore he'd never make a phone. He hated phones, so he had to rethink. So how do you get a man like Steve Jobs to change his mind?

[Adam Grant]

Yeah, I think the narrative about the renaissance of Apple missed something vital, which is not only did Steve Jobs hate phones, he hated cell phone carriers. He called them the four orifices. He often got so frustrated with his phone that he would throw it against the wall and smash it. And he just thought that phones were clunky, they were poorly designed, the tech didn't work right. He hated the hardware and the software and the design. And some of his engineers and designers started seeing the writing on the wall in the late 90s. And it really began when they rolled out the ipod, which was their first big success. And suddenly it became clear to a group of them that it was only a matter of time before everything else you could put on a computer was also in your pocket. And they started pitching him the idea, and he just thought it was stupid. He kept saying, I will never make a phone. I don't know why you would want that. And he was very close to the idea. And Steve Jobs was not an easy person to argue with.

[Tim Harford]

It sounds like very similar to the kind of things that Mike Lazaridis was saying, like, why would we want a touchscreen? Why do we want a browser? We don't want that kind of stuff. It's too complicated. Except, of course, Lazaridis is saying this after Jobs group have already proved it can be done.

[Adam Grant]

That's right. Which makes it all the more depressing. But I think what ultimately made Steve Jobs an effective leader, I don't want to say a great leader, because he violated some of my core values in the way that he treated human beings, but he was willing to change his mind. And he surrounded himself with people who knew how to tempt him to think again. They tried to plant the seed and let him water it. The first thing they did was they said, we're not trying to threaten the core DNA of Apple. We don't want to turn Apple into a phone company. It's going to be a computer company. We're just going to shrink the computer and put a phone on the side of it. And you're already putting thousands of songs in your pocket. Don't you want to carry around everything else, too? The research on this is fascinating to me that people are more willing to embrace change when they're reminded of what's going to stay the same. If you give people a vision for change, they're less likely to resist it if they also hear a vision for continuity. And that's exactly what the engineers and designers did for Steve Jobs. They said, we're going to take the core of Apple, our identity, and we're going to shift the form.

[Tim Harford]

Yeah.

[Adam Grant]

There's an engineer who hears that Microsoft is planning to release a tablet and it's going to have a stylus. And he purposely brings up this example because he knows that Jobs hates Microsoft and he thinks the stylus is the worst invention in the smartphone industry. And immediately that fires up his competitive juices. And he says, we're going to make a better one, and you're going to be able to operate it with your fingers. And there were so many moments like this. I'll throw out one other that I really got a kick out of, which is there was an engineer who just casually says to Steve Jobs, look, I know that smartphones are just hideous. They're for the pocket protector crowd. But what do you think it would look like if Apple designed one and activates his imagination and Jobs basically then starts to run with the vision. I guess the overall lesson here is that if you want to push someone like Steve Jobs to think again, it's really helpful to make sure that you activate their natural curiosity, that you give them a chance to generate some ideas, because then they start to take ownership over them. If you do that in a way that doesn't threaten what they're already attached to, it's a lot easier to get them to give it a shot.

[Tim Harford]

I guess the really deep point there is that you can't change somebody's mind, only they can change their mind. And they were giving him the prompt and the space to change his own mind, because they're not going to do it for him.

[Adam Grant]

I think one of the most powerful lessons in the last few decades of psychology research is it's very difficult to motivate someone else to change their mind. What you can do is try to help them find their own motivations to change their minds.

After the break, we'll return to the horrific Man Gulch wildfire for a final twist in this cautionary tale. We're back, and I'm with Adam Grant.

[Tim Harford]

The author of Think Again.

[Adam Grant]

And, Adam, I'd heard some of the Mann Gulch story before, but you've added a final twist. What is it?

I didn't know this. When I sat down to write the story, I thought that I was writing a story about the failure to think again, about the escape fire and about dropping tools. And as I read about Mann Gulch, I was horrified to discover that there was a deeper and much more systemic failure to think again, which is that the 12 smokejumpers who died lost their lives fighting a fire that did not need to be fought in the first place. The entire field of wildland firefighting, a whole industry, was guilty of decades of failing to think again. I think the earliest record I can find is the 1880s, when scientists started writing about the fact that wildfires are important in the life cycles of forests. So if you think about what a fire does, it puts nutrients in the soil, it clears away dead brush. It also opens up a path for sunlight. And if you suppress wildland fires, you end up with forests that are too dense and that can lead to more explosive wildfires, and that kills forests rather than allowing them to rejuvenate. So that was known starting in the 1880s. Man Gulch happens in the 1940s. And it's not until 1978 that the US Forest Service finally eliminates their policy that if anybody sees a fire, it has to be put out by 10am the next day. And what's crazy, Tim, about Mann Gulch is that wildfire that killed the smokejumpers happened in a remote area. There's no human life at risk. And the smokejumpers go in because no one in the community, the profession, the organization, has questioned the assumption that wildfires need to be put out.

[Tim Harford]

It's a real gut punch to think about that. And it got me thinking about cautionary tales in general, because most of the cautionary tales that we tell are about intense moments where someone makes a mistake. And it may be an individual or it may be an organization, but the spotlight is on a particular time and place. And I wonder how often there's something going on in the background, something much more diffuse, something rotten. In the culture or in the structure of a whole industry or a whole field that should have been fixed 50 years previously. And that we don't talk about because the cool story is it happens at a much faster pace.

[Adam Grant]

I mean, it's maddening when you think about it. We've seen so many disasters that are due to this kind of deeper cultural failure of rethinking. Certainly pandemic response falls in that category. The crash of stock markets fits that bill pretty cleanly. Almost any example of a frog in a slow boiling pot would probably align with this issue. And as you know, it turns out, even that story needs to be rethought.

[Tim Harford]

Because the frogs will move, right?

[Adam Grant]

I mean, the moment you heat up the water to the point of discomfort, the frog leaps out. I read about that and thought, it's not the frogs who can't think again, it's us. You hear the story, you assume it's true, and you retell it as opposed to pausing to rethink it. I think that's a metaphor for so many of the mistakes that we make in our lives and in our world, which is we make an assumption, it proves to be a successful one in the moment. Right? It helps us achieve our goals. And we don't ask whether then the practices that we build around that assumption, our best practices, our time honored traditions, were created for a world that no longer exists.

Thank you, Adam. It's been fantastic.

Thank you. Honored to be part of it. It's always a little nerve wracking showing up on a podcast that I listen to.

[Tim Harford]

It is our honor to have you.

[Adam Grant]

I should say that Adam writes amazing books faster than we can release podcast episodes. So while in this episode we were discussing his book Think Again, his more recent book is Hidden Potential. It's not only packed with interesting stories and ideas, but practical lessons too. You can find all of Adam's books in good bookshops and you can listen to Adam Grant's podcasts, Rethinking and Work Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tim Harford]

For a full list of our sources, see the show [e-mail] Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is.

[Adam Grant]

The work of Pascal Wise.

[Tim Harford]

Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus.