Think Again
Adam Grant
The most dangerous sentence in business:
"We already know this."
Remember being told as a kid not to swim for an hour after eating or you'd drown? Complete myth. But we absorbed it as fact because it sounded right and came from authority.
Business runs on the exact same kind of inherited certainty.
We tell ourselves our customers love the product. That churn is price-driven. That loyalty comes from rewards. That repeat purchase means attachment. These ideas get repeated so often internally that they harden into "truth." And then growth slows, retention dips, and instead of questioning the belief
we defend it.
That's the trap Adam Grant explores in Think Again. His core point is simple and uncomfortable. We spend more time defending what we think we know than updating what we used to think we knew. The problem isn't a lack of intelligence. It's a lack of rethinking and ultimately killing your business.
How we tell ourselves we know better
In business, this shows up in predictable ways. Teams slip into "preacher mode," protecting existing strategies and explaining away weak signals because the story still feels right. Or they move into "prosecutor mode," where meetings become about winning arguments instead of learning. Sometimes it's "politician mode," where decisions are shaped to look good, keep stakeholders happy, or match the narrative leadership already committed to.
All of this feels like work. None of it creates real progress.
The companies that consistently outperform operate differently. They think more like scientists than defenders of truth. They don't start from "this works." They start from "this is a hypothesis." Instead of asking how to prove a strategy is right, they ask under what conditions it would fail. That shift alone changes the quality of product decisions, growth experiments, and loyalty strategies.
Just loving it before, doesn't mean they're love it now
This is especially obvious in loyalty. It's one of the most assumption heavy areas in business. Discounts are treated as retention tools. Points are treated as emotional glue. Long-tenure customers are assumed to be loyal. Customers leave due to the price, nothing more.
But when you actually test these beliefs, the picture is messier. Discounts often drive transactions, not attachment. Points can feel meaningless. Long term customers may simply be inert and not engaged.
The biggest loyalty leak often isn't in customer behaviour. It's in unchallenged internal beliefs as we touched upon with Kodak, believing that everyone loved a Kodak and this would never change.
Thinking again as a competitive advantage
The real competitive advantage today isn't certainty. It's what Grant calls confident humility: confidence in your ability to figure things out, combined with humility about whether you're right right now. That mindset builds stronger experimentation cultures, more adaptive products, and retention strategies that evolve with customer behaviour instead of lagging behind it.
Markets change. Customers change. Behaviour changes. If our beliefs don't change too, they quietly become liabilities.
What I got out of it
Whilst not revolutionary, the book does look at several real world examples of high performance cultures that are so ingrained in their beliefs of superiority that they don't foster a learning environment. It had me thinking about scenarios where I had 99% certainty and that my opinion would not be swayed unless I had a much stronger argument or voice to convince me otherwise. It's not always the most challenging voice that has the greatest ideas.
With technology, we're always looking to see who is right. Who will win the answer/service battle the best. I don't think that the future belongs to the companies with the best answers, neither the one with the best product either.
It belongs to the ones willing to say, Change is accepted and championed here. Those are the companies that will survive.
What you can think about for your business
Here are a few questions to get your mind racing.
- What is something that your customers love that they can't get elsewhere?
- Is your culture set up that you can openly challenge your high performers?
- What would need to be true for your current approach to fail?
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