Why aren’t you changing your mind? Smart people often hold themselves back from questioning their own actions and beliefs, and in the process, from learning

By Rohin Dharmakumar

14 min read

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Hello again, dear reader, and welcome back to First Principles. We’re in official mango season down south!

One of the joys of living in, well, the country that gave the world “the king of fruits” (it’s called “Mangifera Indica” for a reason) is the sight of seeing them all around us on trees. Seriously, the sight of a mango tree laden with fruit is something!

“What is that variety?” I’d ask my mom as we hurtled past roadside trees laden with mangoes in rickety KSRTC buses back in the ‘80s. The highlight of my childhood were the two summer months of every year that I spent in my ancestral village in Kerala.

“Thathachundan,” my mom would say. Parrot beak.

“And those ones?” I’d ask again, after a bit.

“Moovandan,” she’d say.

“And are there fish in that pond?” I’d point at some small half-pond, half-puddle in the distance. Or sometimes a man-made tank adjoining a temple.

“Perhaps.”

“What fish?” I’d continue.

Depending on your perspective, kids are either incredibly curious or incredibly annoying.

Having been both a kid and a parent, I can tell you the answer is… they’re both!

Perhaps it was all those childhood summers spent staring out of non-air conditioned trains (that took nearly three days to transport you from Delhi to Kerala!) and bus windows, the wind and dust in your eyes and hair. We stared out at the landscape rushing by and wondered about trees and fruits and ponds and fishes because what else was there to do?

Usually, I like to open mango season each year with what I like to think of as “the king of the king of fruits”, aka the Imam Pasand variety of mangoes. But tragically, our favourite neighbourhood fruit seller from whom we’d been sourcing mangoes for nearly a decade had to shut down operations around six months ago. He told me no one liked to visit shops any more. They preferred online shopping, even for fruits and vegetables.

So, we bought and ate Banganapalli mangoes, normally a variety I’d keep for the fag end of the season, once the Imam Pasands and Mulgoas had run out.

But enough about mangoes for this Sunday! Here’s what we have for you this week.

1. Why aren’t you changing your mind?
2. Harsh Mariwala is 72… and can’t stop learning 🎙️
3. Leading lines 📸
4. The learning curve 📚
5. Interesting articles 🔖

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1. Why aren’t you changing your mind?

“When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?”

This quote from the late John Maynard Keynes is one of my all-time favourites. And like all great quotes, its apparent simplicity (or stupidity) masks its depth. (Groucho Marx’s “I refuse to join any club that would have me as its member” is in the same category).

Changing our minds is often seen as a sign of weakness or shallowness. And the smarter and more powerful people are, the more society’s expectation of unwavering resolve from them. For if people were to change their minds when faced with adverse events or information, how much can we really trust their beliefs, right?

Wrong.

Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the 1990s must first resolve a basic dilemma: success in the marketplace increasingly depends on learning, yet most people don’t know how to learn. What’s more, those members of the organization that many assume to be the best at learning are, in fact, not very good at it. I am talking about the well-educated, high-powered, high-commitment professionals who occupy key leadership positions in the modern corporation.

[…]

First, most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem solving,” so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. They need to reflect critically on their own behavior, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organization’s problems, and then change how they act. In particular, they must learn how the very way they go about defining and solving problems can be a source of problems in its own right.

Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris, Harvard Business Review, 1991

Chris Argyris (1923-2013) was a feted American management theorist and professor. He argued how smart people often hold themselves back from questioning their own actions and beliefs, and in the process, from learning.

He coined the terms “single-loop learning” and “double-loop learning” to explain things.

To give a simple analogy: a thermostat that automatically turns on the heat whenever the temperature in a room drops below 68 degrees is a good example of single-loop learning. A thermostat that could ask, “Why am I set at 68 degrees?” and then explore whether or not some other temperature might more economically achieve the goal of heating the room would be engaging in double-loop learning.

Highly skilled professionals are frequently very good at single-loop learning. After all, they have spent much of their lives acquiring academic credentials, mastering one or a number of intellectual disciplines, and applying those disciplines to solve real-world problems. But ironically, this very fact helps explain why professionals are often so bad at double-loop learning.

Put simply, because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the “blame” on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it the most.

Argyris talks about a better method of learning—one where we use feedback loops to question our very objectives and beliefs too. Put simply, every time you do something with a goal or objective in mind—and you fail to achieve those—go back and question the beliefs or assumptions that led you to the goals or objectives in the first place.

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At The Ken for instance, there are things we’ve tried and failed at multiple times over the years. A great example would be strategic planning and goal setting. We’ve tried and failed at OKRs twice. We’ve tried quarterly plans. Annual plans. We’ve tried targets and no targets. We’ve worked backwards from deadlines and forward from goals.

So much so that I like to joke we have “organisational scar tissue” every time I propose the latest iteration of this.

“But why will it work this time when it failed the last four times?” many of my colleagues wonder or ask. (Often, I do too, but inside my mind.)

The question that’s more important for me is, “But why did this fail the last four times? Have we addressed those reasons this time around?”

Because “organisational learning is a process of detecting and correcting error,” says Argyris.

Even as an individual, I find myself increasingly questioning and changing my own beliefs. For instance, I’m currently learning spoken Kannada in what is my fourth formal attempt.

I think I’m learning better because I’ve found a book and approach and time table that works better for me, and that learns from my past failed attempts. (If you’re wondering, the book is called “Conversational Kannada – A Micro Wave Approach” and is based on the concept of language acclimatisation and learning as practised by the American Peace Corps.)

I’ll end with a segment from a recent interview you might have come across. The speaker, too, refers to the importance of being able to persevere through failure. 

If you don’t already know who the speaker is, read the excerpt and then take a guess. 🙂

John Shoven (at roughly the 36-minute mark): “What advice would you give them to improve their chances of success?”

Speaker: “One of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. Most of the Stanford graduates have high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school. You were very successful. You were top of your class. Obviously you were able to pay for tuition. And you’re graduating from one of the finest institutions on the planet. You’re surrounded by other kids that are just incredible. You naturally have very high expectations.

People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don’t know how to teach it to you except for, I hope suffering happens to you.”

[…]

“To this day I use the phrase “pain and suffering” inside our company with great glee. And I mean that. “Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering.” I mean that in a happy way. Because you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness isn’t intelligence as you would know. Greatness comes from character, and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it’s formed out of people who have suffered.”

Youtube link

2. Harsh Mariwala is 72… and can’t stop learning

This Monday, I met Harsh Mariwala, the founder of FMCG giant Marico. I came back with newfound respect for his sheer energy, enthusiasm, and ambition. With a net worth of close to US$3 billion per Forbes, Mariwala is both wealthy and accomplished beyond most measures.

And yet, he can’t stop learning. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt from our conversation, Part 1 of which was released this week.

Me: “What is continuous learning for you? What’s your mental model of looking at continuous learning?”

Harsh Mariwala: “I want to learn whenever I get an opportunity. It may not be a structured learning. It could be just an interaction with anybody. Is there some learning for me in that conversation or some observation? Or through reading or listening? So, there is always that strong desire to learn. For example, when I’m doing my workout in the gym… I’m always listening to some podcast. To me, that’s learning. When I’m travelling, I get time to read books. When I’m in the car or when I go for a walk, I listen to podcasts. So that I keep an open mind to learn something which many times may not result in any learning, but I think is just spending energy and effort in trying to learn.”

Me: “Do you find it hard to not do anything for even a few hours?”

Harsh: “Yes, you’re right. Absolutely. I have to be occupied all the time. I have started doing meditation just to calm me down. But otherwise, I have an active mind. And I want to go on doing things.”

There’s also the part where he says a learning mindset is what enabled him to “hire people smarter than him”. See if you can spot the double-loop learning patterns Harsh employed. 🙂

Me: “One of the things you’ve said in your earlier interviews is that when it comes to hiring, you like hiring people who are better or smarter than you. Now, a lot of people often say that, but it’s very hard to truly do. How do you test for that in your conversations or in your interviews?”

Harsh: “I’m just a graduate, you know, I am not a…”

Me: “But smartness has nothing to do with education…”

Harsh: “When I started working… nobody has guided me from the top, I have learned everything on my own. And of course, when you have to learn marketing, distribution, there has to be some, shall I say, study of that subject. And I, whenever I recruited good talent, they were always better than me, because I was not an expert in that particular subject. I learned much more. So my belief in recruiting good talent better than me went on increasing. And it had to be matched by a high degree of empowerment. Because if I’m insecure as a person, I will not empower you even though you may be better than me in marketing. But if I’m completely secure and I trust you, then I’ll empower you and the whole organisation succeeds and I’ll also learn a lot from you.”

3. Leading lines

Hello everybody, it’s Jonathan again with this week’s Silent Sunday photos. 

The ‘Leading Line’ is one of those compositional theories in photography (like the Rule of Thirds and Symmetry and Patterns) that is usually drummed into you in foundational photography courses. As with most things in photography, they’re more guidelines than rules—you can craft a great photograph with absolutely zero thought given to any of them. 

That said, when applied well (either intentionally or instinctively), they can make for some powerful imagery. 

My favourite reader contribution this week is a great example, I think. 

From Aditya George, this is Chennai Central:

Chennai Central by Aditya George

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See how the platform and rails lead your eyes through the photograph to the subject? Vertical, horizontal, angled, curved, meandering… leading lines come in many forms, but all of them serve a single function: they guide your eyes through the story the photographer wants you to see, in the sequence they want to show you. 

Here’s one I attempted during a visit to the Taj Mahal in 2019, somewhat less successfully than Aditya here.

Taj Mahal by Jonathan Ananda

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If the perspective makes you feel small, trust me, the Taj has that effect. 

But enough of that for today, because we have a whole load of other great pictures sent in by the First Principles community. Head to our on-site edition to see the full-size uncropped versions of all of them. 

And you can send in your own contributions using this link.