How do you break into the music business, with no industry knowledge, experience or connections?

Adam Grant talks to Sophia Chang and Michael Ostin about their enduring mentoring relationship and how it helped her become the first Asian-American woman in hip-hop. With fellow organisational psychologist Belle Rose Ragins, Adam explores mentoring and the value it holds for both guide and learner and busts a few myths that can derail the experience. Belle and Adam also look at why most formal workplace mentoring programs fall short, and how to avoid common pitfalls. With Patrice Gordon, a former aviation industry commercial leader, they look at how workplace reverse mentoring can supercharge efforts to build bridges between different minority groups, worldviews, and lives lived. Take a listen here.

Scientists might tell you, with a smile on their face, that 95% of their experiments fail. How happy would you be with that failure rate in your work?

We loved Amy Edmondson’s latest book Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive. Why? Well, it’s story-led (always a good thing), packed with useful insights and practical advice. We liked the separation of intelligent failures, where learning happens because new knowledge is made available, and mistakes, where for whatever reason we don’t do what we know. We also recognised that learning from failure isn’t as easy as it sounds; as human beings we like to succeed, it’s embarrassing to talk about it when we do fail, and the groups we are part of often equate failure with poor performance. And yet those individuals, teams and organisations that enjoy enduring success, and our plaudits, fail more frequently than the rest of us.

If you’re curious about how to embrace failure in your work, we spoke to artist and photographer Erik Kessels on The Being Human Podcast. His personal stories reveal a refreshingly positive take on unexpected outcomes, built on a willingness to remain curious, withhold judgement and avoid certainty. Take a listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How giving time and space to an opposing voice cost James Bennet his job at the New York Times, and why he’d do the same thing again in a heartbeat.

How the New York Times lost its way from The Economist is a challenging read that describes events that unfolded following the reaction to the publication of US Senator Tom Cotton’s op-ed column in 2020. It’s written by James Bennet, the Times editorial-page editor at the time, who published the opinion piece in the interests of presenting debate from all sides and was then ousted from his job in the ensuing backlash from Times’ staff who took offence. If you care about or believe in the need for a free and open press, this is a must read. But it’s also a personal story about belonging, and what it feels like when what you believe in and stand for no longer aligns with those around you.

How can we maintain a positive outlook and at the same time accept the harsh and difficult realities of the situations we find ourselves in?

Context is everything. We invariably don’t have the full picture. Pieces of the puzzle will be revealed to us over time, but with practice we can become more aware of truths that challenge our preconceptions and broaden our understanding. Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist whose work led to a paradigm shift in her thinking about climate change, unearthing more reasons for hope than despair. Here’s an edited extract from her story, which reminded us of The Stockdale Paradox, a concept developed by Jim Collins, which encourages us to maintain a firm belief that we will rise to the difficult challenges we face, and at the same time have the discipline to confront the harsh realities of our situations.