How to complexify your thinking, and why you should.

The Next Big Idea Daily newsletter?(SUBSCRIBE)?is written by me,?Michael Kovnat, and gathers insights from today’s leading non-fiction authors. It’s a companion to our?Next Big Idea Daily?podcast, available on?Apple?or?Spotify.

You know who Adam Grant is, right? If you don't know him as one of the four curators of The Next Big Idea Club, you might know him as a renowned organizational psychologist and a leading light on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. But most likely you've heard of him from his bestselling books, his popular podcast, or his viral TED talks.

Adam's an extremely prolific and productive guy. So much so that it can be hard to keep track of all the ideas he generates or shares. But I'd like to pause on one that came up in his most recent book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know, and which he shared on this week's Next Big Idea Daily podcast.

It's an idea he refers to as complexifying. Basically, it's a technique for resisting your natural tendency to simplify when thinking, to reduce everything to stark contrasts -- right and wrong, black and white. Psychologists call it binary bias, and it certainly has its place. It helps us quickly choose sides in an argument, sum things up, and make decisions.

But when it comes to thinking, Adam argues the binary bias does us a disservice. It narrows and distorts a generally more complex reality, and if we can push past simple either/or categories and consider a wider range of possibilities, our ideas grow sturdier, our dialogues richer, and our decisions more sound.

Hear Adam Grant explain why you should complexify the world.

Adam was only one of the authors we heard from this week. We also got some big ideas from:

• Actor Rainn Wilson on why we need a spiritual revolution.
• Business professor David Dodson on how to lead a team.
• Historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on why America is obsessed with fitness.
• Foreign correspondent Jane Ferguson on the recipe for a meaningful career.

Have a listen to any - or all - of these episodes, and then let us how you introduces complexity into your own thinking.

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