4 Proven Rethinking Skills for Strong Marketing Strategies
THE COMFORT OF BEING RIGHT (Including Your Marketing Strategies)
Nobody sets out to run a losing campaign into the ground, and it tends to happen gradually, through small refusals that each feel perfectly reasonable in the moment: a slow quarter gets blamed on the weather or the season instead of the offer, because admitting the offer was wrong means admitting the plan was wrong, and an agency or a hire who isn’t delivering gets another ninety days instead of an honest conversation, because ending the relationship feels like a bigger failure than waiting quietly for things to improve. Each of those refusals feels like loyalty, to the plan, to the decision, and to the version of yourself who was so sure about it, and stacked together they explain why a business can spend a year finding out what one honest look at the numbers would have shown in a week.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant describes three default modes people fall into when a belief gets challenged, and you have probably seen all three in a marketing meeting: the preacher, who defends the original plan as sacred, the prosecutor, who goes after anyone who questions it, and the politician, who campaigns for approval instead of asking whether the plan still holds. All three protect the ego while doing very little for the business, and together they are a kind of cognitive laziness that prefers the comfort of a settled opinion over the discomfort of checking it.1
Business Decision-Making: WHAT THE RESEARCH SHOWS
The people most certain they are right are, on average, the ones who checked it least. In a widely cited study, participants who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of logic and grammar rated their own performance in the 62nd percentile — more than fifty points above where they actually landed.2 Confidence and competence are not the same instrument, and the gap between them is where most bad business decisions live.
The opposite pattern shows up in forecasting research. Philip Tetlock’s multi-year Good Judgment Project tracked thousands of forecasters and found that a small group — dubbed superforecasters — consistently outperformed professional analysts. Their edge was not raw intelligence, it was a habit Tetlock calls active open-mindedness: treating a forecast as a draft, actively hunting for the evidence that would prove it wrong, and revising it in small steps as new information arrived.3 That same habit, applied to a bid, a hire, or a service line, is why one owner adjusts in month three and another adjusts in month eighteen.
Four Business Skills for Improvement and Better Marketing Strategies
In the Adam Grant rethinking book, Think Again, he splits rethinking into three levels, individual, interpersonal, and collective, and each level has a practical skill underneath it, while a fourth belongs alongside them because none of the first three stick unless the business also rewards the behavior once someone practices it. Taken together they work as business skills you can train on purpose, and they apply as much to marketing strategies, a media plan, or a brand message as they do to hiring and pricing.
01
Think Like A Scientist
Treat a new decision as a hypothesis instead of a position to defend. Before committing budget or headcount, write down what result would prove the plan wrong and set the date you will check for it. A hypothesis with a built-in checkpoint is far easier to abandon than a plan tied to your judgment.
02
Trade Confidence For Confident Humility
Confident humility is certainty in your ability to figure something out, paired with real doubt about your current answer. Before locking in a bid, a vendor, or a hire, list three specific ways you could be wrong. If the list comes easily, the decision was not as settled as it felt.
03
Run Disagreement As A Dance
Task conflict — disagreement over ideas — sharpens decisions. Relationship conflict — disagreement that turns personal — wrecks teams. In planning meetings, assign someone the explicit job of arguing the other case. Separating the argument from the person making it keeps the debate useful instead of tense.
04
Pay People For Changing Their Mind, Not Just For Being Right
A learning culture needs psychological safety and accountability together, not one instead of the other. In post-mortems, ask what would change your mind next time, and credit the person who flagged the problem early.
Thinking like a scientist without confident humility just produces a well-run experiment nobody is willing to end. Running disagreement as a dance without rewarding the person who spoke up just trains a team to stop disagreeing after the first time it didn’t seem to matter. Together, the four form what Grant calls a challenge network — a small group of people who want to see the owner succeed and are willing to say, in plain terms, where the plan is thin. That network has to be built on purpose: asked for, rewarded when it speaks up, and protected from the instinct to treat disagreement as disloyalty.
The market doesn’t wait for anyone to feel ready to be wrong. Every plan gets corrected eventually — either by the owner who built in the checkpoints, or by the numbers that finally force the conversation nobody wanted to have three months earlier. Rethinking is simply a way of choosing which one it’s going to be.
WHO IS VOLP AGENCY
Volp Agency is a team of specialists in copywriting, design, paid traffic, and audiovisual production. Building campaigns that target the right audience with the right offer, to grow your sales.
Sources
*1 Grant, A. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking, 2021.
*2 Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. Bottom-quartile performers scored in the 12th percentile but rated themselves in the 62nd.
*3 Tetlock, P. & Gardner, D. Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown, 2015, drawing on the Good Judgment Project (2011–2015).