Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement

by Buster Benson

The fourth voice, the voice of possibility, represents a way to approach conflict that diverges from the first three.

first three voices attempt to resolve conflict, because conflict is seen as a problem. The voice of possibility seeks to make conflict productive, in the same way that a skilled gardener realizes that weeds are merely unloved flowers, and sometimes those unloved flowers produce sweet, sweet berries that can make delicious pies.

It encourages us to step back from the automatic impulse toward resolution in order to look for other ways the conflict might be productive. It sees a disagreement as a sign pointing to something we don’t yet fully understand, and seeks to learn from it instead of just getting rid of it.

listen to whatever voice is in your head for a moment and try to determine if this is a voice of power, reason, avoidance, or possibility. Then ask it some questions: What’s urgent right now? What’s threatening right now? What could I be doing right now instead of this? How can I know if these answers are really serving my best interests? What would happen if I did nothing?

SOME OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY CITED BIASES

Availability heuristic: When making decisions, we consider only the options that come to mind easily. Things that don’t, for whatever reason, are therefore at a severe disadvantage.

In-group favoritism: We tend to favor people in our group and give them the benefit of the doubt more than people outside our group.

Loss aversion: We value things that we already have more than things we don’t have yet and would give more to keep the things we have than we would have paid to acquire them in the first place.

We’d be in big trouble without our biases, because we would be exposed to the raw fire-hose stream of information coming at us without any filters, without any means to create stories or decisions from it, and we would become paralyzed with information and options pertaining to almost every little decision we make.

Out of sheer evolutionary necessity, we’ve developed skills, practices, and habits that help us compensate for these conundrums. The conundrums are:

Too much information:

Not enough meaning:

Not enough time and resources:

“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead—it’s better.

I am here.

These sayings are all attempts at reinforcing a bias for action, because it’s better than the alternative of hesitating and thereby guaranteeing that a decision will be late without much improving its chances of being right.

This is the point in the book where I'm skeptical a.f. because it sounds like we're leaning into that Silicon Valley bullshit.

Are Right, A Lot Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.

This interesting my LEAST FAVORITE Leadership Principle because it makes me think of Mayhew.

Discomfort is key to our growth, and desirable.

but you can’t. Instead of saying, “I know I’m right!” say, “I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. Can you help me get there?” You don’t have enough information yet to know if what you think they are saying is what they’re actually saying. Instead of getting angry, get curious. Doing so will radically change your relationships to people, ideas, and the world by allowing new perspectives to reach you that would have otherwise been immediately dismissed.

But I already do this … and I'm still waiting on the evidence.

We’re just not that great at representing the perspectives of other people when they differ from our own.

We are the primary source of truth for our own hearts.

Even then, they are representing their perspective and not the perspective of all migrants.

Yeah sure but can we ack that you need to build understanding about groups through sampling??

Continue inviting people to the conversation until you have enough perspectives to talk about the issue without speculation.

OK it’s the very next sentence but still

Ask Questions That Invite Surprising Answers

I'm trying to learn how! This has come up in some other reading AND in counseling sessions -- and I find myself thinking "of course, seems so simple" But I also feel like I struggle to put this into practice.

One of the best tools to balance impatience for a quick answer with the desire to actually land on the best possible answer is asking great questions. Great questions invite great answers, and the best answers surprise us by revealing something that we truly didn’t understand before.

One time, a man I read some cards with burst into tears because he believed the cards had sent him a message from his recently deceased horse.

Tarot as therapy

generally the voice of power is pretty ineffective at making demands that involve belief.

Even when it’s applied sensitively, scientific skepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic, heartless, and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of others.

Quoting Carl Sagan here

But while avoidance might reduce the chances of a pointless or unproductive conversation about ghosts, it effectively closes off an entire topic that might be productive to explore as well.

This is the never-ending agenda of the voice of reason, because in order to make sense of each thing it has to connect it back up to all the other things that roll up to the higher authority that gives power to the wielder of reason.

When our brain sees too many faces and creatures, we call it apophenia, and when we don’t see enough faces and creatures, we call it prosopagnosia.

In the past, I might have quickly agreed or disagreed with the story and then proceeded to reinforce or tear apart the details about what “actually” happened. But there’s no rule saying that we need to do that—it’s a conversational habit that the voice of reason has invented as a way to keep groups committed to a common cause.

Great questions create space for surprising answers to fill them. If we ask questions that can only yield answers that we already expect, we’ll never be surprised and we’ll never find a new wandering path through the world.

To ask a good question, walk right up to the perimeter of your current understanding about something and find a question that you don’t know the answer to.

A bad question not only gets lower-resolution answers but also squanders an opportunity to create a space that the other person feels comfortable sharing into.

FOUR FRUITS OF DISAGREEMENT Security, growth, connection, and enjoyment

Ultimately, productive disagreements return the same or more security in addition to the other three fruits.

Generous listening is powered by curiosity, a virtue we can invite and nurture in ourselves to render it instinctive. It involves a kind of vulnerability—a willingness to be surprised, to let go of assumptions and take in ambiguity.

My favorite term for this bad habit is nutpicking—we pick out the nuttiest nut we can find on the opposing side, because they’re the easiest to tear apart.

Remember cognitive strategy number 7: Favor the familiar? This strategy creates a blind spot when it comes to building our own arguments, because we end up being a bit too lenient on ourselves. But it actually makes us great at identifying flaws in other people’s arguments. Which means the reverse is also true—our opponents are better equipped to identify the flaws in our arguments than we are.

The story continues in this grim manner, eventually making its point that we’re unable to see the loopholes in our own desires.

The story = "The Monkey's Paw" (you know the one!)

Do you naturally gravitate toward fighting back with power and reason, shrink away and avoid disagreement entirely, or approach the conflict with open-ended questions?

NO on power SOMEWHAT on reason SOMEWHAT (less) on avoidance UNSURE on open-ended

A conflict of heart can’t be solved with facts and figures;

In a conversation without much goodwill, people are generally skeptical that a productive disagreement can happen, and given all of the other things competing for people’s attention, the small chance that a thoughtful conversation might work didn’t outweigh the cost.

As we ate, passing dishes and bottles across the table, and slowly filled our bellies with sustenance, it felt completely natural to also pass extremely different experiences and stories among us.

This is what Feasting is all about.

There’s something tribal and inclusive about eating food together.

YES

This size cap encouraged deep and flowing conversations at the team level, while discouraging it between teams—and despite incredible skepticism from pretty much everyone at the time, it worked.

RE: 2 pizza teams But this practice also results in siloing

Though it sounds wacky, I believe it’s because the voices of reason and force are repelled by the social ritual of eating together.

That isn't wacky!

Now put aside the argument itself and think about the environment that the argument happened within. Was there anything about the environment that encouraged or discouraged different fruit of disagreement to emerge?

When a disagreement sparks in a work context, with your boss, the voice of reason is probably going to speak loudest. There are formalities to disagreement in professional settings. On the other hand, when you’re out with your boss after work and getting a drink, some of that formality can fall away, opening the disagreement up to more contributions from the voice of possibility.

There are three things we should consider about the spaces that disagreements enter in to.