The Importance of Rethinking and Changing minds in a Rapidly Transforming World

At some point in your life, you’ve probably heard that if you drop a frog in a pot of scalding hot water, it will immediately leap out. But if you drop the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog will die. It lacks the ability to rethink the situation and doesn’t realize the threat until it’s too late.

This well-known story is often used to suggest how living things, and sometimes humans, adapt to any condition, over a long time frame. It is often cited in management courses and mentioned in any kind of conversation. I even heard on several occasions the term “Boiling Frog” syndrome.

This said, I’m reading “Think again”, by Adam Grant, and I realized right now a wrinkle: this story is popular, somehow entertaining… let’s admit that it is just great but, unfortunately, it is NOT true.

Tossed into the scalding pot, the frog will get burned badly and may or may not escape. The frog is actually better off in the slow- boiling pot: it will leap out as soon as the water starts to get uncomfortably warm.

It’s not the frogs who fail to reevaluate. It’s us. Once we hear the story and accept it as true, we rarely bother to question it. To be honest, I never did it, until today.

Rethinking isn’t a struggle in every part of our lives. When it comes to our possessions, we update with fervor. We refresh our wardrobes when they go out of style and change mobile phones and electronic when new versions are put on the market. When it comes to our knowledge and opinions, though, we tend to stick to our guns.

Psychologists call this seizing and freezing. We favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and we let our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We listen to views that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard.

When people reflect on what it takes to be mentally fit, the first idea that comes to mind is usually intelligence (of various combinations of “intelligences”, which is also the name of this LinkedIn newsletter). The smarter you are, the more complex the problems you can solve—and the faster you can solve them. Intelligences are traditionally viewed as the ability to think and learn. Yet in a turbulent world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn.

In times of rapid change like today, the ability to let go of old ideas and embrace new ones is critical. To survive and thrive, we must constantly adapt to new circumstances. To do that, we need to develop what the social psychologist Howard Gardner has called “mental fitness”—a set of psychological skills that enable us to deal with the world’s ever-changing demands.

Mental fitness is not a new concept. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates argued that the unexamined life is not worth living. The Stoics believed that the best way to deal with change was to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

The Chinese philosopher Confucius taught that wisdom lies in knowing what you don’t know. But in an age of fake news and alternative facts, mental fitness has taken on new urgency. To be mentally fit in the 21st century, we need to be able to think for ourselves, to question received wisdom, and to change our minds when the evidence warrants it.

We need to be able to see the world from multiple perspectives and to think flexibly and creatively. We need to be able to regulate our emotions, to manage stress, and to bounce back from setbacks. We need to be able to find meaning and purpose in our lives.

“The ability to unlearn is the capacity to reflect on our own deeply held beliefs and then to let them go,” says Andrew Pickering, a professor of sociology and philosophy at the University of Exeter. “It’s the ability to think flexibly, to change our minds.” This capacity to unlearn is essential for scientists—and for anyone who wants to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world. “The more we know, the more we realize how little we know. The more we learn, the more we must unlearn.”

Even scientists are constantly engaged in a “mangle of practice,” in which they juggle multiple goals, methods and perspectives. This mangle is not a sign of scientific incompetence, however. On the contrary, it’s essential for scientific progress. The ability to hold contradictory ideas in mind, to tinker with hypotheses and to learn from mistakes is what allows scientists to make breakthroughs. “Rethinking and unlearning are not the enemy of good science. They are its lifeblood.”

In a rapidly changing world, the ability to unlearn old ideas and learn new ones is more important than ever. We live in a time of accelerating change. The world is transforming around us at an ever-increasing pace, and we must continually adapt to stay afloat. To do so, we must learn to unlearn. The challenge is that unlearning is hard. We are creatures of habit, and we tend to cling to our beliefs, even when they are no longer useful.

We are all prisoners of our own experience. The past shapes the present, and the present limits the future. To unlearn, we need to be able to step outside of our own experience and view the world from a different perspective. We need to be humble enough to admit that we might be wrong, and open-minded enough to consider new evidence. We must be prepared to jettison our cherished beliefs, even those that have served us well in the past.

“Think again”, by Adam Grant, is an invitation to let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving us well, and to anchor our sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency. If we can master the art of rethinking, we may be better positioned for success at work and happiness in life. Thinking again can help us generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to learning more from the people around us and living with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of our most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of our identity.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Do you agree? Have you read this book? I look forward to sharing perspectives on this and on many other topics, hopefully open to think again, and to learn from you while doing it.

n.b. text above partly taken from “Think again”, by Adam Grant. Picture of the “Boiling Frog” created using DALL·E Artificial Intelligence, with input: a frog in boiling water