Learn more about our work and new book at https://schoolofgravity.com/. You can reach us at hello@schoolofgravity.com.This episode was presented by the author, Steven Titus Smith. Here’s the transcript (copyrighted): Straight out of college with his Ph.D., on his first project with his first team at his first job that happened to be a Fortune 100 aerospace company, John was, in every -way- possible, --new. and That was his only advantage.To learn the ropes, the company placed John on a team trying to fix a major problem with a satellite in orbit. The satellite cost $1.2 billion to build and $200 million to launch. Bringing it back to Earth and sending it up again would cost a few hundred million dollars. The engineers—all experienced, all with the company for at least a decade—had worked on a fix for weeks. When John arrived they were still at square one.After a few days of listening and asking few (very few) questions, John couldn’t sit on the sidelines any longer. He spoke up. Maybe they were thinking about the problem all wrong. The team courteously listened. And then ignored him.On the face of it, square one seems the perfect place for curiosity to thrive. It is—sometimes. But the pressure to do something fast and “right” weighs so heavily on the souls of the people inside the square that skipping along the surface of curiosity substitutes for diving. John decided to dive.Tenaciously curious, John experimented, --talked to engineers one by one, dug into details and fine-tuned his ideas. Armed with a proposed solution, John entered the next big meeting, shared his ideas and got a response: Highly improbable. Won’t work. One engineer told John to ease into the culture before debuting rookie solutions to complicated problems. Whatever John was pitching, the straight-edge puzzle-people weren’t buying. The work of a 1950s sociologist helps us understand why.The resistance.Sociologist Everett Rogers developed an adoption curve of new ideas that’s used in everything from technology to farming. The phrase “early adopter” comes from his theory. The adoption curve spans from innovators and early adopters (16%) who are open to new thinking or trying something new—initial flaws and all—to laggards (16%) who adopt an idea only when everyone else is using it and they can no longer avoid adoption without complete withdrawal from civilization. No surprise that 84 percent of adopters (from early majority to laggards) lean toward the less open, incurious, secure side of the curve. Certainty is a security wall to keep new away. “Throughout the history of scientific thought,” wrote the late Stephen R. Covey, “most laymen have been so anxious for certainty and have had such a low tolerance for ambiguity and change that they have been eager to say that a theory is a fact.”The danger of quick resistance to new thinking is that the resistance may sound intelligent. Maybe it is. But it comes too early to be constructive. All it does is keep new ideas and new people cornered. In the face of certainty and resistance, or when you’re under pressure to fit in and say nothing, curious human beings—the perceptive ones—have to listen to opponents (not our first instinct, especially if we’re cliquing), argue for and against their own ideas so others aren’t afraid to speak, inspire provocative questions, switch perspectives, walk away from the tide of opinion, resist rigidity, cut to the chase, ask questions that seem obvious but are not, be fascinated by views outside their private universe (not just tolerate them or pretend to pay attention), lean on their tribe(s) and teams for camaraderie but not as a crutch, make the uncomfortable comfortable, the comfortable uncomfortable, and spark the incurious to be curious. John leaned on all the above to start a right-to-left migration to his idea.Finally, one senior engineer, Kim, looked more closely at John’s concept. Maybe his second look was sincere, or a covert tactic to shut John up. Either way, Kim gave John one-on-one time to explain his solution again. In the next meeting, Kim gave John the floor. John plunged into the details. He exposed and examined every angle of the problem. It would cost $50 million to fix, not a few hundred million. They wouldn’t have to bring the satellite back or launch a new one. John’s idea won. It saved the satellite and a stack of cash for the company, not to mention downtime for the government agency relying on the satellite for national defense.The engineers asked questions during the project, but questions don’t always convey interest. Curiosity was gridlocked by the VERY coveted thing every engineer and rocket scientist in every meeting had: experience and expertise. John wanted the truth. Everyone else wanted to be right. We can’t ignore expertise, but we can’t worship it either. Breaking the hypnotic habit of idolizing expertise begins with an advantage psychologist E. Paul Torrance ...
