Adam Grant’s “Think Again” explains why the fastest court reporter in the world designed a system that fails 93 percent of its students.
The 93 percent failure rate of brief-heavy stenography is not caused by a lack of student discipline, but by a pedagogical model designed by an outlier who is trapped in a cognitive loop of overconfidence.
The fastest court reporter in the world is locked in a loop he cannot see.
Mark Kislingbury’s personal achievements are undeniable. He holds world speed records. He is a generational talent. But when you look at the outcomes of the system he designed—Magnum Steno—the data tells a different story. According to 14 years of FOIA data from the Texas Workforce Commission, his own academy has a 7 percent completion rate .
Why does a generational talent build a system that fails 93 percent of the people who attempt it? And more importantly, why doesn’t that failure rate cause him to change the system?
In his book Think Again, organizational psychologist Adam Grant outlines two cognitive loops: The Rethinking Cycle and the Overconfidence Cycle . The Rethinking Cycle is driven by humility and doubt. The Overconfidence Cycle is driven by pride and conviction.
When you map the Overconfidence Cycle onto Magnum Steno, the 93 percent failure rate suddenly makes perfect sense. It is not a bug in the system. It is the inevitable result of an architect trapped in the wrong loop.
“We Believe We’ve Already Found the Truth”
Grant explains the descent into the Overconfidence Cycle perfectly:
“When we shift out of scientist mode, the rethinking cycle breaks down, giving way to an overconfidence cycle. If we’re preaching, we can’t see gaps in our knowledge: we believe we’ve already found the truth. Pride breeds conviction rather than doubt, which makes us prosecutors: we might be laser-focused on changing other people’s minds, but ours is set in stone.”
Here is how those four stages—Pride, Conviction, Confirmation Bias, and Validation—play out in the design and defense of brief-heavy stenography.
1. Pride
Pride is the starting point. Kislingbury achieved elite status using a highly specific, memorization-heavy approach to stenography. That personal success generates immense pride. He didn’t just learn a skill; he mastered it at a level no one else had.
2. Conviction
Pride hardens into Conviction. As Grant notes, this turns the architect into a prosecutor whose mind “is set in stone.” The thought process shifts from “This method worked incredibly well for my specific brain” to “This method is the universally correct way to write steno.” Conviction removes nuance. It transforms a personal biological advantage—an outlier capacity for working memory and pattern recognition—into a pedagogical mandate for everyone else.
3. Confirmation & Desirability Biases
This is where the trap snaps shut. Grant writes: “That launches us into confirmation bias and desirability bias.” When you have Conviction, you only see what confirms your belief.
When a student with a similar outlier brain successfully completes the Magnum Steno program, that is Confirmation Bias. It proves the system works.
But what about the 93 percent who fail? Here, Desirability Bias takes over. It is highly desirable to believe that your system is flawless. Therefore, the failure cannot be the fault of the system’s design. It must be the fault of the student. They didn’t practice enough. They lacked discipline. They weren’t committed. The system remains perfect; the human material is simply flawed.
4. Validation
The cycle completes when those few successful students go out into the world and achieve high speeds. Their success Validates the original Pride. The loop closes, tighter and stronger than before.
The Missing Mechanism: Doubt
What is missing from the Overconfidence Cycle? Doubt.
In Grant’s Rethinking Cycle, the loop goes: Humility → Doubt → Curiosity → Discovery.
Humility is the willingness to look at a 7 percent completion rate and say, “Maybe my system is asking the human brain to do something it wasn’t built to do.”
Doubt is the mechanism that triggers Curiosity. If you doubt the system, you get curious about why it is failing. You start looking at cognitive load. You start looking at human performance physics. You start realizing that demanding a student memorize 90,000 briefs is not a test of their discipline, but a violation of their biological limits.
But you cannot reach Curiosity if you never allow Doubt. And you cannot allow Doubt if you are locked in Conviction.
The Ferrari Fallacy
Imagine a Formula 1 driver deciding to open a driving school. Because he is an elite driver, he decides that the best way to teach driving is to put every 16-year-old student into a Ferrari on day one and tell them to take the corners at 140 miles per hour.
When 93 percent of the students crash the cars, the driver doesn’t say, “Maybe a Ferrari is the wrong vehicle for a beginner.” He says, “These kids just don’t have the discipline to be drivers.”
He is technically correct that a Ferrari is faster than a Honda Civic. But he is catastrophically wrong about how human beings learn to drive.
Mark Kislingbury is the Formula 1 driver. Magnum Steno is the Ferrari. And the court reporting profession is handing the keys to thousands of students without realizing that the architect of the car has never once doubted its design.
Breaking the Loop
We cannot wait for the architects of brief-heavy systems to enter the Rethinking Cycle. The commercial and psychological incentives to remain in the Overconfidence Cycle are simply too strong.
Instead, the profession itself must enter the Rethinking Cycle. We must have the humility to look at the data, the doubt to question the pedagogical models we have inherited, and the curiosity to build systems that align with human biology rather than fighting against it.
Tom Fernicola is a 37-year working court reporter and the author of The Science of Steno: Why Court Reporting Is So Hard. He applies cognitive load theory and human performance physics to stenographic training. Read the research at tomfernicola.substack.com or visit brevitysteno.com.