#471: Adam Grant — How to Remember Anything

Please enjoy this special episode of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description, featuring the superhuman Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant https://twitter.com/AdamMGrant/) and his podcast with TED, WorkLife https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife. Many of you have heard my interview with Adam, which was one of the most popular interviews of 2019. I titled that podcast “The Man Who Does Everything https://tim.blog/2019/12/05/adam-grant/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description” because Adam seems to accomplish more than the next 10 people combined, and he has built systems and habits that allow him to do this. Adam is an expert in how we can find motivation and meaning, and lead more generous and creative lives. He is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he has been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. He is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of four books that have been translated into 35 languages: Give and Take https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=adam+grant&qid=1575415508&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=efd03886b41361aca527f01557c591f7&language=en_US, Originals https://www.amazon.com/Originals-How-Non-Conformists-Move-World/dp/B01A7Q61LI/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Option B https://www.amazon.com/Option-Adversity-Building-Resilience-Finding/dp/1524732680/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=adam+grant&qid=1575415508&sr=8-5&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=0acddfd50299d8a765a45761089e285b&language=en_US, and Power Moves https://www.amazon.com/Power-Moves-Lessons-from-Davos/dp/B07H4WPSS2/ref=as_li_ss_tl?keywords=adam+grant&qid=1575415508&sr=8-4&linkCode=ll1&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=d78eb3e3bd83cdcfb71027691400c7ad&language=en_US. His TED talks have been viewed more than 20 million times. His speaking and consulting clients include Google, the NBA, and the Gates Foundation. He has been recognized as one of the world’s 10 most influential management thinkers, is one of Fortune’s 40 under 40, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He’s received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. It goes on and on. The good news is that this isn’t all freakish genes and good luck; Adam uses uncommon tools and strategies for getting all of this done. You can find our previous episode about this at tim.blog/adamgrant https://tim.blog/2019/12/05/adam-grant/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. In Adam’s WorkLife https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife podcast, he takes you inside the minds of some of the world’s most unusual professionals to explore the science of making work not suck; put another way, how do you make work actually work for you? Adam and I share an intense interest in just how far—and easily—you can train your memory to do things that seem impossible, and I wanted to share with you an episode from Adam’s podcast titled “How to remember anything https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_how_to_remember_anything/transcript.” It is highly tactical. One last thing—for legal reasons, we didn’t have the flexibility to remove any mid-roll ads, so... Accenture, this one’s on me. Please enjoy the episode! You can subscribe to WorkLife https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcasts. * This episode is brought to you by “5-Bullet Friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship,” my very own email newsletter, which every Friday features five bullet points of cool things I’ve found that week, including apps, books, documentaries, gadgets, albums, articles, TV shows, new hacks or tricks, and—of course—all sorts of weird stuff I’ve dug up from around the world. It’s free, it’s always going to be free, and you can subscribe now at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-sponsorship. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers of all different types, to tease out their routines, habits, influences, books, techniques, tactics, et cetera, that you can use or apply to your own life. This episode is going to be different, and I have a surprise for you. Many of you have heard my interview with the superhuman Adam Grant, which was one of the most popular interviews of 2019. I titled that podcast "The Man Who Does Everything", because Adam seems to accomplish more than the next 10 people combined. His colleagues are kind of mystified by it. And he has built systems and habits that allow him to do this. That's the important part.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  So it's not just that he came out of the womb with these abilities. He trained these abilities, and he has systems. He and I share an intense interest in just how far and easily you can train your memory to do things that seem completely impossible. That's what this episode will focus on. So it's going to be very, very tactical, very practical. For those who don't know Adam, Adam is an expert in how we can find motivation and meaning, and lead more generous and creative lives. He is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, where he's been the top-rated professor for seven straight years. He is the number-one New York Times bestselling author of four books that have been translated into 35 or so languages: Give and Take, Originals, Option B, and Power Moves. His TED Talks have been viewed more than 20 million times.

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  His speaking and consulting clients include Google, the MBA, and the Gates Foundation, just to give you an idea of the spectrum. He's been recognized as one of the world's 10 most influential management thinkers, is one of Fortune's 40 Under 40, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. He's received distinguished scientific achievement awards from the American Psychological Association and the National Science Foundation. It just goes on and on. The good news is that, like I said, this isn't all freakish genes, and good luck. Adam uses uncommon tools and strategies for getting all this done. You can find our previous episode about a lot of this at tim.blog/adamgrant. Adam now has his own podcast with TED called Work Life, in which he takes you inside the minds of some of the world's most unusual professionals.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  ...to explore the science of making work not suck. Put another way, how do you make work actually work for you? To that end, I wanted to share an episode of Adam's podcast that I really enjoyed titled, "How to Remember Anything." It is highly tactical and you can just listen to the first five minutes to get an example of just how incredible you can hone your memory with the proper approach and tools. One last thing, for legal reasons, we didn't have the flexibility to remove any midroll ads, so Accenture, this one is on me. You're most welcome. And to those listening, please enjoy the episode. You can subscribe to Work Life with Adam Grant wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:50Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers and it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time because after all, the podcasts, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week.

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog/friday. That's tim.blog/friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with, and little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So, check it out, tim.blog/friday.

• 4:18Tim Ferriss?

  If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So, easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog/friday and thanks for checking it out if the spirit moves you.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  LA Rams, LA Rams, LA Rams. 2016 was supposed to be a good year in the NFL for the Rams. They were relocating back from St. Louis to Los Angeles. A fresh start, a new home. But they only won four games and lost 12. They stank. And they hadn't had a winning season in 14 years. But the next year, 2017, things were different.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  When you find a way to come on the road, finish up your road record, seven and one, and win a division, there's only one thing you could say.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  The following season, the Rams win 13 out of 16 games, tying for the best record in football. They make it all the way to the Super Bowl. Their secret weapon? The Rams had hired a new head coach, Sean McVay. He was just 30 years old, the youngest NFL coach since 1938. His secret weapon? His memory.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  We saw you on television, and you remembered a ton of plays.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Sean McVay can recall, on command, almost any moment he's ever seen on a football field. Listen to him being grilled by a couple sports reporters about completely random plays from past seasons.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Week 12, Saints at Rams. 429 in the second quarter. Second and seven on the Saints' 7. What happened? Oh, Josh Reynolds touchdown, off-schedule play versus a three-man rush. You're absolutely right.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me?

• 6:08Speaker 03

  You're unbelievable.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  You don't need to know the playbook or understand the lingo to hear that. This is sort of crazy.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Now, we are bringing it back to 2015, Week 7. Bucks at Skins. Yep. Second and seven on the Tampa Bay 24. 58 seconds left in the fourth quarter. Jamison Crowder wheel route down the right sideline. Jamison Crowder wheel route down the right sideline. Set up the first down, and then how did that drive end? Jordan Reed touchdown and a four-by-one individual ISO slant. Check out the brain on Sean.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Amazing. He even remembers plays going back 16 years, when he was in the state semifinals in high school. This kind of recall gives him a big edge as a coach. When he needs to make a quick decision with the game on the line, he has an entire library of successes and mistakes at his fingertips. Sean McVay is clearly a savant. But memory is not just an innate talent. You can strengthen yours like a muscle. Your team can use it to pump up creativity and boost sales. And just maybe, we can all figure out exactly where we left our car keys.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I'm Adam Grant, and this is Work Life, my podcast with Ted. I'm an organizational psychologist. I study how to make work not suck. In this show, I'm inviting myself inside the minds of some truly unusual people, because they've mastered something I wish everyone knew about work. Today, memory. How to make your own recall stronger, and how to build your organization's memory, too.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Thanks to Accenture for sponsoring this episode.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Through most of human history, the most valuable people to have in your tribe were the ones with great memories. Even in the era of cavemen, your life depended on that friend who remembered which mushroom was poisonous, or where to find water in a drought. As civilizations developed, you needed to remember which merchants were trustworthy and which guilds were hostile. In Lincoln's era, a mark of a well-read person was the ability to quote at length from many sources. Now, you're probably in the habit of outsourcing your memory to electronic devices. But the ability to retain and recall information in your head is still crucial.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  One, it helps you establish expertise under uncertainty. If a car salesperson knows safety specs off the top of her head, you'll assume she knows what she's talking about. Two, having a good memory is essential for making fast decisions. When a patient goes into cardiac arrest during a procedure, surgeons don't have time to run a Google search about what to do. And three, memory helps you build and maintain relationships. You expect a financial planner to remember your risk preferences. You want a therapist to recall how your worldview was shaped by your weird family. And before a performance review, you hope your boss hasn't forgotten all the good work you've done. As a professor, I've always encouraged my students

• 9:23Speaker 01

  to develop their memories. The problem was, when they'd ask how, I didn't really have a good answer. Then I came across this guy.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  I've been known to be, well, a little bit forgetful.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Joshua Foer is a science journalist. For as long as he could remember, he'd had a terrible memory. What are the things that you've always had the hardest time remembering?

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Let's see, like, why I just opened the refrigerator, to put the toilet seat back down, just about every important anniversary and birthday of family members. I think maybe I've forgotten some of the things that I've forgotten.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Back in 2005, Josh got an odd reporting assignment.

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Slate magazine sends me to go cover this wacky sounding contest called the United States Memory Championship.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  The USA Memory Championship. What Josh observed were these competitive memorizers who had remarkable abilities. They could see photos of 100 strangers and remember all their names 20 minutes later. They could commit hundreds of random numbers to memory in just 15 minutes. And they could repeat the sequence of a whole deck of shuffled playing cards after looking at it for only five minutes.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  How does a person do that?

• 10:44Speaker 04

  I figure these are going to be like a bunch of freakish savants, rainmen, basically, who have these incredible memories. And what I discover is something totally different. They are just like normal people with normal memories in that they've trained themselves using a set of ancient techniques to become these memory champions. And I wanted to find out whether I could do that, too.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  So Josh, with his spotty memory, started training with a master of the sport and eventually wrote a book about the experience called Moonwalking with Einstein.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  They weren't making this up. It is absolutely true that when you learn these memory techniques, you can perform astounding feats of memory. And this is verified not just by my own experience, but by like 2,500 years of history of people using these techniques and by a whole bunch of science. Incredible memory capacities are latent inside of all of us if we sort of use the right techniques to awaken them.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  So how do these champion memorizers do memory?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  A lot of the earliest accounts that we have of memory techniques come from books on oratory, on how to be a persuasive speaker. And, you know, like when Cicero was getting up in the Roman Senate to deliver his stem winders, he was doing that from memory. If you want to memorize a speech, don't try and memorize it word for word because that's just going to like, it's going to make you sound robotic. You're going to, you know, forget the next word. That's not a good way to speak persuasively. What you should do is create an image of each of the topics that you want to talk about in your speech. Put the images of those topics. Into a memory palace.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  A memory palace. Because abstract words, numbers, and ideas get stickier when you connect them to a concrete image and a familiar place. So pick a place that you know well and mentally attach things you want to remember to vivid images inside the different rooms.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  You create a wild, crazy, funny, colorful, bizarre, grotesque image in your mind's eye of each word in a list of random words that you're trying to memorize. And you visualize that image in a different room of your house. And you walk through your house, creating these images. And when it comes time to recall the information, you just walk back through your house. And what you find is that the images are in the rooms where you left them. And I know that doesn't sound like it would work.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds a little ridiculous.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  It didn't sound to me like it would work the first time I heard about this. But it's remarkably effective. And what you find is that you can, like, almost immediately after learning this trick, you can memorize really long strings of information. You know, memorizing 100 random words in perfect order is almost trivial, once you know this trick.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  The key is a sense of place. Place really matters in memory. In a classic experiment, psychologists recruited a bunch of scuba divers to learn a few dozen new words. The divers learned some words on dry land and others underwater. 24 hours later, they were tested for recall. If divers had learned words underwater, they had a much harder time recalling them on dry land, and vice versa. They were able to remember 30% to 60% more of the words when they were in the setting where they had originally learned them.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So being back in the place where you learned something is where you find cues to help you retrieve it. And you can simulate that effect with a memory palace. If you put something in a particular place in your mind, you can revisit that place mentally at any time. Josh's go-to memory palace is the home where he grew up in DC.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  You know, I can walk in the door, I can see the black paint on the door and the brass mail slot. And I open it and there's this walnut credenza and floor made out of stone. And so when I create these visual images in that home, they are just like sticky. They become attached to all of these other memories that I have about that house. And so what I do, if I'm like, let's say, memorizing a shopping list, and I have to remember that the first item on the list is milk, say, I walk in that house and I would picture myself

• 15:24Speaker 04

  pouring a gallon of milk, maybe over my mother's head, in that entryway of the house. And I picture the dairy dripping down her head and like what that would smell like and how she would be really annoyed about it. And like, the more emotion and color you can attach to that image, the more likely it is that when I walk back through that house again later, I will be like, oh, you're right. Yes. In the foyer of the four house is my mother dripping with milk. I have to pick up milk from the grocery store.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  So does that mean you spend a few weeks a year just like wandering through buildings until you know them like the house you grew up in?

• 16:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. So there was a time, I mean, especially during this year, when I was training my memory, where I was basically a collector of architecture, so that I would have this whole kind of city of memory palaces available to me in the competition.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Nice. And so in a year of practicing that, you went from a journalist with a bad memory to what?

• 16:23Speaker 04

  Well, so the punchline of the story is I became the United States Memory Champion.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  So if you're interested in improving your memory, there's no one better to learn from than the forgetful guy who became the American memory champ in a year. Say you want to remember someone's name. What should you do?

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Come up with some sort of an association between the sound of a person's name and some aspect of their physical being. So what you're doing when you meet somebody is you're looking at them and saying like, hey, what's distinct about this person's physical presence? Something about their hair, something about their eyebrows, something about their ear. The truth is, you're looking for like, what is weird about this person? Which means that to do this well, you have to be a kind of judgmental schmuck.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Pop quiz. Do you remember Josh's last name? I said it a few minutes ago when I introduced him. But in case you need a refresher, here's how Josh approaches it.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  If I wanted to remember my last name, four, well, it sounds an awful lot like the number four. I would look at myself and say, you know, I'm going to carve a number four into his head with a little butcher knife. And I'm going to picture the blood dripping down his face. Again, the more color I can put into this image, the more likely it is I'm going to remember it later. And what I've done is I've just created an association between this name, which otherwise wouldn't mean anything to me, and this guy's face. And that's not a guarantee that I'm going to remember that name later on. But what it's done is given me just like a little hook that makes it that much more likely that when I run into this person at a later date, I'm going to be able to fish their name back out.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  It's obviously a fun parlor trick, but have you used this in your job at all to remember people's names or anything about their families or any arcane details like that?

• 18:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I certainly try to. There have been a few really delightful moments when I have remembered not just somebody's name, but like the name of their kid or some just esoteric detail that they had dropped into conversation where I can give myself a big pat on the back because like, you know, the truth is, when you remember something about somebody, you are demonstrating to them that you care.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Think about your favorite teachers. They're usually the ones who remember not only your name, but your interests and talents. I bet they also had a wealth of information at their fingertips. They could answer seemingly any question by reciting a compelling idea, quote, or data point from memory.

• 19:00Speaker 04

  One of the things that is true about memory is we develop great memories for domains in which we have a rich knowledge base. So it's like not a coincidence that, you know, if you are an American history professor, you're going to have a great memory for facts about American history. And you're going to be able to integrate new facts that you learn about American history into your memory much more easily because you can make more associations.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  You can see this in studies of chess players. Researchers positioned chess pieces around a board and asked both chess masters and amateurs to study the board for five seconds. Then they asked both groups to recall the positions of the pieces from memory.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  The beginners made tons of mistakes, only correctly remembering the locations of a few pieces. Chess masters were able to do it with stunning accuracy. They could perfectly recall the positions of more than 20 pieces. The logical conclusion? Having a great memory makes you a better chess player. Just like Sean McVay in football, you have immediate access to a personal library of past games to guide your current decisions.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  But what happened when researchers scrambled the board, putting the pieces in places where they'd never land in a real game? Suddenly, the experts were no better than the beginners. It turns out that experts don't necessarily have superior memories overall. They build up memories of specific patterns from years of experience.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  Everybody has a great memory for something, and it is usually the thing that you care the most about, that you're most interested in, that you've got the richest knowledge base for.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  For me in second grade, that was baseball. I remember my teacher being surprised that I could recall not only the names, but also the batting averages of every player on the Detroit Tigers. My friends made fun of me for it. They called me Mr. Facts. Apparently, it was annoying then, but it comes in handy now because my job is to be Mr. Facts. And the interest I have today in remembering psychology studies is pretty similar to how I felt as a kid about baseball stats.

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Your team or company has lots of people with deep memories of what's worked and what hasn't, all working under one roof. It's a huge pool of information, potentially at your fingertips. And it's the raw material from which creative ideas can emerge, if you can figure out how to access it. More on that after the break.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  OK, this is going to be a different kind of ad. I've played a personal role in selecting the sponsors for this podcast because they all have interesting cultures of their own. Today, we're going inside the workplace at Accenture.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Research shows that when people have to put up a facade at work, they're more likely to feel emotionally exhausted and burned out. But when they have the freedom to express their values, they feel energized.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  That five, 10 minutes that I go pray and I come back, I'm recharged all over again.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  That's Asma Shasamand. She's a devout Muslim.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  I use religion not as just an institutionalized mechanism, but more as a way of living. Because I think that in all religions, the core is to be a good person, you know, to treat others with love and kindness and compassion.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Asma immigrated to Canada in the 1990s. She was a small child. Her parents were fleeing a war.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  I was actually born in Afghanistan, in Kabul.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Do you remember anything about your time in Afghanistan?

• 22:45Speaker 05

  I do remember one vivid memory I have, which is we were in these trucks trying to escape. And they were hiding people under blankets and whatnot because they were war zone areas.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Wow, gosh, I'm sorry you had to go through that.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Her father eventually became an entrepreneur, and her mother studied engineering. Asma followed in their footsteps. She worked in tech and startups for years and was always wary of big companies.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  I had assumptions when I came in. And I was very hesitant, I have to say to you, because I was like, I'm not going to feel like I could fit in.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  But Asma was intrigued by Accenture's newly formed Canada Innovation Hub. She reached out to the head of technology there, who invited her to Accenture's office in downtown Toronto.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  When I came in, I was so delighted to see the amount of diverse backgrounds. You know, they were wearing hijab, they were different skin colors. And it was nice to see them around a table in an open space, talking.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And after those exploratory meetings.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  The girl that was working at reception that day, she told me in my language. She said, I hope that you join this firm. It's a good place to work. And she said it to me in Farsi, you know?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Asma eventually got a job at Accenture as a digital transformation manager. On her first day, she asked a coworker whether there was a place she could pray.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  I thought she was honestly going to take me to like a small, little cubicle. She took me to a room, then I looked inside and we had an ablution area.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Asma was taken aback by the level of care Accenture had put into getting the prayer room right. They didn't just have a place where Muslims could wash up before prayer. They also had prayer mats and dividers for people to pray separately.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  And I took a picture and I sent it to my mom. And it really reiterated my decision that I made a good decision. It's one thing to say that we're diverse. It's another thing to do it. Bringing your whole self to work is like you're flying because you are not only productive, you're happier and you're engaged in the work that you do because you now feel like you don't have to worry about those things that are so close and dear to you. You don't have to hold them so close and dear to you anymore that you have to protect them. You can now share them with people around you.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Accenture is working to become one of the most truly human companies in the digital age. Learn more at Accenture.com/careers.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  A great memory is a strong advantage in any workplace. But even stronger is a group with a great memory. Group memory is a roadmap to learning from the past. It helps you access good ideas that might have been forgotten and avoid repeating strategies that have already tanked.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  There are a lot of efforts to create sort of knowledge repositories or databases of past solutions.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Andrew Hargadon is a technology management expert at UC Davis. He studies how organizations create and use knowledge.

• 25:46Speaker 06

  Consulting firms will have large databases of every presentation they've ever given to a client. And what was interesting about those was often how little people used them. If at all, they used them as essentially a glorified Yellow Pages to figure out who had done something related, and then they would immediately call those people.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  But people change jobs, they change firms, they retire. What do you do when there's no one left to call? You need systems for storing and retrieving this kind of information, so it's not lost when the person who knows it is lost. You need an organizational memory. Organizational memory is the collection of every product and campaign and strategy that a company has tried. As you can probably guess, a collection like that gets messy, fast.

• 26:39Speaker 06

  When we talk about organization's memory, we think of it like a computer, where there's a file stored somewhere and we just need to track it down. But in terms particularly of smaller groups and teams, collective memory is more like a human memory. It's not always that simple to retrieve the right memory at the right time.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  It gets even harder as your organization gets older. The store of past knowledge is richer, and the people who created it are long gone. So what does the organizational memory of a century-old company look like?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  It looks like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones-style, thousands of boxes, hundreds of thousands of photographic prints, thousands of material samples, probably almost 100 pieces of furniture.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  We're in southwest Michigan at a furniture company called Herman Miller. They produced some of the most iconic pieces of furniture for work and home in the 20th century: the Aaron Chair, the Noguchi Table, the Eames Lounge, and, love it or hate it, the Office Cubicle.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Amy Osherman is their corporate archivist. She took us on a tour of Herman Miller's memory.

• 27:55Speaker 07

  By our safe drawer, we have every ad that Herman Miller has produced, starting from 1931 to now. So here's an advertisement from the October 8, 1949 issue of The New Yorker. "America's foremost collection of modern furniture, sculpture and wood and glass." So that's cool.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Herman Miller is 114 years old. Its organizational memory is all the information and knowledge that's built up in that time. Amy's job is to make sense out of all of it.

• 28:34Speaker 07

  I sometimes call myself the fancy dumpster because people will find old product and recognize that it's old, thankfully, and say, oh, it should go to Amy.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  There are drawers full of old templates, shelves full of old pieces of furniture, but there are also the stories that people tell about the place and the histories of various collaborations that resulted in products and ads. And all of that past can be drawn on when inventing the company's future.

• 29:01Speaker 07

  Should we go in the vault?

• 29:04Speaker 07

  Chairs everywhere.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Many of the company's most popular pieces were first designed after World War II.

• 29:10Speaker 07

  This is like kind of the furniture hall of fame. And here, Eames Wire Chairs up top. Ooh, 1922. Oh, it smells like vinegar, so it's probably not a good thing. This chair was designed for the very top of the Time Life Building in New York.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  The engineers and designers at Herman Miller have to evolve their products to suit changes in taste and newer forms of production and marketing, all while staying consistent with their historic look and feel. And to do all those things, they head for the archives. The role of an archivist becomes important for collecting the ideas of the past, adding the ideas of the present, and finding creative ways of combining the two.

• 29:54Speaker 08

  It's hard for me to imagine a week that goes by that I don't have some kind of conversation with Amy in our archives.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Ben Watson is the chief creative officer at Herman Miller.

• 30:07Speaker 08

  About a product that hasn't seen the light of day for decades, or a part of the organization that no longer exists.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  A few years ago, the company relaunched the Herman Miller collection of home and office furniture. It was based on the modern-looking pieces that had originally made Herman Miller a big name in the 50s. So the design team looked back to its origins.

• 30:29Speaker 08

  By opening the archive, which included not only catalogs from every year, actual sketches and diagrams of designs that were never produced, variants of designs that were long since forgotten, we uncovered all kinds of solutions that the so-called experts didn't know anything about. And many of those discoveries led us to produce new ideas that became part of the collection, which today is a growing and thriving part of our business. With significant amount of revenue, we found a lot of products that had a lot of resonance for today that we'd all forgotten about.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Your workplace probably doesn't have an archivist, but you can play that role in your team, especially if you're doing creative work. Because although innovation can seem like a bolt from the blue, it's often the result of remembering ideas from one setting and applying them to another.

• 31:31Speaker 06

  Most innovations aren't novel ideas. They're simply ideas that a new audience hasn't heard yet.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Andrew Harganon has found that it's critical to organize and access memories of what's worked and what hasn't.

• 31:44Speaker 06

  People who study organizations recognize, obviously, that organizations do things over and over. And they often get good at things, and they keep the good things, and they embed them somehow in the organization. They set up standard operating procedures. They set up routines.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Apparently, at one car supplier, engineers spent almost a third of their time solving issues that had already been solved elsewhere in their company. A good memory system can prevent that by making it easy for people to access existing solutions.

• 32:17Speaker 06

  But the challenge comes in when we need to distinguish between doing the same thing over and over and doing different things. And memory plays a key role in both of those. If we did something right and we want to keep doing it, we want to support that behavior. We want to encode it, sort of record it and play it back again. But we also want to misremember them when we start to come up with or start to look for new solutions. And that's where memory can play the second role, which is give us that big grab bag of things we've seen in the past that could be used in a different way again later.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  To understand how organizations draw on the memories of old products to solve new problems, Andrew studied the creative firm Design Continuum. A medical company had tasked them with designing something called a pulsed lavage.

• 33:10Speaker 06

  Pulsed lavage. It's an emergency room tool that creates a high-pressured pulse of saline solution. And it's used when you have a motorcycle accident or a bike accident and somebody's got a lot of gravel or dirt in a wound and you need to clean that wound out effectively.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  It needed to be safe, cheap, and disposable. Others had struggled to crack it, but the designers figured it out in just a few days, thanks to a little trip down organizational memory lane.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Years earlier, their company had developed a totally different product that could solve the problem. They'd even tested it on their kids.

• 33:50Speaker 06

  They developed super soakers, those high-pressure squirt guns.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  So they took that knowledge out of organizational memory and applied it to hospitals.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  They designed a super soaker for an emergency room. And low and behold, it ended up working out really well. They had to change the type of plastic and some of the design for medical product guidelines. But in all other ways, it was basically just a slightly more expensive super soaker.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Those who can't remember the past are doomed to miss opportunity.

• 34:22Speaker 06

  When we think about memory, we think about it as knowledge, as bits of knowledge. We don't think about remembering and the role that remembering plays in making a new sense of that knowledge. Most of the value of our memories really comes out in finding new uses for them.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  To find new uses for old ideas, you need a way to remember them. You might not have access to a rich archive of squirt guns. You probably haven't mastered the memory palace yet either. If you want to remember something right away, you can start with three steps. One, take a break. In one experiment, taking a 10-minute break after learning something improved recall for students by 10 to 30% and even more for stroke and Alzheimer's patients. Two, quiz yourself. There's a wealth of evidence that studying, rereading, and highlighting are inferior to just taking practice tests. By retrieving information from your memory, you make it easier to find again.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Three, tell someone else about it. New research reveals that the best way to learn something really is to teach it. Not just because you understand it better when you explain it, but also because you remember it better after you recall it. So if you want to commit anything in this episode to memory, go to a dark, quiet room and do nothing for 10 minutes. Then quiz yourself on the material and share a summary of your key takeaways with somebody else.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Work Life is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Greta Cohn, Jessica Glaser, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Angela Cheng, and Janet Lee. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwan. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Layton Brown. Ad stories produced by Pineapple Street Media. Special thanks to our sponsors. Accenture, Bonobos, Hilton, and JP Morgan Chase. Next time on Work Life.

• 36:39Speaker 09

  You know when your boss and your boss's boss and HR is sitting in the room that it's not gonna be good.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Facing rejection and bouncing back.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  [1.76-2.96] The experiment with scuba divers[3.03-4.93] was done by Duncan Godden and Alan Battley.[5.46-7.03] The classic studies of chess players[7.06-8.26] were by Adrian de Groot,[8.29-9.76] William Chase, and Herb Simon.[10.66-12.26] Appreciation to the late Dan Wagner[12.29-14.26] for his seminal work on transactive memory.[14.83-16.36] And a shout out to Neil McCray and colleagues[16.39-17.16] on source memory.[17.93-18.89] Thanks to Christian Jarrett,[18.93-20.36] Ulrich Bozer, and David Robson[20.39-21.46] for writing great summaries[21.49-22.93] of the research on encoding learning[22.96-24.86] through teaching, testing, and relaxing.[25.93-27.76] To Deborah Encona and Jim Walsh[27.83-29.36] for their scholarship on innovation[29.39-31.26] and organizational memory.[31.33-33.83] And to Patricia Cullen on facades of conformity.[34.79-36.26] Finally, thanks to Bleacher Report[36.29-37.33] for the Sean McVay audio.[44.13-45.36] I don't know if you've seen the research[45.40-48.33] on what's sometimes called kleptomnesia,[48.36-50.96] where you misremember other people's ideas as your own.[51.13-52.76] Did you say kleptonecia?[53.26-54.03] Kleptomnesia.[54.06-54.56] Kleptomnesia.[54.60-55.10] I love it.[55.13-55.66] OK.[55.73-56.36] Oh, that's brilliant.[56.53-57.16] Do you have any advice[57.20-58.66] on how to avoid those kinds of errors?[58.73-64.83] Oof. How to be less of a thief of other people's ideas?[65.33-66.83] I gotta get that some thought.[67.00-81.13] Experiment with scuba divers was done by Duncan Godden and Alan Battley. The classic studies of chess players were by Adrian de Groot, William Chase, and Herb Simon. Appreciation to the late Dan Wagner for his seminal work on transactive memory. And a shout out to Neil McCray and colleagues on source memory. Thanks to Christian Jarrett, Ulrich Bosser, and David Robson for writing great summaries of the research on encoding learning through teaching, testing, and relaxing. To Deborah Ancona and Jim Walsh for their scholarship on innovation and organizational memory. And to Patricia Hulen on facades of conformity. Finally, thanks to Bleacher Report for the Sean McVay audio.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  I don't know if you've seen the research on what's sometimes called kleptomnesia, where you misremember other people's ideas as your own.

• 37:42Speaker 04

  Did you say kleptoneja?

• 37:44Speaker 01

  Kleptomnesia.

• 37:45Speaker 04

  Kleptomnesia. I love it. Okay. Oh, that's brilliant.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  Do you have any advice on how to avoid those kinds of errors?

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Oof. How to be less of a thief of other people's ideas? I gotta get that some thought.