Pod Insights The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant What the Return-to-Office Debate Gets Wrong About this episode In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Brené Brown and Adam Grant dive into the return‑to‑office debate and argue that most conversations are stuck at the wrong level. Instead of asking “How many days in the office?”, they ask, “What problem are you actually trying to solve?”
They explore evidence on hybrid work, weak‑tie innovation, culture and belonging, and why some leaders still cling to “butts in seats” as a proxy for performance. Along the way, they introduce a systems‑thinking “iceberg” tool for getting below the surface of policy fights to the patterns, structures, and mental models driving them.
You can find The Curiosity Shop on YouTube and Instagram (@thecuriosityshop).
0:00 - What’s Surprising Us About This Podcast?
1:49 - Return to Office
22:06 - Challenging Your Return to Office Mental Model
34:15 - Birth Order
40:18 - Tradeoff Between Authenticity and Editing
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/peps.12641
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https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/the-real-meaning-of-freedom-at-work-11633704877
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https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/seven-truths-about-hybrid-work-and-productivity/
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-effects-of-remote-work-on-collaboration-among-Yang-Jaffe/bff6dabad6d264c0f34678a788e20df1b015656d
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2041386614564105
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44605966_The_Strength-of-Weak-Ties_Perspective_on_Creativity_A_Comprehensive_Examination_and_Extension
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pub/papers/granovetter73ties.pdf
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1802407115
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361135288_Remote_Collaboration_Fuses_Fewer_Breakthrough_Ideas
https://oms-www.files.svdcdn.com/production/downloads/academic/Disrupting-Science-Upload-2022-4.pdf
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https://www.atlassian.com/blog/distributed-work/intentional-togetherness-research
https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/coming-to-a-new-awareness-of-organizational-culture/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:28 Adam Grant? Welcome to The Curiosity Shop, a show from the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:38 Brené Brown? Hi, everyone. I'm Brené Brown.
1:39 Adam Grant? And I'm Adam Grant.
1:41 Brené Brown? And we're having fun on the podcast.
1:42 Adam Grant? More than I expected.
1:43 Brené Brown? So what's been surprising to you about the pod so far?
1:46 Adam Grant? I think what's been surprising is how often we agree.
1:49 Brené Brown? That's interesting. I think...
1:53 Brené Brown? I think I'm surprised by how much I'm learning.
1:55 Adam Grant? You didn't expect that coming in?
1:57 Brené Brown? No, I mean, I expected to learn, but I, I can feel it shifting my thinking.
2:03 Adam Grant? Oh, for sure.
2:03 Brené Brown? Yeah, in uncomfortable ways.
2:05 Adam Grant? I wake up thinking about things that we talked about several weeks ago, thinking, oh, no, I, I missed a chance to ask about, and wait, we do this every week, we can follow up.
2:14 Brené Brown? No, I, that's one of the biggest things for me is the, the hangover, the residual, like, we should have said this, or I want to press him on this, or, wait, how does that work? So I, I'm having fun.
2:25 Adam Grant? Productive hangover.
2:25 Brené Brown? Yeah, thank you.
2:26 Adam Grant? Yeah, thank you.
2:28 Brené Brown? All right, we're gonna do three things today. We're going to talk about the return to office debate.
2:36 Adam Grant? We've been avoiding this one for a while.
2:38 Brené Brown? I know. I, I actually don't know if we're in violent agreement on return to office or really deep disagreement, but.
2:49 Adam Grant? Maybe both.
2:50 Brené Brown? Maybe both. The second thing we're gonna do is I am going to introduce a tool from systems theory that I am obsessed with, that we, we use all the time to look at problems. I thought we could apply it to this question about return to the office.
3:05 Adam Grant? Oh, interesting.
3:06 Brené Brown? Yeah, to see.
3:07 Adam Grant? Good.
3:08 Brené Brown? At what level of the issue does our cohesion fall apart?
3:12 Adam Grant? Right.
3:13 Brené Brown? If it does.
3:14 Adam Grant? And then, as the third item, I pulled some listener questions for us.
3:17 Brené Brown? Let's do it, let's get started. Okay, you, you, you launch us off. Return to the office. Yeah, because you, you're, you're very, you're very committed.
3:27 Adam Grant? I am committed to following the evidence, which I've been doing for the last decade. And I think the evidence is very clear that if you give people one to two days a week to work from anywhere, they are at least as productive, if not more so, they're more satisfied, they're more likely to stay, and there's no cost to relationships or collaboration.
3:49 Brené Brown? God, this is gonna be really boring. I think I agree.
3:52 Adam Grant? Really?
3:54 Adam Grant? I thought you were, I thought you were much more against that model of hybrid work.
3:58 Brené Brown? No, no, I, I, I think I agree with what you just said. One of the things that I, I, what I was anticipating disagreeing with you on was that the frame of return to office just being about productivity is not the right frame.
4:25 Adam Grant? I think we're in agreement on that.
4:26 Brené Brown? Okay, so I have my 24-page lit review because I really came, I mean, I came like, you wanna dance? We'll dance.
4:35 Adam Grant? Oh, I'm ready to dance. Did you bring Nick Bloom's research?
4:38 Brené Brown? I did.
4:38 Adam Grant? Did you bring the Gendron et al. meta-analysis from last year?
4:42 Brené Brown? I did.
4:43 Adam Grant? Okay, good.
4:43 Brené Brown? But I also brought other things like MIT Sloan's Lynda Gratton on kind of what productivity metrics miss.
4:55 Brené Brown? I hope, I hope y'all cough out of the camera when he went like this. Yeah, no, I got a frickin' lit review here, dude, so you, let's go. Okay, so Bloom and colleagues, this is the 2024 Nature, right? Equivalent productivity, equivalent performance review scores and equivalent promotion rates for hybrid workers compared to full-time office workers, correct? So quoting here from Bloom's HBR article, "Hybrid and fully in office showed no differences in productivity, performance review grade promotion, learning or innovation. Hybrid had a higher satisfaction rate."
5:35 Brené Brown? Okay, so I'm gonna go now to, this is MIT Sloan, Lynda Gratton, London Business School. "Three decades of workplace research argues that the productivity debate is largely fought with the wrong metrics."
5:52 Adam Grant? I'm doing it again.
5:54 Adam Grant? I'm skeptically intrigued. How about that?
5:58 Brené Brown? I really hope, Aaron, that you got a zoom in of this face.
6:05 Adam Grant? All right, I want to hear it.
6:08 Brené Brown? Most roles, strategy, coaching, creative work, lack easily verifiable comparative productivity measures. She's going to argue that hybrid work is better understood as a job design option. The question isn't where do people sit, but what tasks need which environment?
6:28 Adam Grant? Yeah, I agree with Linda on that.
6:29 Brené Brown? Okay, okay.
6:31 Adam Grant? Okay, so I think the key aspect of work design is asking how interdependent are people in their jobs? So in organizational psychology, there are three kinds of interdependence. They're called pooled, sequential, and reciprocal. It's easier to think about them as gymnastics, a relay race, and basketball. So if your job is gymnastics, where everyone does their own beam, vault, floor routine, and then you just add up the individual scores, you hardly ever need to be co-located because everybody can do their own thing and have their own focused time at home. But if you're running a relay race, then you need to have some time with the people that you're handing the baton to and receiving it from. And if your work is mostly playing basketball, where you're passing the ball back and forth and
7:15 Adam Grant? doing a lot of dynamic coordination, that's, I think, when you need the most time physically together.
7:20 Brené Brown? Give me an example of the gymnastics.
7:27 Adam Grant? Call center work. Sales teams are almost exclusively designed this way. Everybody has their own clients. They have their own customer base. They have their own industry, potentially. And the team's metrics are basically the sum of the individual metrics.
7:43 Brené Brown? Okay, so I'm trying to, I'm trying to think through this rationally and calmly because...
7:50 Adam Grant? I wish you the best with that.
7:54 Brené Brown? I think I disagree.
7:58 Adam Grant? Good. Tell me more.
8:02 Adam Grant? And wait, I should just say, the Nick Bloom data often are looking at all center jobs.
8:08 Brené Brown? Right.
8:08 Adam Grant? Where people are pretty independent.
8:10 Brené Brown? Yeah, I think, do you, would you consider those knowledge workers?
8:15 Adam Grant? I think of them doing service work more than knowledge work, but maybe there's a mix.
8:19 Brené Brown? Yep. Okay, so let's, let's go here. So this is, this is me making my case for in-person, in-person, culture, creativity, and mission.
8:32 Adam Grant? Okay, I agree right off the bat on culture and mission, definitely not on creativity.
8:37 Brené Brown? Okay. So the evidence for in-person work, I think, becomes strongest around three kind of interconnected organizational dynamics that I want to get into. And I want to talk about it because I'm open to learning.
8:54 Adam Grant? Me too.
8:55 Brené Brown? Like a little crack in the door. Weak tie innovation networks, tacit knowledge and cultural transmission, and shared mission organizational identity. Okay, so let's talk about weak tie. Weak ties is the hidden, is kind of, I think, the hidden engine of creativity and innovation. So weak ties, connections with colleagues outside your immediate team are the primary carriers of novel information, cross-disciplinary insight, and breakthrough ideas.
9:27 Adam Grant? Robust finding.
9:28 Brené Brown? Robust finding. So who are you? I'm Yang at all, 2021.
9:33 Adam Grant? I mean, there, there are, at this point, there's, yeah, there's a, there's a Marcus Baer meta-analysis that spans 50 years of evidence that, yeah, you get more fresh ideas from people you don't know well and don't talk to every day.
9:46 Brené Brown? Right. So I'm thinking that being in the office is less about socializing and more of a creative infrastructure that when it disappears, I think there's two things that happen.
10:03 Brené Brown? I think there's less innovation that is the product of those weak ties. And I think teams without weak tie inner, I don't know why we call it weak tie. Why do we call it?
10:17 Adam Grant? Classic granovetter.
10:18 Brené Brown? Yeah.
10:19 Adam Grant? Sociology.
10:20 Brené Brown? Yeah.
10:21 Adam Grant? Um, these kind of- Opposite of strong ties.
10:22 Brené Brown? Yeah, of strong, yeah, like, um, loose relationship exposure. I don't know, what's another way to say weak tie? Yeah, loose, yeah. I think they also help prevent teams, both, I think all teams have to be innovative and creative these days. But I think they reduce teams from turning into self-referencing systems.
10:43 Adam Grant? Yeah, they prevent group think. There's another way to say it.
10:45 Brené Brown? Yeah.
10:45 Adam Grant? Okay, so I agree with all that. And I think your instincts are right, that when people are physically together in person, they're more likely to bump into their weak ties. This is the whole kind of Steve Jobs designs that Pixar headquarters, uh, so that everybody has to walk by each other to get to the bathroom.
11:02 Brené Brown? Right.
11:02 Adam Grant? Right. I think that there are counter arguments, though, that don't get weighed when, when people say, "Well, we need people to, you know, to come in to have these creative collisions." The first one is, there's no reason why you can't structure that unstructured interaction in remote work. So there's, uh, there's research on pairing people up randomly for virtual lunches, showing that their productivity goes way up afterward because they end up just learning from weak ties. And you don't have to, what I mean is, you don't have to randomly bump into them, right? You could have just a, "Hey, every week, we're going to connect you with somebody that you don't know. And you're going to compare notes, and you're going to learn from each other, and we'll create that way." I think the, the second thing is, we don't need constant weak tie stimulus.
11:44 Adam Grant? Because, uh, this is Ethan Bernstein's work, intermittent interaction is actually better for creativity than constant communication. Because we also need some distance from other people to not get sucked into their ways of seeing the world. And that separation then allows us to develop divergent perspectives, and then come together and get a good mix of convergence and divergence. Last thing is, um, there's a study by science teams, showing that up until around 2010, remote science teams that published, um, you know, breakthrough kinds of discoveries, they were less creative than teams that were co-located. And around 2010, that reversed. And ever since, remote teams have massively out-innovated.
12:29 Adam Grant? Teams that are in person. Why? We think there are two things going on here. Number one, the remote technology was just bad before. We didn't have good systems for sharing files, editing documents together. We didn't have good ways of communicating for over distance. Now we do, right? Secondly, and more importantly, you have access to the whole world's talent in remote teams, whereas you're stuck with the people who happen to be in your science lab if you're together. And so I'm like, yeah, you can have creative collisions with the people who happen to be in your headquarters, but why not have creative collisions with the best people in your whole field, wherever they live?
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14:36 Brené Brown? So when I'm listening to this, what I'm wondering, and I know this is a kind of a constant debate that you and I have.
14:44 Brené Brown? Stepping away from the data, like stepping away from what you're citing, stepping away from my 25-page lit review.
14:49 Adam Grant? I can't step away from data.
14:50 Brené Brown? I know, but let's just step away from it.
14:52 Adam Grant? You're stealing my identity.
14:53 Brené Brown? I know.
14:53 Adam Grant? All right, let's do it.
14:54 Brené Brown? Unwanted identity, shame, episode six.
14:58 Brené Brown? How do you reconcile this with just who we are as human beings? Like from mirror neurons to...
15:08 Adam Grant? Yeah, I mean, this is why I'm not saying we should work remotely all the time. This is why I want us to be co-located three or four days a week. So that we can build meaningful relationships, so that we can establish culture, so that we can live experiences that become stories, so that we can connect to the mission and identify with the organization. I think all of that requires shared time in the same room. But I don't think we need to impose that five days a week. I know what you look like. We have, you know, we have a relationship built. We can have great conversations by text and phone and Zoom and email. Right? And so I just, I think it's arbitrary to say all of the time needs to be in the same place.
15:50 Brené Brown? No, I think I agree with that. It's just, it's so interesting to me, especially, you know, we're filming this while Artemis II is up and just blowing my mind. It's like I'm such a space nerd. And I know you're a space nerd.
16:00 Adam Grant? Victor Glover.
16:01 Brené Brown? Yeah, let's go. You know, and I think I have, you know, as a Houstonian, I've got friends that work for NASA, obviously.
16:07 Adam Grant? Talk about remote work.
16:08 Brené Brown? Yeah, yeah, a lot.
16:09 Adam Grant? We're flying by the dark side of the moon.
16:11 Brené Brown? And it was interesting because we took all of the earthbound astronauts through Dare to Lead. And we talked about the ability maybe to do it remotely. And it was so important for them to get them in the same room.
16:25 Adam Grant? Yep.
16:26 Brené Brown? For these three or four days that we spent together. And for my friends who are engineers, when they get to something that's very difficult, even if they're on remote teams, and these are globally remote teams, they find a way to get together in the same room.
16:39 Adam Grant? Yes.
16:39 Brené Brown? And so it's like, I, I mean, I think we're in violent agreement because I actually am a big believer in hybrid. I'm not, I'm not in a forced return to office five days a week.
16:48 Adam Grant? Yep.
16:48 Brené Brown? And I'm not at all a believer, just as a human being, that we never have To be together physically.
16:54 Adam Grant? Yeah, I think we're on the same page there. And just to, I have to come back to the data now.
16:58 Brené Brown? Yeah.
16:59 Adam Grant? There's a Ding and Ma paper from 2024, looking at four years of return to office mandates, showing that they failed to improve from financial performance metrics, but they reduce satisfaction and work-life balance.
17:11 Brené Brown? Yes.
17:12 Adam Grant? And then there's follow-up research showing that you also struggle to attract great talent when you have a return to office mandate. So all the people who are claiming, well, but the tech leaders who are demanding everyone comes back to the office and the finance leaders who are demanding that, they were doing a wailing and culling strategy of trying to get rid of people who aren't committed without having to pay them severance. Guess what? You fail to attract great people moving forward. And also, the people who are most likely to leave, it turns out, are the most talented people who have options elsewhere, and they want flexibility. So it sounds like we have mostly landed on the same page about this. NASA.
17:49 Brené Brown? Yeah, love.
17:50 Adam Grant? So I think it's one of both of our favorite organizations to study. I learned so much from John Cannongater, who led, you could call it almost dare-to-lead beta for NASA astronauts and Russian cosmonauts for years. And one of the really interesting ahas that I had when I was studying John's work and working with some of his teams was they did not care about making sure that astronaut crews were together for weeks at a time doing training. What they did was they picked short windows to do very deep dives.
18:26 Brené Brown? Yes.
18:26 Adam Grant? So they would get lost in the Utah wilderness. And John was a Knowles guide. And he would say, good luck, find your own way, and then disappear. And they had to navigate those situations together. And what the astronauts would always come back saying is, one or two days with a group, getting lost in the wilderness and having to navigate our own way, the stress we underwent together, the problem solving we did together, so much more meaningful than if we had sat at desks next to each other for a year. And so I'm curious to hear how you think about this idea of Atlassian does this, right? They've shown in their data that how often you come to the office has no bearing on how much belonging you feel.
19:10 Adam Grant? But attending a quarterly, three to five day offsite is very powerful for connecting you to your team and to the firm. What do you think about the idea of we do a deep dive together and then we go off and do our own focused work and then we reconvene?
19:26 Brené Brown? It's probably the way I think about the future of medicine, which is personalization, personalization, personalization. I want to... My objection to return to office, not return to office, bring them together for offsites, not bring them together for offsites. My objection to the whole vat of that discussion comes down to an overwhelming frustration that I cannot pin leaders down to a why that makes sense. It's not intentional. They're not examining beyond the problems they can see.
20:09 Brené Brown? They're not getting underneath to mental models. They're not getting underneath to... And so for people who... I think, I'll be honest with you. I think it would be, I would be very challenged to understand anyone that says everyone's back all the time for everything. And I'd be very challenged, even if it was call center work, to say no one ever has to do anything. Because I worked in a call center in Spanish. Gracias por llamadas.
20:38 Adam Grant? Ah, excelente. Well, they must have that in español.
20:40 Brené Brown? Yes, si. And so that is brutal work. The churn in that work is huge. So I don't, I come into that research with a different understanding of what that work is. And I do think it's gymnasts.
20:54 Adam Grant? Oh, yes. And I think we're in agreement there, too. My first real job was in ad sales and I needed other people around me after the 19th rejection in a row to process that.
21:06 Brené Brown? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:07 Adam Grant? But also after studying call centers, it is really easy to see how people are better able to focus when they don't have to be surrounded by a cacophony all the time.
21:15 Brené Brown? Oh, yeah. We were just like, hundreds of us in cubes. So I think it really comes down for me to what is driving your decision? What are, you know, maybe this is a good place to introduce this. So this is a, this is a, this comes out of Dana Meadows' work from, she's a systems theorist. I'll link to her book and her work and I'll share the PDF with you that we use to teach it. So it's, it's basically a problem solving method with systems theory where you have the iceberg, which is the problem you see. So leaders are like, okay, here's the problem we see. Do we let them work remotely? Do we force them back into the office? Do we do a hybrid? And they're just looking at the top of the iceberg.
21:59 Brené Brown? They're not getting under what are the patterns of behaviors that we need to build, de-emphasize, strengthen, get rid of? Like, what are the patterns of behaviors that we need? Underneath that, what are the systems and structures of support that lead to performance and impact?
22:16 Adam Grant? Yeah.
22:17 Brené Brown? And then even below that, at the deepest level in this iceberg, are the mental models. So what, you know, if I ask a leader, like if you're running a company, Flowers, Inc., let's say, or, you know, I'm looking at the wallpaper, Pink Flowers, Inc. And I, you know, and you're like, I'm having everyone come back to work. Why? Because I need to see them. They need to be there. Like.
22:37 Adam Grant? What kind of strategy is that?
22:38 Brené Brown? What kind of strategy is that? And, and I want to, so tell me what your mental model is. Tell me how you're making sense of work. Well, how do I even know if they're working? Well, you don't know if they're working if they're in the office unless you're standing over them or you're, you know, you don't know either way. So I don't get that.
22:53 Adam Grant? Yep.
22:54 Brené Brown? You know, um, they need to have friends. Well, that's not really what work does and they could have a lot of friends. It's better for them. Have you asked them?
23:03 Adam Grant? No.
23:03 Brené Brown? Yeah, right. And the thing I love about this problem solving with systems thinking iceberg is we know from the research that the lower you go in the iceberg to answer the questions, the greater leverage and more lasting and meaningful the change.
23:18 Adam Grant? Yes.
23:18 Brené Brown? Does that make sense?
23:19 Adam Grant? It does. It's very similar, actually, to the Shyne culture iceberg.
23:23 Brené Brown? Oh, oh, God, yes.
23:24 Adam Grant? Which, I mean, it's it's almost identical. You see the artifacts and practices that are the most visible manifestations of a culture. Those ideally are created to reflect and reinforce a set of values. But the values themselves are not as transparent. And then underneath those values are these deep assumptions that are rarely even articulated. And they're just taken for granted. Those are the the hidden mental models.
23:45 Brené Brown? The mental models.
23:45 Adam Grant? Yeah.
23:46 Brené Brown? And mental models, man, people always say, how, when you go in to do work in a company, Brene, how do you know whether it's going to be incremental change or transformative change? Like real, and I said, listen, if you have to change mindsets and mental models, you're talking about transformation because you're going to have to break very sacred things.
24:02 Adam Grant? Yeah. So let's let's take a concrete example of this. Last year, I was at an event where a CEO who had very publicly announced a return to office mandate was on stage. And the moderator asked for questions and I couldn't resist. I put my hand up and I summarized the evidence we've been talking about. And I asked the CEO, what do you know that organizational psychologists and economists don't? And he said, well, I just believe that we're better at mentoring and innovating when we're all in the same room together. And I just thought that was such a primitive mental model. Like, OK, yeah, but how many hours a day do we need to be in the same room together? How many days a week do we need to be in the same room together?
24:47 Adam Grant? Have you thought about different ways of solving for mentoring? That, you know, deal with the fact that you are a multinational company and some of your most important roles are not physically in the same country as the people that you expect to be doing the mentoring? What do you do when you work with someone whose mental models are not fleshed out? Because I just wanted to smack that down.
25:10 Brené Brown? Yeah, I think. I think what's really hard is, in my experience, no matter who that leader is, and I could take a while to guess about who this leader is and be so right.
25:20 Adam Grant? Yeah, you know, you know exactly who it was.
25:23 Brené Brown? I think the problem is it's the parenting equivalent. And I don't like to use parenting stuff with work because it infantilizes work. But here, you know, it's the parenting.
25:35 Adam Grant? I was going to say infantilizes parents.
25:40 Brené Brown? It's the parenting equivalent of because I said so.
25:43 Adam Grant? Yes, exactly.
25:44 Brené Brown? And it it actually creates a lack of respect and distrust. It really creates distrust when and I think what we've seen working because we were working so closely with leaders during the pandemic and right afterward as they were making these decisions, that if you believe it enough to mandate it, then you should have the discipline to get under the mental model and walk people through it.
26:14 Adam Grant? Yes, and explain why.
26:15 Brené Brown? Right, and if you can't be bothered by that, and you're going to rely on just because I said so, say goodbye to your top talent.
26:23 Adam Grant? Yep.
26:24 Brené Brown? And not because even they have to go in because they don't want to work for someone who's treating them, infantilizing them.
26:29 Adam Grant? Yeah.
26:30 Brené Brown? With because I said so.
26:31 Adam Grant? That's a great meta argument. I wonder what would have happened if I made that point.
26:35 Brené Brown? Say that again. What do you mean?
26:36 Adam Grant? Well, just just to even say back to the CEO, that sounds a lot like when a parent says because I said so. Can you walk me through what what is your evidence and what is your like what's what's your proof that this is so important?
26:51 Brené Brown? So so here's where I think I would differ in the way that I would challenge someone like that. I don't think I'd ask for evidence. No one's going to be able to out evidence you.
27:00 Adam Grant? I know, that's why.
27:01 Brené Brown? That's why you're going.
27:03 Adam Grant? We're on my turf.
27:04 Brené Brown? I know.
27:05 Adam Grant? But also, that's the highest quality information available, right?
27:07 Brené Brown? But I think I've never had experience using that to get to someone's mental model because they they immediately get defensive.
27:16 Adam Grant? Yes.
27:17 Brené Brown? So I think what I would say is, what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at home? And what are your core beliefs about what happens when people are at work?
27:27 Adam Grant? Yes.
27:28 Brené Brown? What are you what keeps you up at night when people are working from home?
27:32 Adam Grant? Oh, that's so helpful. Okay, and then, you know, one of the core beliefs is, I, you know, I think this is obviously easy to debunk, but, you know, there's still a, you know, while people are, you know, they're they're slacking off at home. And once somebody says that to me, I can say, you know, that that's interesting because what Nick Nick Bloom has shown in his experiments is that when people are given a chance to work from anywhere a day or two a week, they save about an hour on average of commuting time. And guess how much of that time they spend working? More than half of it.
28:06 Brené Brown? Yeah, I've read that.
28:07 Adam Grant? So you just got an extra half hour of work plus out of your employee. And guess what? The other, you know, 24 or so minutes, they get to use on family time, health, hobbies, friends.
28:19 Brené Brown? Deliberate recovery.
28:21 Adam Grant? Yeah, which I'm like, wow, you have literally found a way to do something that biologists and physicists told me was impossible. You created more hours in the day. And I can't have that conversation without them being defensive until they've told me here's what my belief is.
28:36 Brené Brown? Yes, so, and so I think the way that you get to that is the question about what's on your heart and mind. What are you afraid of? What do you make up as happening? I think if you can get on the table, the fears, the mental model, the how people make sense of their world, how people think people contribute value. And you can say to them, that makes sense.
29:00 Adam Grant? Yeah.
29:01 Brené Brown? Are you open to challenging it with what we know to be true from research?
29:04 Adam Grant? Yes, or complicating it even.
29:06 Brené Brown? Yeah.
29:07 Adam Grant? Yeah.
29:07 Brené Brown? Yeah. But I think if you miss the step of, I've never successfully had anyone, including myself, like, we just did this with our company. We got into some mental models and one of them was super painful. It took us like three hours. We had to stop, people had to walk out, people went like under the line and to get back up. But one of the mental models that we uncovered was that we make excuses for our behavior during unique situations. And when we gave three examples of unique situations, there was nothing unique about them.
29:43 Adam Grant? Right, there's a pattern.
29:44 Brené Brown? There's a pattern.
29:45 Adam Grant? Yeah.
29:45 Brené Brown? We had handled things exactly like that in different contexts for 10 years.
29:49 Adam Grant? Yes.
29:50 Brené Brown? But we use uniqueness as
29:54 Adam Grant? Smoke screen.
29:55 Brené Brown? A smoke screen.
29:56 Adam Grant? Yeah.
29:57 Brené Brown? To come out of our integrity and what we know is best in terms of leaving sometimes.
30:01 Adam Grant? Yeah. No, that's really helpful. And it makes me, it makes me think about what this also unlocks is a chance to then even redirect the conversation away from what might be a bit of a red herring. So I'm thinking about George Kelly's classic work on slot rattling. Are you familiar with this?
30:20 Brené Brown? No, I don't know it.
30:21 Adam Grant? So George Kelly studied the, the mental models. He thought of them as goggles that you wear to make sense of the world. And I always remember this, this case that he, he wrote about of, there was a guy who got discharged from the military and his life fell apart. And Kelly was analyzing why. And it turned out like he had spent his whole career in the military analyzing things through that lens. His mental model was military good, non-military bad. And so, once he was even honorably discharged, he had been, he had put himself in the bad category. So what most people do when one of their constructs is violated, when one of their mental models is challenged, is Kelly described it as slot rattling where he's like, oh, okay.
31:06 Adam Grant? Well, now I have to convince myself that non-military is good and maybe military is bad.
31:11 Brené Brown? Demonize the military.
31:12 Adam Grant? Right. And you just kind of end up playing this, you're on a seesaw. And what Kelly said is, no, you need more mental models. You need more lenses. You need other ways to see the world beyond military, non-military in order to, to complicate your worldview.
31:26 Brené Brown? Wait, wait, I gotta stop you there.
31:28 Adam Grant? Yeah.
31:30 Brené Brown? This is so interesting. So the mental model made something good and something bad. The answer is to not just switch them.
31:44 Adam Grant? Yes, exactly.
31:46 Brené Brown? But to get on, get a whole new pair of goggles.
31:49 Adam Grant? Exactly. You need more mental models. And I'm thinking about this in the context of the hybrid work, work debate because we're doing this slot rattling right now. It's often a tug of war between leaders saying, I want you in all the time and I'm going to force it. And employees saying, no, you can't. And I don't want to work here if you do that. And then, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna measure, but can you really measure? And are you really going to fire me if you value me? And it's, it's the wrong conversation. The conversation should be. How do we achieve organizational goals in ways that are respectful of individuals' lives? If we have that conversation, I mean, one thing that that jumps out in the data very clearly is the flexibility people want most is not where they work.
32:31 Brené Brown? No.
32:31 Adam Grant? It's when and how much.
32:32 Brené Brown? Yeah, that's it.
32:33 Adam Grant? They want to control their time, not their place. And so if a leader were to realize that, it would be very easy to say to somebody, hey, are you telling me that if I let you leave the office at at 3 o'clock so you can be home with your kids?
32:48 Brené Brown? Carpool, yeah.
32:49 Adam Grant? You will you will come to the office every day? Maybe that that works. That that requires another mental model.
32:55 Brené Brown? I mean, this is so this is so interesting because it's getting caught in the binary.
33:04 Adam Grant? Yes.
33:04 Brené Brown? Even if you switch sides.
33:05 Adam Grant? Classic binary bias.
33:07 Brené Brown? Binary bias, yeah. So this is why I love this tool because this is how I spend so much of my time that I get asked to come in and see a problem. And my work is really so, you know, I have to get on my scuba gear and do this deep dive to be like, you know, are we can we go below the patterns of behavior, below the systems and structures to figure out how do you make sense of the world? How do you think people contribute value? And if you think they contribute value by with mentoring, coaching, feedback, there are many ways to build that into remote work.
33:47 Adam Grant? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, there what's what's the old joke about consultants that do you know this one?
33:53 Brené Brown? No, I don't know.
33:54 Adam Grant? A consultant is somebody who borrows your watch, tells you the time, and then charges you for the privilege. I think that that gets something really fundamentally wrong, which is when I'm not good at consulting, but as an advisor or a researcher, when I come into an organization, I am holding up a mirror.
34:14 Brené Brown? Yes.
34:14 Adam Grant? And helping them see their mental models. And once I've done that, they are much better equipped to solve their problems than I am.
34:20 Brené Brown? Yes. And that's why, you know, someone asked me the day they're like, when did you become an expert on manufacturing and supply chain? And I'm like, that's the problem you see. That underneath it is mental models and there's a finite group of those, you know, that we have to challenge and then we use data and then, but getting underneath there, even challenging my own mental models is really hard. So this is interesting. So violent agreement.
34:46 Adam Grant? Yeah, I mean, a ton of it.
34:48 Brené Brown? Have your why, understand the middle models from which you work, challenge your middle models with evidence and data.
34:56 Adam Grant? And I think that lands us at, we want people to be together a reasonable amount of time and not all the time.
35:03 Brené Brown? For the right reasons.
35:04 Adam Grant? Yes.
35:04 Brené Brown? And when you ask the Alaskan thing, I do think the one thing I would say about companies that, and I'm not, this is not a endorsement or a criticism of how Alaskan does it because I am not familiar with it, but what I would say is for purely remote organizations that rely on all hands, the one thing I would say that I see consistently being helpful is scheduling in more white space.
35:29 Adam Grant? Yes.
35:29 Brené Brown? And more open time and not scheduled planned time for people who don't always get to get together.
35:36 Adam Grant? Yes. Yeah, they need, they need time to actually incubate ideas.
35:40 Brené Brown? It's not programmed.
35:41 Adam Grant? Yes.
35:42 Brené Brown? Yeah, I agree.
35:42 Adam Grant? Yeah. Okay, good.
35:43 Brené Brown? Go to questions.
35:44 Adam Grant? Yeah, let's, let's go to questions.
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37:17 Adam Grant? So there were two that I thought were really interesting. One has, I thought, I thought it had nothing to do with our conversation from the first part of the episode, but it does relate to mental models because I think a lot of our mental models are wrong on this. The question, this comes from Bree, was can the two of you talk about birth order?
37:41 Adam Grant? So where do you want to start on that one?
37:43 Brené Brown? I just feel like there are some things where you and I are not going to see eye to eye, which is birth order, Enneagram. We'll probably see the same on horoscopes, but astrology, because I'm not for that, unless it's a good one for the day. But I am a huge, but I think birth order is really, can be very significant and very helpful. I don't think it's predictive, but I think it can be a data point.
38:08 Adam Grant? How did you know I was going to land in a different place on that?
38:12 Brené Brown? Because the research is so not compelling.
38:15 Adam Grant? Yeah, it's a mess.
38:16 Brené Brown? Yeah, but the lived experience is super compelling.
38:19 Adam Grant? I think it's hard to study. I think.
38:21 Brené Brown? I think it's hard to study.
38:21 Adam Grant? And I think it's, there are so many complex variables that interact with birth order.
38:26 Brené Brown? Right.
38:27 Adam Grant? Well, let's put something on the table then. I think there are a lot of theories that people hold about birth order that just do not stand up to evidence. But there are a couple that are supported in some very careful, large-scale studies. One is that there is convincing evidence that later borns are more likely to take risks than firstborns. What do you think of that one?
38:52 Brené Brown? I think that's true. And I think, I mean, what would you say about the studies that show disproportionate number of firstborns in certain roles and certain?
39:00 Adam Grant? Leadership roles, for example, high achievement. I mean, I think it's the converse of that, right? And the standard explanation of that is, as a firstborn, you are drawn toward conventional ways of pleasing your elders and, you know, kind of being the model oldest sibling. And so you get good grades and you run for student government. And that niche is not available anymore to laterborns. And so they need to find a different way to stand out. And they often do that by rebelling, by differentiating, taking risks, trying things that are not proven. And then also, I think there might be a parenting component of this too, which is, parents are much more controlling with their first child than they are with their fourth.
39:39 Brené Brown? I mean, my younger sisters were juggling knives at five. And I'm the oldest. But I will say that, I don't know, I get, this is where I, this is where I get really frustrated because there's such, you can say something that's very emotionally resonant. For example, I came across a meme on Instagram that said, were you really a pleasure to have in class? Or were you just the firstborn daughter with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder?
40:11 Adam Grant? I saw that.
40:11 Brené Brown? Yeah. And I was like, here. But then, I think what ends up happening is, I think this is fine. This is true. You know, firstborn, firstborn daughters, I could read a room before I could read a book. You know, like, you know, just that there were things that are both resonating, helpful and painful about some of that. And then all of a sudden, the grifters get a hold of it. And now there's a trauma protocol based on, you know, this. And then now there's a, you know, and now that if you take this supplement. So it's like, then you're like, this is why we can't have nice things. This is why we can only have research.
40:48 Adam Grant? People bastardize.
40:49 Brené Brown? Yeah. And they turn it into like,
40:54 Brené Brown? If you sleep this way, this is your diagnosis. You're like, dude, fuck off. Like, you don't, you don't have any idea what you're talking about. What is your background? Like, so then it's, then you just go to this world that I don't live in as a deep person of faith, that if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Like, now, I believe, like, if you could accurately measure it, is it really that important?
41:15 Adam Grant? That's a great question. Okay, so let's, let's go back then to the, the birth order finding on, you know, kind of conventional achievement versus risk-taking. I think part of what's interesting about that is it's a really small effect in most studies. It doesn't show up in all studies. And it depends on how many siblings you have and also on age spacing. So one, I think, common way of, like, trying to make sense of this is, well, if later borns, you know, are separated by five or more years from their older sibling, they kind of get a fresh start in terms of, they don't have to compete with that older sibling.
41:50 Brené Brown? That's right.
41:50 Adam Grant? And so they can go more in the conventional achievement route. If, if they're only a year or two apart, it's anybody's guess how that might play out. And then you look at this, but you're lumping all later borns together? What about being the last born versus the middle child? Middle child never gets covered in these studies.
42:09 Brené Brown? Peacekeeper, the peacekeeper, like, in the, on Instagram, that would be the peacekeeper.
42:13 Adam Grant? It would be, and there's possible truth to that, but families are so complicated. Why do you want to reduce everything to the order in which you arrived?
42:23 Brené Brown? I don't know, because we're desperate to make meaning.
42:26 Adam Grant? We are.
42:26 Brené Brown? We're desperate to make meaning and to make things make sense. And, you know, it's like, and then when we see something that deeply resonates, it, it gives us a sense of belonging and place. And like, you know, I'll see all the Gen X, you know, shut up, we drank out of a water hose, we left on our bikes at 6:00 a.m. and came back at 10:00 p.m. Well, that's actually true, we did.
42:47 Adam Grant? I, I got dysentery playing Oregon Trail.
42:51 Brené Brown? Yeah, so it's like, so it's also a way for us to meaningfully connect with humanity and each other and tribal in a way. And so I have this like really unspoken connection to other firstborn daughters. And, you know, so I think it's there's something very human about it. It's just that anything that emotionally resonates and gives us something is very vulnerable to being misused.
43:24 Adam Grant? Yeah, and exploited.
43:25 Brené Brown? And exploited.
43:26 Adam Grant? Yeah, I think that's right.
43:27 Brené Brown? Yeah.
43:27 Adam Grant? Okay, let's go to the other question. I thought this was this was an interesting meta question that actually a bunch of different people have submitted. The basic question as I tried to synthesize across them was, how do you think about the trade off between authenticity and just releasing a podcast as you run it and editing to deliver your best material? And I don't know that we have fully figured out how we're gonna do that moving forward, right?
43:57 Brené Brown? No. I'm a no edit person.
44:00 Adam Grant? And I am a not editing disrespects the listeners' time person. Let's cut out the fat, which might be a third of the episode.
44:09 Brené Brown? And I'm more of a I'm more of a believer that we're trying to challenge each other in caring, respectful ways. We're trying to think of new ideas. We're trying to challenge ourselves. And I want a podcast that reflects the fact that this is that's not a fast moving process, that there are empty spaces that people are uncomfortable with, and the rush to fill them is one of the greatest barriers to deep thought, deep thinking, deep conversation and meaningful. So I don't want to edit something. It would be like, you know, asking someone to take my wrinkles out. Like, you know, it's like, this is this is it. You know, I've
44:53 Brené Brown? earned the I've earned all of these, the smiles, the cry, that, you know. And so for me, I don't think of it as being disrespectful to the listener. I think about it as being honest.
45:04 Adam Grant? I love that framing of it. How do you think about then the dilemma of I've gotten messages over the years from people saying, Yours is the only podcast I listen to because it's every minute is well-used and I feel like I can fit it into my day.
45:22 Adam Grant? I don't want to lose those people.
45:23 Brené Brown? No.
45:24 Adam Grant? The biggest fans, the people who read all of our stuff are probably going to listen regardless.
45:31 Brené Brown? I don't know. I mean, I guess finding a happy medium. I think one of the things that we're doing is we're trying new structures. So we're doing like 30 minutes of this and we're giving people the playbook at the top. I'd be open to listener feedback. I would have a very hard time, and I know this is like, this is my number one Enneagram, which I believe in, that I make everything a moral issue as a number one.
45:52 Adam Grant? You're a huge moralizer. It's true.
45:55 Brené Brown? What the frick?
45:58 Brené Brown? Jesus.
45:59 Adam Grant? It's one of your best and also most challenging qualities.
46:02 Brené Brown? Okay, whatever.
46:07 Brené Brown? For fuck's sake, y'all. But I would almost feel unethical to take a conversation where there were pauses and it was hard and we were trying to figure it out and we're looking like we're struggling to be respectful and make it sound like because that's not the way the world works and everyone's need to
46:28 Brené Brown? is dangerous. And so I guess where it comes in for me is maybe the, I've been thinking about this. Maybe it's more structure, letting listeners know what's going to happen, being explicit why we leave some pauses in and finding a happy medium. Like, one thing that is, like, one thing that's for sure, I hope that people don't confuse organic conversation with a lack of preparedness because I, I'm always prepared. You're always prepared. Like, no, we don't prepare together on purpose.
46:59 Adam Grant? At all. This is much more interesting not doing it.
47:01 Brené Brown? It's more interesting.
47:02 Adam Grant? The only thing we've done so far is just align on the topic.
47:05 Brené Brown? That's it. And so I think that's important because I think that's how conversation is real.
47:10 Adam Grant? Yeah.
47:10 Brené Brown? Like, I don't, I don't say, hey, Steve, babe, at 6 o'clock, I want to have a conversation about these things. Let's prep it together. I'm going to say this and actually, I don't always need Steve for my conversations. I just have them with him and then I let him know whether he's in the shit house or not. But, um, But yeah, I think we're just trying to get it right.
47:27 Adam Grant? I think there's value in maybe a distinction that just became clear to me, which is there are conversations where the process is important to show, and there are conversations where we're trying to share useful content. And I think the former requires more, let the episode run.
47:48 Brené Brown? Yes.
47:48 Adam Grant? And the latter, if we went down a 17-minute rabbit hole, maybe people only need to hear 10 minutes of that.
47:55 Brené Brown? I think it's a huge watch out for us.
47:57 Adam Grant? Big time.
47:57 Brené Brown? Yeah, because I could go down a 70-minute rabbit hole.
48:00 Adam Grant? I mean, I wanted to look at which studies.
48:03 Brené Brown? I know, yeah, yeah.
48:04 Adam Grant? Wait, wait, but let's talk about that one more.
48:06 Brené Brown? Yeah, I know. We'll just keep practicing. And I love the feedback. I get a lot of good feedback, constructive and positive on LinkedIn, which is where my comments are open and I like to get in there and respond to people. So yeah, I'm open to it. But I do think it's meaningful to show that if you're actually actively, and I have to do this with leaders a lot. When we teach active listening, the hardest thing that we have to break is you preparing your response while someone else is talking. I don't want to miss anything you're saying when you say it. Therefore, if I'm going to respond in a meaningfully respectful way, I need a minute to think about what I'm going to say back.
48:48 Adam Grant? That's why I brought my notebook.
48:49 Brené Brown? Yeah, that's why I brought, yeah, I mean, like.
48:51 Adam Grant? I need to capture that so it's not taking up space in my brain so that I can listen to you.
48:55 Brené Brown? Yeah, and maybe there is something about edits to make it easier for a listener. I'm not convinced that people, in fact, I've seen a lot of feedback for both of us, that people, one person used this term exactly. Thank God you're not insight machines. That's not what we need. We don't know how to talk to each other.
49:16 Adam Grant? I thought that was a compliment. I want to be an insight machine.
49:19 Brené Brown? Yeah, I do not. I want to be like a huh, but happy medium?
49:25 Adam Grant? Yes.
49:25 Brené Brown? That's what we'll try. And we'll experiment and correct.
49:28 Adam Grant? Yeah.
49:28 Brené Brown? Based on?
49:31 Adam Grant? Data, of course. And if you're pulling from LinkedIn, I'm going to draw from Spotify and Instagram.
49:37 Brené Brown? Oh, perfect.
49:37 Adam Grant? And that way we'll have a range.
49:39 Brené Brown? Yeah, and we'll use the one I like best.
49:40 Adam Grant? The one we like best.
49:43 Brené Brown? See you next week.
49:44 Adam Grant? Yep.
49:46 Brené Brown? The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.
49:56 Adam Grant? We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcastvoxmedia.com.
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Previous The Emotion Few Talk About, But Many Feel Next BS Disclaimers, Invisible Armies, and the Importance of the Words We Choose Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated