I turned to the research of one of the foremost authorities on group conflict, the management professor Karen Jehn. During her long career, with stops at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, Jehn had conducted studies on teams that showed that certain kinds of disagreements didn’t have a negative effect—in fact, teams that had high levels of conflict were often more likely to engage in open discussions that helped them arrive at novel solutions to problems. The worst outcomes came when groups engaged in thoughtless agreements.
