The Real Cost of Misinformation on Human Flourishing and Leadership Choices with Alex Edmans

So yes, it's easy just to say, oh, the one secret to success is diversity. But as we've established so far in our conversation, there's often multiple secrets to success. And so what we need is not just demographic diversity, but cognitive diversity. And not just cognitive diversity, but inclusion. A place where people are willing to express their different viewpoints.

Welcome to the Happiness Squad podcast. Your weekly dose of practical tips and inspirations through to help you operate at your fullest potential by integrating the science of flourishing into how you live, work and lead. In each episode we will share insights, tips and stories from leading experts, company executives and flourishing solution providers that you can implement right away to make happiness your competitive edge and find more success, joy, health, love and meaning in everything you do.

What happens when you combine the precision of a finance professor, the heart of a purpose driven thinker, and the courage to question what everyone else takes as gospel? On today's episode, I sit down with the brilliant Alex Edmonds, professor of Finance in London, business school, TED speaker and best selling author of two great books, Grow the Pie and May Contain Lies. Alex has spent his career untangling the myths that dominate business well being and leadership. And in this conversation he helps us do just that. We explore why believing what feels true can be dangerous, how confirmation bias shapes everything from parenting advice to corporate culture, and why purpose, diversity and grit the though powerful aren't magic bullets. Alex doesn't just challenge popular narratives, he gives us a roadmap for how to think critically, ask better questions and make smarter decisions at work and in life. If you truly care about building a flourishing organization, or maybe you just want to stop falling for shiny headlines, this episode will sharpen your mind and maybe even change how you lead foreign. Hi Alex, I am so excited that you decided to join us one week after your new baby arrived in the world to share your insights with us. Thank you.

You're very welcome Ashish. It's really great to be back on your podcast.

So Alex, I read your book May Contain Lies back to back so many times and really I think this conversation is such an important conversation because in this whole space of well being, flourishing happiness, there are so many people who take individual stories and paint them as this is the answer that will change your life. And I think you provide such a powerful approach just like you do with your prior book Grow the Pie where any person can look beyond what we want to be true. Right? So I just, I think this will be so rich, filled with insight for people and hopefully prevent a lot of harm that when People just buy into these policies. So start with, you know, why do you think it is so important to rethink how we believe what we come to believe? Talk a little bit about that.

This is because there's so much information out there. So nowadays you can get information from almost every source. So when I was a kid, there only a certain number of sources. So if you wanted to find out about something, you would go to the library, you'd look up in the Encyclopedia Britannica, or if you wanted health advice, you would make an appointment and see a doctor. But nowadays you can get information from anywhere. So Internet gurus and Instagram celebrities will liberally dispense health advice. And you can get information on issues like workplace happiness, not only from leading CEOs or, or professors who've conducted scientific research, but anybody who gets a platform and says something that sounds good. And these are really important topics. So, yes, I'm an academic and I like to ensure that things are accurate, but this is not just for academic reasons, this is for entirely practical reasons. So just like you would want to make sure in a medical setting that a drug is safe before taking it, any company wanting to improve workplace wellbeing needs to ensure that it's more than just gut feeling, feel and shooting from here if they're trying to make a workplace intervention. Yeah.

And I think that there is nothing more that, you know that spoke to me than I saw your lecture on YouTube where you opened it up with your story of breastfeeding and what you found out when your first baby was born and how people buy into that. Can you share that story, Alex? Because this is so powerful in terms of daily application, of not believing everything to be true.

Thank you. And I really appreciate you asking about that example, because it just hammers home how real and how important this topic of misinformation is. So, before my first child was born, we took an antenatal course. It's the National Childbirth Trust course, which is the most respected course in the uk, and much of it was excellent. So I really don't want to criticise that course, but there was part of it which was on breastfeeding and some of that module was on how to breastfeed, how to ensure a good latch. But they started off by discussing why breastfeed, and this sort of makes sense because breastfeeding is tough and it may well be that if you're an exhausted parent, you might think, well, let's just give up and reach for the bottle, because that's easier. So if they could convince us about the benefits of breastfeeding, then we would persevere. And so what they looked at was a variety of studies published in top scientific journals linking breastfeeding to many positive outcomes. So there's physical outcomes for the child, so reduced allergies, better health, physical outcomes for the mother as she recovers from a birth and pregnancy. And there's also mental outcomes for the child in terms of higher iq. And so this is why the World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months. And by exclusive, they do mean exclusive. No formula, nothing else. And so my wife and I, we were convinced by the evidence, and that's what we planned. But as a very famous breastfeeding consultant told us, Mike Tyson is his name, he said, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And being punched in the face for us was that breastfeeding didn't always work. So even though we did get a good latch, after our son drained my wife dry, he was still hungry. So what do you do in that situation? You might think, well, I've got to feed a hungry baby. But you might think, well, no, if the World Health Organization says, don't give anything other than breast milk, then you should listen to that. So I went back to the evidence and I looked at this much more deeply. And what I realized was, even though there was a strong correlation between breastfeeding and, let's say, iq, this was not causation. Why? Because whether a mother breastfeeds or not, it's not random. It depends on other circumstances. So maybe the mothers who are able to breastfeed are the ones with parent, with family support. They might have a supportive partner at home. They might have a nanny, housekeeper to help with this. And so it might be those other factors, not just the breast milk, are behind the higher iq. So when you control for those other factors, which means when you strip out the effect on IQ of things like parental background, you actually find no link between breastfeeding and iq. And also many of the other outcomes, such as the health outcomes. And so why is that so important? Yes, we all know the phrase that correlation is not causation. We think it's like an academic disclosure disclaimer. But this really has practical implications for how we bring up our children, because the. The message that we give to mothers, that you are a bad mother unless you exclusively breastfeed guilt trips mothers into only doing this, even if they're exhausted. One reader of my book wrote to me saying that she was in tears when she read this Chapter of my book, why she is expecting her first child as well. And she was told by the hospital, which is linked to an Ivy League university in the US that they will not support her decision to bottle feed. And she says, well, I can't breastfeed because I have no breasts, because she had breast cancer and a double mastectomy. And they're putting through this woman through so much shame at not breastfeeding when it was just something that she had no control over by saying, we are only going to give resources for breastfeeding parents. And then after she read the chapter of my book, she burst into tears because she'd been put through all of this shame for nothing.

You know, both of those stories are such powerful stories of real life implications. And you can see it all across, Right. Diets, we fall into these things, do this, not that. You know, breastfeeding is absolutely one of those. And I think both the shame, the guilt, and frankly, the harm. Right. I have. I mean, now again, probably keeping a baby not fed if the baby's still hungry, you know, is probably much worse for the baby and for the parents emotional and mental health as the baby.

Screams the lungs out.

But there we are, right? Even from the most leading organizations, we can't just take a statement to be fact. We've got to do some work around it.

Yeah. So people like to dispense black and white advice because the more clear cut the advice is, the easier it is to latch on. You can tweet it in 280 characters and if you just say exclusively breastfeed, or maybe blueberries are the secret to long life, or never drink white wine, only red wine, those are easy things to implement. But these black and white rules, they basically ignore the complexity and the nuances of life. So as you're saying Ashish with Westfield, there's lots of other considerations. If your baby is hungry, you need to feed them. And also in terms of communication, babies want to learn that if they are to communicate with their parents, such as expressing their hunger, then their parents will respond. And if you don't respond to such cues, it may well be that later in life they just don't trust others and that they won't communicate. They might just do try to take things for themselves. Also the World Health Organization, well, the key word there is world. So they need to dispense advice which is applicable all around the world. And there might be other countries where you can't actually prepare formula in a sterilized environment. Maybe you don't have access to electricity. To boil the water to a high level. Maybe there isn't as clean a water supply, but maybe those concerns about formula feeding are not as strong in the uk, so and again, it's not the fault necessary of these organizations. Sometimes you do need to keep things simple, but you might need to think, well, is that simple rule of thumb applicable in my situation? Yes, sometimes it might be, but sometimes it won't. And what I'm trying to encourage with the book is critical thinking rather than one size fits all advice.

Yeah, no, I love it, Alex. And you know, I think the way it is playing out in the whole space of flourishing and well being and that's why the approach that we're taking, you know, I strongly believe the teams should decide the interventions, we should give them a whole range of what works and let them experiment and try what works. Because teams are unique, just like humans are unique. And one of the things that I rally big against is one size fits all top down programs that companies run where it's mandatory for everyone to go through that. And yes, there might be strong evidence, you know, even in a research backed approach that psychological safety works, but might not work in all contexts. Right. If I give you to improve kind of performance, improve well being, if I give you a hundred hours of work in 40 hours, maybe addressing that before you go into psychological safety might be more helpful in helping individuals and that team perform better. Right. So I love this notion of black and white, one size fits all. And we moving away. You also highlight a second bias which we fall so into, which is the confirmation bias. Talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. So confirmation bias is the idea that we have a view of the world and if we see something that confirms that viewpoint, we lap it up uncritically and we don't question it. So in terms of breastfeeding, you might think, well, why didn't I just challenge this as soon as I heard it from the National Childbirth Trust course? I am a professor of finance. I should understand data and statistics and the difference between correlation and causation. Well, it's because I had a bias. And you might think, well, do I really have a bias? We have biases about certain emotive things like climate change or immigration or abortion or gun control. Do I really have a bias about breastfeeding? And I did. It was a small bias, but it was still a bias. And the bias is that I am brought up to believing that something natural is better than something man made. We learned that natural flavorings are better than artificial flavorings and So I thought when people said no natural breast milk, which I think is just evolved over, over centuries, millennia, that must be better than something formulated artificially by some machines. And so that's why I didn't question it. And this might apply to many issues such as, say, workplace well being. So we'd like to believe that humble leaders are better leaders. We want to believe that leaders eat last. Why? Because we believe that humility is a desirable trait. We want the good guys or the good women to win. But in some cases, it might be that you don't want humble leaders. You want somebody who gives clear direction and is leading from the front in particular situations. And so while it may be that humble leaders work well in some situations, it could be that dictatorial leaders who are not just making every single decision by committee and listening to everybody, as psychological safety might suggest, it might be they think, no, I've heard all of this, what you've said. I've heard your concerns. Actually, I don't think that they are relevant in this situation. I'm going to move ahead.

Yeah, I love that. And you know, the confirmation bias. You open your book with the story of Bell and you talk about how we make celebrities oftentimes just because of this social media TikTok movement where we want to believe stories, right, of how you can make so much money or how somebody changed their life, and then huge groups decide to change their behavior, drop medicine. And this was a story of cancer that Bell never had. But in corporate worlds. You also highlight the story of Elizabeth Holmes, right, Theranos, and how easily we believe we want a female founder dropout to win. And so we just forget about. And there were so many smart people involved in Theranos, nobody saw it.

Yes. And again, this is because we want these things to be true. So confirmation bias is strong. So Belle Gibson was just an Instagram influencer who claimed to have cancer, and then she defeated it by ditching chemotherapy and radiotherapy and just going to clean eating. And again, that supports what we want to be true. We'd love to believe that the secrets to health are fruit and vegetables, not cisplatinum and these drugs by chemotherapy companies. But she was nothing more than just an Instagram blogger. So people took her advice over their oncologist. At least one case, the person died because they stopped chemotherapy. With Elizabeth Holmes. Again, this was a really charismatic visionary said to be like a female Steve Jobs, even dressed like Steve Jobs. And people who had made their careers on being extremely discerning, let's say George SCHULTZ the former U.S. secretary of state, that they didn't question it, they just pile a lot of money into it. Why? Because they like the story of this visionary who was inventing something, a a machine which would be able to diagnose so many diseases from just a pin prick of blood. They just wanted it to to be true. And then another person in in that light. So I also discuss in the book is is Simon Sinek. So we've discussed the idea of leaders eat last how great leaders make you feel safe. His most famous TED talker was led to a book called Start with why arguing that having a purpose is the secret to success. And again we want that to be true. What you tell your kids, absolutely, you can do anything you put your mind to, just dream and just if you want something hard enough and that suggests that the world is your oyster, you don't need to be limited by your abilities. Just, just have a big enough vision. But the evidence for what he says is extremely weak. He cherry picks a couple of cases. He argues that Steve Jobs was successful because he started with why. He says people don't buy Apple products because of what they do. They buy why they did it. No, I buy Apple products because they work, because they're functional. They have apps. I buy them now an Apple Watch because it's portable. I didn't really know what the why was and would I really care about this. And so the idea that this is the secret to success, it's not backed by up by data. There's lots of potential other explanations for Apple success. But Simon Sinek was neither a CEO himself, he was not a founder, nor was he a business school professor who's looked at what drives success. He was a former advertising executive and just like advertising is good at marketing something which might be pretty simple, what he does is he creates his golden circle model not backed up by any data and starts to preach this. And unfortunately millions of people around the world buy his books and listen to his talks and they run their companies in part based on this. Now you might think, well, am I really being too harsh? Because does it really matter if people are believing in this idea of purpose? Isn't it a good thing to have a purpose that even if the evidence behind it is not so strong, why is it bad to sort of follow this idea is that companies puts too much effort on purpose rather than actually doing what they're doing. So like Ben and Jerry says, oh, let's have a purpose. Let's claim we believe ice cream can change the world rather than doing all that marketing. If they actually reduce the calorific content of their ice cream, maybe the world would be better off in terms of less global obesity. So yes, if, if you got purpose for free without affecting how a company is run, then it wouldn't be a bad thing. But these things are not for free. People have limited time and limited resources. And if you distract people to things that actually might not matter so much, then you're actually reducing the resources they can devote to what really matters.

Yeah, and I think that's where I think this is so important. Right, Alex? So often I'll give you an example of a pharmaceutical client of mine that I was serving. And you know, they are literally struggling with stress, that kind of, there's too much work to be done, they feel things need to improve and the organization decides to put massive effort. Right? You can decide to put your effort on very different places. They decide to put their effort on activating the why, why we exist. Let's remind everybody, this is one of those classic examples. Shouldn't you restructure work, rationalize teams? If people are struggling with overwork, shouldn't you address that problem to improve performance? Really, do we really need to start and spend so much time on defining. I mean, by the way, this is a pharmaceutical company, right? You're literally making life saving drugs. And so this gives the exact one of those examples, right? Of yes, purpose is good. If it came free in some situations, purpose would really matter. But I think you have to be discerning around when to pull that lever versus when other levers might help more in helping your people flourish.

Absolutely. But that would not be a good message for Simon Sinek that purpose matters sometimes, not others. So you want to say this is the secret to success. And, and what he claims in his book was really egregious stuff. He says everybody, everybody who is highly successful, they think in exactly the same way. And that way is completely different to how the rest of the world thinks. So basically there's one formula that every single successful person follows and that is, and everybody else is getting it wrong. But if that was the case, then it would be obvious, like if you weren't succeeding, you just adopt that one thing, just come up with a purpose and you'll succeed. And in fact, people succeed in very different ways. So just like in terms of musicians, some of them might write ballads and otherwise others might do rock or pop. Similarly, in terms of leadership styles, some of them might be more, more aggressive and more dictatorial, others might be more humanitarian. Some might be made based on innovation and, and thinking outside the box. Others might be more about stability. So there's different approaches?

Absolutely, absolutely. There are two other ones that I don't know if you've had a chance to read, but have the same effect in the startup world. The one is called 10x is better than 2x. So if you want to, you need to think about your 3 million or 5 million. Don't think about how you get to 6 million next year, think about how you get to 50 million next year. And if you do that, that's what's going to make you successful. Right. And then from 50 to 500, again, you want to believe it. You want to believe it all in that that's going to lead to, you know, success, not maybe in all cases, if you have a bad product. Thinking about how you get to 50x of a bad product is not going to get anywhere. You need to actually fix the product. Right.

That's interesting because there's other tech people who say the opposite. So Peter Thiel's book is called 0 to 1, just get to 1 first thing. So. So, and people can just spin and I don't know what the evidence for his work is, but people just spin whatever narrative that they want to. Yeah.

So look, you outline a very powerful framework. You say these four things and I would love to explore each one of them. You say, look, your ladder of misreference or misinference is a statement is not a fact, a fact is not a data. Data is not evidence and evidence is not proof. And you really methodically invite people and in your book you share stories for each one of these on how we have kind of fallen into the trap. So I would love to explore each one of these with you, Alex, over the next few questions. So let's start with this statement is not a fact and how this came to life in a very powerful research that we believe right now.

Yeah, certainly. So this is the idea that we like to quote people all the time without actually checking. Is there any evidence at all behind the rules? For example, in the field of, say, workplace wellbeing, we often quote Peter Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And so this is the idea that companies should spend tons of resources on their culture rather than their strategy. And again, I would love to believe this. A lot of my work is on the importance of corporate culture, as we discussed last time. But first one issue was Peter Drucker never said it, so this was often attributed to, to him, but they didn't ever Check whether he said it and he didn't. And even if he did say still doesn't mean it's gospel because was there any evidence behind it. So people who can just say these things, it just doesn't mean it's true. Yes, Peter Drucker is indeed a leading management thinker, but that doesn't give him the license to say anything he wants without any evidence. So before we want to use these phrases as, as dictums, look at the evidence behind it. Is it true that cold should eat strategy for breakfast? Is it true that 10,000 hours is the secret of success? If I look at the book called the 10x Rule, the subtitle is the Only Difference between Success and Failure. So there is one thing which is the only difference. And if everybody does that one thing, you will magically also have a 10x company. And again, it's not clear at all whether there's any evidence behind what he's climate.

Yeah. And you know, as I read your book, there are so many of my own stories and things that I believe to be true that I've quoted Alex that now I am reexamining. And one of the biggest one in your book you open up with was this 10,000 rule that we accept as a fact. Right. By Malcolm Gladwell. So talk a little bit about what you found about where it applies and where it doesn't apply actually.

Well, this is an embarrassing rule for me to admit to because I believed it myself. So I had heard it and I used to teach it to my students. So what is the rule? That rule is the idea that you could be successful almost anything as long as you are willing to work for 10,000 hours in it. And sort of this plays into our confirmation bias. We learn that practice makes perfect. And as a business school professor, I would tell my students in my last lecture where I sort of finished talking about finance and I look forward to life in general, I say, well, you come to Wharton, which is where I was teaching at the time, and maybe your background was purely in marketing, but if you really want to become an investment bank or trader, just by immersing yourself in finance, you'll be able to do well. Or maybe in the past you might not have been a natural public speaker, but this is something where if you are to invest a lot of effort into it, then you'll be successful. And I would say this, people just nod along as if this was a truth universally acknowledged and they also wanted it to be true. It seemed an empowering and, and quite inspiring speech. But then if you look at the evidence behind it first, the evidence that Malcolm Gladwell looks at is on violin players. So what leads to success in violin playing where you're playing the same sheet music over and over again? And maybe practice does work, might not be useful in other environments. And indeed there's other people. Let's say the book Range by David Epstein, which argues we don't want to just focus on one thing, we want to cross fertilize from experiences in very different fields. And then even if you were to look narrowly at violin playing, what this book looked at, what the study looked at, was students today. And they asked them, well, how much did you practice 18 years ago? So they were now about age 23. They said, well, what was your practice from age 5 onwards? So here there's an issue of reverse causality. You can't remember how much you practiced when you were age 5. People just don't even remember what they had for breakfast yesterday. And so it could be that if you were successful now, you were a great violin player about to break into the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. You'll see, I must have practised a lot when I was young. Whereas if you weren't so successful, you don't want to admit to yourself you put in a lot of practice and it was to no avail. So you will say, no, I didn't really practice much. So it's not that practice drives success, it's success drives perceived practice. And so for something so quoted about the importance of practice, for a study that never measured practice to begin with, it just looked at people's recollections of practice. This is something which meant that that rule had very little foundation. And again, you might think, well, just a bit like Simon said, do we really care whether this is true or not? Isn't the message of hard work a good message, that the ends justify the means? It doesn't matter if the work was scientifically accurate. Well, again, it does. Why? Because it's not the case that the world is your oyster. There were people who followed Gladwell's rule. They gave up their careers to try to be a professional golf player and they failed. And they not only failed, they injured themselves through repetitive practice. And also what Gladwell focuses on is the quantity of practice, let's get to 10,000, rather than the quality of practice. And so that the latter is what actually matters much more than just simply putting the hours in.

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Yeah.

Look, I want to move on to the second one, the data. Fact is not data. But before I go there I want to share. Friends, get a copy of the book. There are two other things that are really quite relevant if you are working on the space of flourishing company well being culture. One is on CEO pay and employee gap. CEO pay to employee pay gap that Alex highlights. And the other one is on sleep and some of the work on why We Sleep by Matthew Walker. Really, really powerful. I think it's important for us to examine our own biases, not necessarily buy everything on face value, but be nuanced about it. And that's really what Alex highlights. It's not about throwing the theory, but being nuanced and ensuring that that applies to you in your situation. So let's get to the second rung of the ladder. So to say which is fact is not equal to data.

Absolutely. So I've just criticized giving statements without anything to back it up. Just say something like culture eats strategy for breakfast or 10 times 10x is the only difference between success or failure. Well, these books, these authors are much smarter than that. Sometimes they will provide some facts to back themselves up. So with Simon Sinek, he says, don't just take my word for it, that purpose is the secret of success. Let me prove it to you by giving you some examples. Apple was successful. And it started with why it had this purpose. Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. Well, actually, Apple never said that. Nowhere can you find Apple saying this. But let's say they did say that. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Wikipedia they had a purpose which was to democratize knowledge. And they have surpassed the Encyclopedia Britannica as the world's fountain for knowledge. Successful. And the Wright brothers? They were also successful. They launched the first powered flight. Now again, it's not true. It's not clear that they had a purpose. But let's assume they did have a purpose. Purpose. They have clearly been successful. But those are just cherry picked, hand selected examples. There could be thousands of other companies or nonprofits or people who also started with Y and they failed. But Simon Sinek will never tell you about them because they just don't support his thesis. So even if the facts that you do see are correct, it's the fact that you don't see where all the action my eye.

Yeah. And I think the one piece that you highlight there, right. Which is interesting, is even in that storytelling and facts, Walter Isaacson's part of his description is it's all about the what and the how. Right. Again, it is all about the what and the how. And you highlight that in your book. Built to Last falls under the same fallacy of again, this notion of taking a set, ignoring the rest and highlighting that the third rung is data is not evidence. So even if there is data, I think we have to be careful as treating that as evidence. Talk to us a little bit about that. And in particular, you highlight this data mining and causation versus correlation that can actually be really important to examine.

Yes, absolutely. So you might think, okay, yeah, I understand the problem of cherry picking one or two examples. So let's say we've got hundreds of examples, then we're seeing the full picture. We're not just seeing a selected sample. But the issue is that there could be multiple explanations. And so that's the difference between data and evidence. So evidence is evidence that allows you to draw one particular conclusion, whereas data, there could be multiple explanations for that. And we've seen some prior examples. For example, with breastfeeding, is it that breastfeeding causes higher iq or is it certain parents are able to breastfeed and their circumstances are what is behind the whole iq? That's an example of alternative explanations. Or you can have reverse causality. And that's the case in the violin example. Is it that 10,000 hours of practice leads to success or is it if you are successful now, then you will admit that you practiced a lot when you were young. Yeah.

So the other example there, and I want you to talk a little bit about is what you found with, you know, this notion of female founders and you highlight that as a very powerful example of again, something we believe and you know, that female founders companies perform better and it's so commonly believed versus kind of other holistic factors that affect that. So talk a little bit about what you found there.

Yeah, so there's a lot of evidence right now, research on diversity and diversity is a really important topic in workplace wellbeing and it seems to be entirely logical. Just diverse teams will make better decisions. Right? You've just got to reward a set of ideas. You're going to think outside the box. But diversity is far more than just your gender. So it depends on so many other things. Your background, the country you grew up with, whether you studied humanities or arts or sciences. So to reduce somebody's complexity in humanity to just their gender is really, really narrow. But people do that because it's just easy. I can just look at the mix of men and women on a board and if one has a greater mix, then it must be more diverse and it might be better. And there are studies by the likes of McKinsey and Blacklock claiming that female run companies or more diversity does better. But this is data, this is not evidence. So is it correlation or is it causation? So the latest McKinsey study took financial performance from 2017 to 2021 and showed it was linked to diversity in 2022. So it could be financial performance causes diversity, not diversity causing financial performance. So when a company's already doing well, then it's not having to firefight anymore and it can think about, well, how do we increase diversity? Or it could be there's an industry effect here. So let's take coal mining. Coal mining is a male dominated industry just because of the nature of the work. And so there's going to be a greater proportion of males in the workforce. And also coal mining has done poorly. But that's nothing to do with the lack of diversity there, that's just in. It's a difficult sector. So there are lots of alternative explanations here. And when you look at my own research on cognitive diversity, people actually thinking differently, you do find a link to performance. But because that's much harder to measure, people want the simple thing of I just need to count how many men and women there are to understand diversity. That's what leads to a much more palatable result.

Yeah, and I think that's what I found so powerful. Because, you know, Alex, I believe right again, we want to believe and I believe right, diversity matters. But I think what you highlight so beautifully is we have to be granular about it. So diversity is first of all not just about racial or gender diversity. What you're highlighting is diversity is about cognitive diversity, the different perspectives that we bring in. And then the second is to do that, you highlight that just diversity doesn't matter. What matters is inclusion. I can put a bunch of people together, but if I don't create the right environment for those Ideas for them to belong, for them to share that it's not going to necessarily make a difference. So I love the nuanced way in which you are inviting companies and leaders to really think about this topic rather than, you know, check the box. Yes, I have now a more diverse board. So everything is good.

Absolutely. So there's a couple of things here. Firstly, it's diversity needs to be more than just demographic diversity, it should be cognitive diversity. And then number two, as you say, Ash, is you don't just need diversity, even if diversity is holistically defined. And so you have a diversity of thinking, you need inclusion so that those diverse thoughts actually surface. Because if I think differently, but I know that I have to bury it because I know that if I was to speak up, then people will just not like it, then actually diversity is negative. It'd be better for everybody to think the same way than for me to think differently, but be frustrated that I have to bury it and keep it to myself. So, yes, it's easy just to say, oh, the one secret to success is diversity. But as we've established so far in our conversation, there's often multiple secrets to success. And so what we need is not just demographic diversity, but cognitive diversity. And not just cognitive diversity, but inclusion. A place where people are willing to express their different viewpoints.

Yeah, I want to go to this last run because I want to have enough time to have solutions, you know, for individuals and organizations on how they can change. Check and make sure that the actions they're taking is really informed, is going to push them forward, not hurt them. So your last rung of the ladder is evidence is not proof. Talk a little bit about that, because that also applies so much in our daily lives right now.

So that is the idea. Let's say you have nailed evidence, you've nailed causation and not correlation in one particular situation. It might not apply in other settings. For example, going back to breastfeeding, it may be that the World Health Organization does conclude correctly that in a developing country you want to breastfeed your kids rather than bottle feed. But this might not be true in the US or the uk, where it's. It's actually not so difficult to prepare formula in a clean circumstance. Or maybe even if the violin setting had nailed that practice makes perfect in violin playing, it might not work make perfect in other settings as well. So again, we'd like to have a particular result and even if that result was discovered in a narrow setting, we claim that the result is, is true and applicable to all settings. Why? Because if you were to write a book, let's say, called the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss, about how to be fit and healthy and it only applied to 40 year old women. The idea of having a book, the Full hour body for 40 year old women, will not help. So you're not going to sell to many people, but if it's a full year body for all you've promised, it's universally applicable, then you're going to have more people buying it.

Yeah. And in a very real way, you know, it's affecting our world. I was quite blown away by your example of the Taylorism productivity in factory settings now and how it's affecting no Child Left Behind. So talk a little bit about that.

Yes. Okay, so what is Taylorism? So in 1912, Frederick Taylor, who was a shop floor foreman, he tried to increase productivity in manufacturing. And he did this by scientifically analyzing each individual task and using experiments to find the best way to do things. And this should be what I would like as a researcher. I, I would like to use science and evidence to find the best way. So how much coal should you shovel at one time? What is the optimal size of a shovel? How long to take breaks? And they gave useful instructions as to how long a break to take. And then people thought, well, let's apply this outside of manufacturing, let's apply this to education. And so this involved the teachers telling them exactly how to teach, what pays to be on in a particular day, the very best ways to teach phonics and reading and just that doesn't work because different teachers have different styles and also different students might have different learning challenges. And so to take manufacturing, where one widget is exactly the same as any other widget and you want to have basically 10,000 widgets that look the same and apply that to kids where different kids are different. Even though my daughter is one week old, we can already tell she's different in many ways from my son when he was one week old to say, well, there's one way to educate your kids. This is something which is highly problematic. So even though scientific management mattered and worked manufacturing, this does not mean it's also going to work in education.

Yeah. So I have a 15 year old. And this struck home to me, Alex, earlier this summer in this, you know, last summer my wife read Grit and we were like, you have to read this book. This is going to be successful. It's all about Grit. And again, another one notion of passion and perseverance and how we want to Believe it so badly. Right. That this is going to work in all settings. I found that story quite powerful too, of what you found. So share a little bit around grit. And I think for those who are listening, with kids, I think this is really, really important, friends, because as parents, sometimes we end up in trying to help our kids, potentially subjecting them to harm.

Yeah. So this is a book by Angela Duckworth, who is a leading scientific researcher, unlike, say, Simon Sinek. And so she gave a great TED talk and a book accompanying it called Grit. The Secret to Success is grit, which she defines as passion and perseverance. Again, things that we believe to be true. You might say it's a mix between Simon Sinek's idea of a purpose and Gladwell's idea of hard work, which is 10,000 hours. But again, she tries to support this with evidence. And so she. What she looks at was men and women who got into West Point, which is the United States Military Academy. Now, you get in, you're not yet qualified. You have to survive this course called Beast Barracks, which is a six week challenge. It's physically and mentally demanding. And what she found, this is why she became so famous, was that the biggest predictor of success was not physical fitness, but it was their grit. And this was jaw dropping for something which is physically demanding. She found that actually physical fitness was less valuable than grit. So if truth, this grit must be a magic potion. But the problem here is the difference between evidence and proof. So what she looked at was a very narrow setting of very fit people. So these are people who'd already got into West Point and they already had the threshold level of fitness to survive. And so this is why fitness did not matter, because they already were fit enough. But if you were to extend this to the general population. Well, actually, for most people, you should work on your fitness because that's the best thing to work on rather than your grit. And so why does this really matter for teaching our kids if we give them the idea that you can succeed in almost anything as long as you just work hard enough and have passion enough? Well, that is an inspiring message, but it might just be unrealistic. No matter how much I tried when I was a kid, I would never play for the England football team. I would never become a pop star. Maybe, boring as it might be, I should work more on maths and then later on economics. And so, yes, it still matters to be passionate and I love what I do. And hopefully this comes across in my interview. And it matters to work hard. But there are Limits to that. It doesn't mean that the world is absolutely oyster. Yes, have passion, yes, work hard, but we are limited by some abilities that we might have. It's not just a completely free choice.

You know, this nuanced view was something I didn't have the words for Alex, but really came to life for me in actually a McKinsey setting. Okay. So we were looking at, really. We are constantly looking to improve the way we recruit, way we evaluate candidates, et cetera. Right. It's an ongoing process. We are constantly studying what teams, how do teams perform well? We constantly study what helps people progress to partner and be successful. And here I was part of this conversation where an argument was being made based on data that had been looked at for. You know, we've studied all the way from business analysts to partners and senior partners. And what we have found is RQ relationship, you know, quotient. All these softer skills matter more than quantitative. And so the implication was that when we are interviewing, if we have a tie between two candidates, we should. And if there's only one place we should give it to the person with a higher, you know, RQ over quant. Right. Or maybe even if it's a little lower, maybe we don't look at it. Right. And I couldn't, like, I couldn't back then articulate exactly like, what was the fallacy. Even deep in my gut, I was like, that can't be true. And here's what that study and your kind of book highlighted for me. Here's what was wrong with that approach. And I will go back and invite our colleagues to look at that. We were studying people who were already in McKinsey. So they already meet a certain criteria, like, similar to your physical fitness. They've already met a certain level of criteria about quantitative. Right. If they didn't get through six case interviews where they had to actually do math on the fly, draw insights from it, analytical and conceptual problem solving, they would never have made it. So when you now look at this group that is already here, oh, by the way, they've all got high academics, they have high sats, they have high quantitative scores. So again, it's such a sample which is. You can't say, hey, let's actually not think about this as much when we are evaluating people who are coming in. Because that pool is much bigger.

Yes.

And so that was kind of a fallacy that we, you know, I think we fell into. I stood by it because my gut said, no, this is not the right answer. But you just gave me the language As I read your book, but this is something we do all the time. Right. So you know which employees do well in the companies. Great. But make sure that you're knowing that you're already having a selection bias because you're not looking at the full rates.

Yes. I'm really glad that you said that. It's usually because this was something I wanted the reader to get from my book is not just to notice the misinformation on these particular settings, but also just have a general way of thinking that they can apply to other settings. So this is why what I try to build is frameworks where I illustrate these frameworks with examples that bring it to life just like the ones that we've discussed. But just I would like the reader to take more than just those specific examples, but a way of thinking more critically in general when they're encountered with data and evidence and statistics and stories.

Yeah, so let's go into that. Let's start with individuals, Alex, and then we'll go to organizations. What would you recommend? Are these two, three critical tests that readers should think about? You know, there's a lot in the book. I encourage everyone to get a copy of it. But if for those who are listening, here are at least three that you should start with, what would those be, Alex?

Well, I think when you, when you see a study and let me actually just reduce it to two to make it even easier is look at the credentials of the authors and number two, look at their bias. Now first in terms of credentials, and I know credentials, people don't like this dirty word credentials, because they say, well, is he trying to be a gatekeeper according to who is allowed to say something or not? And admittedly I am. And I think credentials are important. Just like I would like to see that somebody is a, has a dentistry qualification before they allow me to drill my teeth, I want to know that if somebody's going to tell me how to run my company or what intervention to make, that this is based on more than just wishful things thinking. Now it's clearly is not as black and white as the idea of dentistry. So anybody's allowed to say something. It's, it's a free country. But how much weight I want to put on something will depend on really do they have expertise in that specific field. So I might put more weight on a former CEO or a, some a scholar who researched hundreds of companies than somebody like Simon Sinek who was just a former advertiser. So look at whether the person actually has expertise in that specific area, if it's a paper, if it's a study, has it been published by a peer reviewed journal? If it hasn't been peer reviewed, then nobody's checked it. It could just be saying anything.

Right.

The second might be bias, is that do you have incentives to claim your particular results? So some of the diversity studies were written by McKinsey and McKinsey is a great organization in terms of being a consultancy, but their goal is not scientific research. Their goal is not to find the truth, but it's to release whatever boosts their reputation. And had there been a result that diversity worsens performance, McKinsey would have never wanted to release that study because people would not like it. So they wanted to cook the data and cook their interpretations to give the conclusion of that diversity improves performance. And so this is why when you look under the hood, you actually find that the evidence is really flimsy. So those are just two simple things. Credentials, what is the expertise in the area? Bias. And indeed for that you can ask yourself if there was the opposite result, would they be willing to release that study? So for me I am highlighting some of the issues with diversity studies. I've also highlighted some of the issues with with purpose studies. Now do I have any incentive to do that? No, because there's a diversity in diversity. I'm an ethnic minority, I'd love to believe it pays off. And my first book, Grow the Pie, which you interviewed me about a few years ago, that is on the power of purpose. I would love to believe that there's unambiguous evidence that purpose matters, but the evidence is much more mixed. But the wit that the fact that I and willing to admit that there's mixed evidence should be more telling because I don't want that to be true. I would like the evidence to be all one way.

Yeah. And the other one, Alex, that I really enjoyed your prompt. Right. Was in particular, when you have a confirmation bias, if you are seeing a statement that confirms even without that study, you would believe it. Ask yourself the opposite question. Right. What are all the factors that you would come up with? What are the arguments you would come up with? If somebody showed that and say it's not true and then test for those to say, you know, is, is that present?

Absolutely. So let's look at this in terms of the breastfeeding study. So let's say you found that breastfeeding led to lower IQ rather than high. Then people would say, well I don't like that result. I'm going to try to knock it Down. So what am I going to do? I'm going to say, well, maybe the women who are breastfeeding are poor, they're not able to afford formula, so maybe it's their poverty which leads to the worse iq, not the breast milk itself. So now that I've alerted myself to alternative exhalations, ask myself, do those alternative exhalations, like family backgrounds, still apply even though the evidence is in the direction that I want? Yeah.

So this counteractive, how can we be wrong? Right. Especially when you are so convinced this is right and you found the evidence is so critical. Alex, talk to us a little bit around creating organizations that think smarter. Right. Because when you go from individuals to teams, all of a sudden this just gets amplified.

Yes. And so this is where diversity of thought and inclusion and psychological safety that we've talked about earlier, that's where it really matters. So to address the issue of groupthink, which is where everybody is sort of saying the same thing and they don't want to speak out because they're seen as not being team players, create a culture which actively encourages dissent. So this might be as simple as the chair not speaking first to start with the junior people to speak first so that the juniors don't anchor on chair's views. And if somebody says something which is against the grain, to actively say, I encourage this, it's really great that you're challenging me. It might be as a leader. Sometimes the leader is not the leader of the whole organization. So if your boss is seen to challenge her boss, then actually then the leader is role modeling the behaviors that they are espousing. So some of these things are actually quite simple. It's not like rocket science just to try to go out and find different viewpoints, but because it's so difficult for, for us because we don't want to be proven wrong. This is why many companies don't do it. Just like the idea of getting fit easy, right? Don't eat chocolate cake and exercise more. But not easy because chocolate cake is so, so tempting and exercise is hard work. And so that is the same in terms of critical thinking.

Well, listen, Alex, this was incredibly insightful. So rich. I really encourage everyone to get a copy of the book, read it. I have just one question to confirm because I found this and I want to make sure it's actually yours. So I found Alex Edmonds custom GPT that can be used to look at any article that you found to see, you know, what might you be missing? Is that yours or is that somebody? Is that is that somebody that made up. I want to make sure if that's a resource, it is genuine and it's yours before we put that in the, in the, in the show notes.

It's absolutely mine. So yeah, so I actually made this because on the suggestion of some readers. So what I develop in the book is a framework to evaluate something critically. And and sometimes people will ask me, oh, this is this new study which came out. Can you tell me does it fit your framework? And I did that at the start, but it's just a lot of effort. So let me just develop a chatgpt routine for this and let me give props to my research assistant, Andrew Tickel, who also was an RA for the book. He helped develop it. I checked it many, many times and so that is an available resource you can find on the book's website, makertainwise.com I'm sure hopefully the show notes as well. So you can just put a study into that. Now it works. It gets sort of 80, 90% of it, but it's still not as perfect as a human. So I will still be in a job but it's hopefully a useful resource for people who might might want a a quick way of fetting some something.

Thank you Alex. I appreciate the power of research and science and frankly, discerning discernment that you bring into the world. I appreciate you. Thank you for joining us again.

Thanks so much Ashley. It's just really great to speak to you again.

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