The one skill you need to succeed in your career in a turbulent world - by Adam Grant

This transcript has been generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio.

Adam Grant, author, organizational psychologist: We don't live in a stable world anymore. We live in rapidly changing, turbulent world. And in a dynamic environment, intelligence is not just your ability to think and learn, it's your capacity to rethink and unlearn.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum. He's a best-selling author. His name is Adam Grant. His books include Think Again.

Adam Grant: On the I'm-not-biased bias. I think of it as the mother of all biases, Robin. It's the belief that you might have flaws in your thinking, but I'm neutral, I'm rational. And the danger of that is, the better you are at thinking, often the worse you are rethinking.

Robin Pomeroy: What do you hope might happen in the world? What would like to see?

Adam Grant: One of my biggest hopes, Robin, is that we change what we value in leadership.

There's a cluster of personality traits that are called the dark triad. They are narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And this is the exact opposite of what we should be looking for in leadership.

I would love to see that tide turn in 2026. I would for boards of directors when it comes to choosing CEOs, voters when it come to electing politicians, to put their foot down and say, character matters as much as competence and charisma. If you are not willing to put the best interests of the collective above yourself, you are unfit to lead.

Robin Pomeroy: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them. I'm Robin Pomeroy and on this episode which we're recording at the annual meeting 2026 in Davos I'm talking to just a great guest who is an organizational psychologist, he'll tell us what that is.

He's a best-selling author. His name is Adam Grant. His books include Think Again. The power of knowing what you don't know, and hidden potential, the science of achieving greater things. You may know him from his podcasts, Rethinking and Work Life, and his monthly newsletter that reaches 200,000 people.

Adam Grant, it's a joy to meet you. How are you doing?

Adam Grant: It's great to be here Robin, thanks for having me.

Robin Pomeroy: You've been at Davos several times, I've seen you around before, I remember the first time I saw you was in the Congress Centre, just out in that kind of atrium area, and you were mobbed by people considering this is a place full of chief executives and heads of government. You know, I had to fight my way through to you, everyone wants to talk to Adam Grant. My first question to you – what are they asking you?

Adam Grant: I think it's changed over time. I think when I first started coming, people mostly wanted career and leadership advice. And now I'm hearing many more questions about, how do I drive major changes? How do I shift to culture? Can I get a selfie occasionally? I never know why anyone wants that. But I think people are really thinking more globally and more macro about how do we fix broken systems.

Robin Pomeroy: What's the question they should be asking? What would you ask yourself if you came across you in a conference somewhere?

Adam Grant: I think the, I don't know, the question I'm always excited to get is what's something you learned lately that surprised you or changed your mind?

Robin Pomeroy: Adam Grant, what's something you learnt lately that surprised you or changed your mind?

Adam Grant: You know, one of my big surprises recently was there's this whole debate about attention spans. And in the TikTok generation, attention spans supposedly are shrinking.

Not so fast, says a big meta-analysis, a study of studies. Dozens of studies, thousands of people. If you look at tests of concentration over a three-decade period, adults and children have not gotten worse. They're just as good. In some cases, they're even better.

So what's going on there? I started digging into the research and it turns out it's not our ability to pay attention that's suffering. It's our motivation. We're used to looking for the next shiny object.

And the good news is that people are fully capable of focusing for extended periods of time if you sustain their interest. And frankly, that explains something that's mystified me for a long time, which is, why are these teenagers, who supposedly can't pay attention to anything, binging eight hours of a show on Netflix? That requires sustained attention. Why are they sitting playing video games for 14 hours at a time? That requires a sustained attention.

And I think what's distinctive about video games and great shows is they are motivating. They spark our interest, they maintain our interest, and I think we need to get better at that.

Robin Pomeroy: Isn't that passive attention though, are we getting, is it getting harder to, you know we all remember our student days, anything was more interesting than the studying you're meant to be doing. And I think I feel like that now and I guess the assumption that you're challenging there is young people are even worse than that, than I was or I am. Is there any truth to that do you think?

Adam Grant: I think there's a nuance here that often gets missed. Which is, yes, watching TV is passive attention. Except if you look at how teenagers are watching TV now, and I see this with my own kids, they're watching with subtitles on very frequently. Which means they're not just sitting there lazily consuming, they're reading as they're listening. That counts as some degree of active engagement.

Video games even more so. There's a huge body of evidence showing that video games actually boost grit and resilience. They teach self-control and willpower, they force you to grapple with failure, in a lot of cases also to try to figure out how to collaborate with other people who are potentially competing against you.

I don't think that's passive at all, I see that as active.

Robin Pomeroy: I want to talk to you about talking to people because I think you're a really great interviewer.

Adam Grant: Ah, thank you.

Robin Pomeroy: I mean, everyone tells you this, and I want to delve into your kind of interview technique. I want learn some things from you. Before I do, I promised our listeners and viewers you'd tell us what your job is. What is this organizational psychologist? I think that's an American expression that doesn't quite translate to British English. Is that right?

Adam Grant: Perhaps. In Europe more often we're called occupational psychologists or work psychologists.

Basically I study how to make work not suck.

And I had started my career studying how to make jobs more meaningful and motivating I then transitioned to also looking at team effectiveness collaboration creativity now I do a lot of work on organizational cultures as well. So basically anything that has to do with human behaviour at work or around trying to achieve a goal that's that's endlessly interesting to me.

Robin Pomeroy: And a fun fact about you, I mean, people who follow your work will already know this, but before you were a professor at the Wharton School, which is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, you had some other interesting career options. Were you a magician?

Adam Grant: I was I yeah, I did I did perform as a magician for a number of years and I was not good enough to quit my day job.

Robin Pomeroy: What was your best trick?

Adam Grant: My favorite trick, my favorite short trick anyway, is a trick where I have somebody from the audience pick a card. I try to find it in the deck, it's disappeared, and then I throw the deck against the wall, and the card is stuck on the glass, usually on a window.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay, good, oh I should have brought a deck of cards, we've got windows here.

But here's the other one, here's your other career option, you know where I'm going I'm sure. You sometimes refer to yourself as the second best celebrity springboard diver after Jason Statham, is that correct?

Adam Grant: I'm not a celebrity, but Jason Statham is definitely, he was both, well, he's obviously much more recognizable than I am, but he was also a much better diver than I was. He was on the British national team for like a decade.

I was a springboard diver, I was not good enough to make Olympic trials, I kind of peaked by becoming a junior Olympic national qualifier and I actually think a big part of my interest in psychology and trying to apply that to our lives came out of diving when I was afraid of heights and I had to motivate myself to flip and twist in midair. And I was worried that I was going to get lost or belly flop or end up smacking on my back.

And transitioning then from diving to coaching, trying to get other divers to do the same thing, it really made me realize there's a lot we don't understand about what makes us tick.

Robin Pomeroy: Having experiences like that, that's quite formative, isn't it, to people, whether that's sporting or some kind of risk-taking activity, challenging yourself.

I wonder if you've ever tried, for example, stand-up comedy. Is that something you've tried? Because that's one of those things, standing on a diving board, terrifying. Addressing a theatre full of people, terrifying. Stand up comedy. These are things, having these challenges, pushing yourself. Do you think that's something we should all do, or is that just too much of a generalization?

Adam Grant: I think, so I've never tried stand-up comedy. I think it would be a fun challenge to take on. I did do improv for the first time this past year, and it felt actually a lot like teaching or answering questions after a keynote speech or even a live podcast interview, where, okay, the goal is to make people laugh, but at the end of the day, you're trying to take everything that you've learned and make it relevant to the audience.

I think for me, being in those positions was profoundly uncomfortable at first.

As a shy introvert, I was afraid of public speaking. I didn't want to be on stage. And I think early on I learned through diving that seeking out and embracing discomfort was actually key to growth. And the more I put myself in situations that I really would rather not be in, and might even embarrass myself, the more I was forced to stretch my skills.

And so I don't know that stand-up comedy is the right option for everyone. But I think if we all made a list of the situations that make us nervous, and then forced ourselves into them, we'd end up accelerating our own growth.

Robin Pomeroy: And what is it that you advise people, to jump off that diving board, or figuratively speaking? I mean, it could be, look, everyone else, not everyone, but some people can do it, so why can't you? Is it that? What's so special about that person? You give it a go. You may work. I mean is there one key bit of advice to say, go on, give it go? I mean you literally said it if you're a coach to divers, you literally said, jump into the abyss. What did you say to them?

Adam Grant: Well, I was really lucky to have an extraordinary coach, Eric Best, who changed the way that I thought about motivating myself and also other people.

I remember one practice where I was supposed to do probably the hardest dive I had ever done to date. It was a full twisting two and a half, so two flips, 360 turn, and then a dive.

And normally, as a diver who faced a lot of fear, I would stand at the end of the board shaking for a few minutes before I went, when it was time to try a new dive. This is a whole 'nother level of fear for me. I stood there shaking for 10, 20, 30, 40 minutes. Finally, at 45 minutes, I'm just frozen. Eric has run out of patience. And he says, Adam, are you going to do this dive? And I thought, yes, one day I would love to do this dive. And I told Eric that. He said, great. What are you waiting for?

And all of a sudden, Robin, I realized I had the relationship between confidence and action backward. I was waiting until I felt confident to take the leap. But I needed to take a leap in order to gain confidence. And that's literally true in diving. But I think it's a great metaphor for risk taking in life.

I remember when I got tenure at Wharton, I had a group of students tell me I should write a book. And I said, I'm not ready yet. And then I heard Eric's voice in my head. Would you like to write a books one day? Yes. Great. What are you waiting for?

When I got asked to give my first TED Talk, I thought there's no way I'm ready to get in that red circle. And I heard Eric's voice echoing. Would you like to do this one day? Yes. Why not today?

And it's a question I've found myself asking over and over of myself, but also with other people. I used it frequently as a diving coach. I would ask divers, just like Eric asked me, do you want to do this? What are you waiting for? But I've also found myself motivating friends, family, colleagues the same way, even my own kids sometimes.

Robin Pomeroy: Have you ever had one of those friends, family, students ever come back to you and say, Adam, that was the worst piece of advice I've ever had? I've failed on my backside. Has that ever happened?

Adam Grant: I haven't had that happen yet because normally when people are grappling with the question of you know of whether to wait or take the leap they've already built enough skill or enough motivation that they are prepared.

But I did have it sort of backfire once when our when our son was I think he was eight he was waffling about whether to go on his first rollercoaster and I said Henry do you want to do this? And he said no dad I don't That was the end of the conversation and it took another year to get him on one.

Robin Pomeroy: Okay, I'm going to get to this bit. I want you to coach me in interview technique.

I was listening to one of your many great podcast episodes and this one was with someone called Daryl Davis, an African-American who spends his time talking to extreme right-wing racists and white supremacists. Not messing about here. People who think white people are just much, much better than he is.

And it's extraordinary that he seeks that out. It's not just he's bumping into them by chance. And so your conversation with him. I'll put a link in the show notes to this so people can go and hear it, absolutely extraordinary to me.

But you asked him how he did those conversations and how he was able to persuade the unpersuadeable.

And you said, oh, I recognize your technique, after giving his answer, what you're doing there is motivational interviewing. Can you tell us something about what is that? And how does someone like him use that technique.

Adam Grant: Yeah, definitely. Motivational interviewing is one of my favorite ways of helping people think about change. It comes out of counselling psychology.

Originally, a pair of counselling psychologists, Miller and Rollnick, were working with people who were struggling with addiction. And at the time, basically, it was a lot of blaming and shaming to say, you know, how could you do this? You're ruining your life. You're letting your family down.

And they found that not only was this not effective it just it made people either feel terrible about themselves or get defensive and change didn't happen and they started wondering if there was a better way to help people think about change and the insight they stumbled onto was when people are having a hard time changing the worst thing you can do is just try to argue with them or persuade them.

The best thing you could do is get curious and interview them. And instead of trying to motivate them to change, your job is to help them find their own motivations to change.

And so in the addiction context, what they would do is they would ask somebody, tell me a little bit about what are the effects of alcohol in your life? What are the upsides? What are downsides? They're trying to be very neutral about it. They're not steering you in one direction.

And then somebody would say, well, I love how I feel when I drink. But then, you know, I got into a car accident. And instead of saying, oh, that's terrible. You know you shouldn't do this again. Miller and Rollnick would say, oh. But you survived the car accident. Clearly, this is not a big deal in your life. Tell me more.

And very often, the client would say no, actually, this is a huge problem. And then Miller and Rollnick could say, well, why? What is the issue that poses for you?

And then what was happening was the clients were basically talking themselves into change.

And I think there have been over 1,000 randomized controlled experiments showing that this is a helpful way to help people surface their own reasons to shift their attitudes or their actions.

And when I met Daryl Davis, Daryl was one of the stars of Think Again. When I first met him, I was just blown away that this jazz musician took it upon himself to confront people who believed that he was unintelligent and that he was a lesser human being because of his race and then talk them out of white supremacy.

And so we're doing this podcast, and I want to know more about his technique, and I asked Daryl to describe it. And he says, basically what he does is he walks up to these white supremacists, or sometimes they'll approach him after he's performed a gig in a bar, and they'll come up to him and strike up a conversation about music. And then at some point, they will disclose, I'm a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

And Daryl will ask just one question. He wants to know, how can you hate me when you don't even know me?

And I think what's so powerful about that question is it's a hard one for people to answer. And so these white supremacists will say, well, your group has done a lot of bad things. And Daryl will say absolutely. And then he'll ask them some more questions back. And eventually, he will help them unpack their own reasons to question their beliefs.

And as he was describing this, I just said, I mean, this is motivational interviewing. It's a master class in how to do that. Because he's not telling them, you shouldn't believe this. He's not saying, I'm actually as good as you, and you are wrong. He's not preaching his beliefs. He's not prosecuting their beliefs. He's curious. He wants to understand, how did you arrive at that view, and how do you sustain it? And usually at the end of one conversation with them, people are starting to second guess their views. And over time, sometimes it's months, sometimes it's weeks, sometimes its years, they will end up abandoning their hate.

Robin Pomeroy: You mentioned Think Again, the power of knowing what you don't know, that was the book you wrote. Can you just give us, in a nutshell, why is it important for us to think again? What was kind of the USP of that book?

Adam Grant: So I think the basic idea behind Think Again is that we normally see intelligence as the ability to think and learn. And that was true in a stable world.

We don't live in a state world anymore. We live in rapidly changing, turbulent world. And in a dynamic environment, intelligence is not just your ability to think and learn, it's your capacity to rethink and unlearn.

Because the assumptions that you held yesterday may not be true today. The strategies that you invested in if you're a leader, the vision that you articulated, the decisions that you made in the past are not necessarily going to be effective in the future.

And so I got really interested in how do we improve people's skills at rethinking and unlearning.

And one of the bodies of research that really blew my mind was on the I'm-not-biased bias. I think of it as the mother of all biases, Robin. It's the belief that you might have flaws in your thinking, but I'm neutral, I'm rational, I am objective, I am a great thinker.

Well, it turns out the higher you score on an intelligence test, the more likely you are to fall victim to the I-am-not-biased bias.

Because you've got a long track record of being told that you're smart and you're right, and the danger of that is, the better you are at thinking, often the worse you are rethinking.

Robin Pomeroy: What advice do you give? I asked you at the beginning of this interview, what do people rush up and ask you? What help or advice do they ask you. I'm betting a lot of people ask you, they'll say, Adam, when I go home for Thanksgiving, I'm going say it like an American way because it's always seems to be the festival that's talked about. You know, my father-in-law is of a completely different political persuasion in a country and I think it's so true in many parts of the world, certainly in Europe, that's very polarized.

So maybe a generation ago, it wouldn't have been so bad if you were one party or another. But now it's very, very different in a situation where even facts are contested. Very clear facts.

So how do you—is that wisdom that you've just talked about, is that something you could use when you're talking to someone face-to-face who just won't accept something that you know is a fact. I mean, you know. I'm not going to rethink the fact, because the Earth isn't flat, the earth is round. But you need to deal with that person, either in business or in a personal capacity.

What's the skill we need to not just walk away or punch them in the face or whatever happens.

Adam Grant: Well, I think you have a few options there.

The first one is to recognize that we actually overestimate polarization.

There's a pretty big gap between the assumptions we make about people who hold different views from us and the actual views they hold. It's called the perception gap actually and in psychology and very frequently what you'll find is nobody is defined by their worst view or their most hateful belief.

And so it's it's pretty likely that you know even if you have an uncle that that you think is just way out there that you can find some common ground That's one option.

I think a second option is to recognize that oftentimes the root of polarization is binary bias, which is the tendency that many of us have to try to come up with a coherent worldview to take complexity and oversimplify it into just two categories.

We see this all the time in the US when it comes to gun safety and gun rights, for example. You know people basically will say well you know, I'm either pro-gun rights or I'm pro- gun safety. And then they will think we're on opposite sides of the debate.

If you actually look at the data, though, there are at least six different camps. And over 85% of Americans believe in universal background checks before you can get access to a gun. And so you could start that conversation by saying, let's talk about universal background checks. Let's talk whether somebody with a mental illness, a diagnosed mental illness should have access to firearms. You start with that, and all of a sudden, that person that you think disagrees with you actually is much more likely to be on the same page with you than you realize.

And what I love about this is there's some research by Peter Coleman which shows you don't even have to start on the issue that you disagree on. In one of Peter's bodies of work, he runs this difficult conversations lab where he has people deliberately taken because they hold opposing views on a charged issue.

And he randomly assigned some of them to read an article about a completely different issue. And instead of presenting that as one side, the other side, he presents it as, here are all the different shades of gray on that issue. And if you, for example, just get an article, about the complexity of people's views on climate change, then you are dramatically more likely to find common ground with somebody who disagrees with you about guns.

And so I think maybe the broader lesson here is that we need to complexify our thinking. We need to take these issues that are oversimplified and look for the nuance in them and that's where we have more thoughtful conversations.

Robin Pomeroy: Do you think there's any evidence that people are doing that? Have you seen people do that?

Adam Grant: I think there's, you know, it's funny. I think, there is, I've seen a lot of people doing this, but I also probably hear about it disproportionately because there are Think Again readers and listeners who reach out and say, hey, I tried this. Here's what happened.

I think that of everything that I have recommended and studied, the one question that I've gotten the most traction with is when I ask people, let's say I'm talking to a flatearther or somebody who thinks that horoscopes and zodiac signs are predictive of anything which empirically they're not, I'm sorry to say for people who are fans of astrology.

When I talk with people who believe in things that have just been empirically falsified, that are not supported by facts, the best conversation that I have is asking, what evidence would change your mind.

And what I love about that is it grounds the conversation in facts, right? I want to know, okay, what would you have to see? What proof, what data would you find convincing? And then I can reason with you on your terms instead of mine.

And I've just found that to be much more fruitful than just arguing with people right off the bat.

Robin Pomeroy: How do you think the world's going?

Adam Grant: That's not a loaded question.

Robin Pomeroy: Well, it's interesting because you said earlier that we all assume that kids today have got less of attention span. I think in that podcast episode you were using the phrase that you and your guests were saying, they say, it was a lovely thing, they said and you never have to say who it is.

Adam Grant: Who? yeah.

Robin Pomeroy: So they say that we're getting more polarized. They say we can't talk to each other anymore. I think it's probably true, but I don't know. I don't have any empirical evidence. You study psychology. You're looking at evidence and data all the time. Are they right this time?

Adam Grant: Well, I do think empirically we have good evidence that polarization has increased over the last decade or two. And there are lots of reasons why that is.

I think, well, I think that one does seem to be getting worse, but it's not as bad as we think it is.

I think if you look at most other metrics, this is still broadly speaking the best time in human history to be alive. If you look life expectancy, if you look at disease, if look at poverty, if you at hunger, if your look at violence, all trending in positive directions.

And I think sometimes the mistake that we make is we zoom in on one little dot. Right, and we, you know, we, we kind of over, we over index on the the particular instances of violence that are in the news.

And we don't zoom out and say, actually, the murder rate has fallen year by year in developed countries. Even though we have an ongoing land war in Europe, war is down dramatically.

And I think we need to do more of that zooming out. I think. Yeah, anybody who's read Factfulness or The Better Angels of Our Nature or Not the End of the World, I think the data-driven story about the state of the world is a little more uplifting than the news anchored version.

Robin Pomeroy: That's a nice outlook. I was going to ask you for your hopes and fears for 2026. Let's just do a hope, shall we? What do you hope might happen in the world? What would like to see?

Adam Grant: You know, one of my biggest hopes, Robin, is that we change what we value in leadership.

There's a cluster of personality traits that are called the dark triad. They are narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

And this is the exact opposite of what we should be looking for in leadership, because narcissists are all about themselves. Machiavellians are manipulative and will basically believe that the end is justified by the means, and do whatever it takes to get ahead. And psychopaths tend to not feel a great deal of concern for others.

And we know that great leaders are the reverse of that. They put their mission above their ego, not their ego ahead of their mission.

And whether we talk about servant leadership, or some of the work that I've done on elevating givers over takers, or valuing humility as opposed to arrogance. I think I would love to see that tide turn in 2026. I would for boards of directors when it comes to choosing CEOs, voters when it come to electing politicians, to put their foot down and say, character matters as much as competence and charisma. If you are not willing to put the best interests of the collective above yourself, you are unfit to lead.

Robin Pomeroy: You'd think that would be our natural state, wouldn't you? Why isn't it? Why is it like nice guys don't win, and those things actually can be quite effective?

Adam Grant: Well, I think there are a couple of mechanisms that show up in the research.

One challenge we run into is superficial charm. People mistake confidence for competence, and so, you know, narcissists are often captivating when you first meet them or when you see them from a distance, and it's only as you observe them over time or up close that you start to see their more toxic tendencies.

I think the other issue is that people see, oftentimes, this kind of aggressive, dominant approach as a sign of strength. In times of flux, people actually gravitate toward the narcissist or the authoritarian leader because they look at that person and say, that makes me feel safe and secure. That person's strength is what we need. And ultimately in the longer term, it's not, because the moment that leader's personal interests diverge from what's good for the company or the country, you can no longer trust them. And I think people are making a Faustian bargain when they make that choice.

Robin Pomeroy: How can that change though, you know? Company boards are often like that. We've all worked with or for people who are just like you've described. I don't know if there's anyone listening to this who's not thought how on earth did that person get to where they are.

How can you break that cycle? You've just explained very clearly why we believe in that triad of bad personality traits. How do you break that? You can break it in yourself, I could changed my mind, but that doesn't mean my company or my country or my government is going to change. What needs to happen?

Adam Grant: Well, I think we have the best data on how to fix this in workplaces.

So in organizations, one of the mistakes we make is we tend to promote people only based on the individual results. And that allows the narcissists and the Machiavellian to get ahead.

What we ought to be doing is not just indexing your own performance. We should be measuring, what is your impact on others?

There's great research on this on salespeople, for example. Alan Benson and colleagues have studied over 30,000 salespeople. And what they want to know is, who's a great sales manager? And the people who often get promoted are the best individual salespeople, the biggest brand makers who bring in the most revenue. They are not the most effective managers of teams of salespeople though. What's the leading indicator that you are going to be a great leader of sales teams? It's how many assists you gave to other salespeople. Did you refer clients to them? Did you help them solve problems? Did you get them access to deals?

And that's a great example for me of measuring what is the value added to your team. Let's promote on that basis, not just what did you accomplish yourself.

Robin Pomeroy: Let's hope someone's listening in a position who's hiring and firing and takes that to heart.

Adam Grant, thanks so much for joining us on Radio Davos.

Adam Grant: Always a pleasure, Robin.

Robin Pomeroy: We've been recording lots of great interviews here in Davos. And to be sure not to miss them, follow Radio Davos and our sister podcast, Meet the Leader. You can get either of them wherever you get podcasts or visit wef.ch/podcasts.

I'm Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum. Thanks for listening and watching Radio Davo and goodbye for now.