“If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.” That quote from CEO and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, stops a lot of people in their tracks. Leaders and employees alike often try to minimize conflict, to keep the peace, to move the meeting along and make sure everyone feels heard. But here's the truth. Agreement feels good, but it doesn't always get us the best outcomes. Today we're talking about the value of disagreement, how to design for it, how to do it well, and why. Conflict, when handled thoughtfully, is a strategic benefit.

So in the next 20 minutes, you're going to learn how to turn disagreement into a design feature for great teams, transforming conflict from something to be avoided into a catalyst for sharper thinking that better decisions and stronger collaboration. Now, let's start by looking at the problem with agreement culture, which quite frankly is what most of you have in your workplaces. So in many workplaces, agreement is overvalued. Teams rush towards consensus to avoid discomfort or save time, and there is often a false sense of agreement. And in fact, Patrick Lencioni, in his book the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, refers to this as false harmony. False harmony--so teams appear to be aligned, but they're actually disengaged, or they're silently disagreeing with one another, or they're just agreeing to get it over with already. And the result? Well, you've probably heard the term group think, and this is a term made popular by social psychologist Irving Janis, who is a researcher at Yale University.

He wrote a book by that name, groupthink, in 1972. He was not the first person to come up with the term, but he is the one who popularized it and did the most research on it. And when the idea behind groupthink is that when people suppress their dissent to maintain harmony, decisions suffer. Like, you just don't make the best decision. And in fact, sometimes you make decisions that are absolutely contrary to the best interests of the organization or the team or the client relationship, whatever it is. Okay, so let's look at a user experience parallel here. When designers avoid critique sessions, or when product owners avoid the results from their usability and user experience, teams then bad ideas make it into production. You can't iterate something if no one is telling you to change it, or if you're not listening to the results, when people are wanting to change things.

So designers know this intuitively and they expect their prototypes to get torn to shreds in critique. It's not personal, it's productive in the workplace. We take that disagreement to mean something much more personal. We take it very personally, and that's where we get stuck. So that's what I'm talking about when I say agreement culture. We're in this sort of like everybody wants to make everybody feel good and nobody wants to make it. It's more like nobody wants to make anybody feel bad. So let's look on the other hand at why conflict when it's done well? And specifically, I also want us to frame this as disagreement.

Not necessarily so much conflict per se, but disagreement like constructive disagreement. So let's look at why disagree when done well, works and works powerfully. So research consistently shows that disagreement about ideas and not people. So this is task disagreement improves decision quality, increases innovation, and makes people more excited to be on those teams. It's just more rigorous. Now, Charlan Nemeth, Psychologist at UC Berkeley, found that minority dissent stimulates divergent thinking. So let's unpack that for a minute. What do we mean by minority dissent? So we mean just a few people, not minorities per se, but just a couple of people in the minority dissent.

So they are disagreeing with kind of the prevailing thinking of the team, the group, the organization that stimulates divergent thinking. And I've talked about divergent thinking here on the podcast before. We'll link up the episode to divergent thinking in the show notes for you if you want to go grab that one. But when we're doing that divergent thinking, like getting big numbers of ideas and just thinking broadly, that is so helpful before we start to converge on like the best idea. So we really need to have those divergent thinking skills sharp. So again, when a handful of people are dissent, you know, are expressing their dissent, that's going to stimulate divergent thinking. Even when the dissenting view is wrong. You don't have to be right to, you know, to disagree.

You can powerfully disagree and be wrong, but it forces other people to think more deeply and more creatively. You could almost think of it as the playing the devil's advocate, if you will. And you don't play the devil's advocate to be right in suggesting that, you know, poking holes in, in the prevailing opinions or trying to get people to see things differently, it's not about being right, it's just truly about expanding people's minds, expanding people's thinking and coming up with the best decision possible. Now, Amy Edmondson, who is a researcher at Harvard, her research on psychological safety shows that when teams have more open, respectful debate and dialogue that they outperform teams that avoid it. And the idea behind psychological safety is that you're not going to get punished for something that you say, you know, whether it's a off the wall idea or whatever and so. But that it is a psychologically safe place to take risks and to not have negative repercussions from taking those risk. Now, in Bezos world, conflict is a feature of innovation.

It's not a flaw. Conflict and disagreement specifically. So his leadership philosophy, disagree and commit, relies on debate as part of the decision making process. And so what he means by disagree and commit is we're going to have an open debate. We don't expect there is going to be any sort of consensus or unanimity in what we decide. There are going to be some, some people who think that it should be done this way and some people who think that it should be done that way. And at the end of our discussion, there will almost undoubtedly still be some disagreement, but we will have chosen a path forward. So if we've got option A or option B, we have a really healthy debate where people are encouraged to disagree with one another and encouraged to put, you know, lay all the cards out on the table and really have an honest discussion about option A versus option B.

Well then let's say we decide on option B as the path forward, but all of those option A people are not necessarily convinced. And what Bezos, what Jeff Bezos is talking about here when he says disagree and commit is you can still disagree, but you got to get on board because the decision was made. You can't hold out, you can't resist. You can't be, you know, quietly subverting that decision. So if there was a healthy debate, everybody got to say their piece. We've heard all sides of the issue. Now it is time to make a decision because we just stay in analysis paralysis. We have to make a decision to move forward.

And the culture there is some of you are going to disagree with whatever gets decided, but you still have to commit and get on board. It doesn't mean you have to agree, but you have to, which is, you know, a very distinct difference. So you don't have to agree, but you have to agree to do the work. Make sense? I hope so. All right, so productive conflict is collaboration really at its highest level. It's how we test assumptions, it's how we refine ideas, and it's how we get to the truth faster. So let's dig into how do we design for disagreement? How do we create an organizational culture or a team culture, where disagreement is not only okay, but it's encouraged.

How do we get to more of that Jeff Bezos quote that I started with where he says, if I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields better results. So how do we get there? So here's where we're going to put on our UX thinking hat and dig into this from a design perspective. So disagreement does not happen productively by default. It absolutely must be intentionally designed into the system, into the culture, into the ground rules. So let me give you some design elements for good disagreement, healthy disagreement. So first of all, norms, and you've heard me talk about norms on the podcast before. So we want to establish how does the team disagree? How, what does it sound like, what does it feel like? Because if it feels, you know, if it feels generally uncomfortable, then people aren't going to want to do it.

If it's not getting rewarded, people aren't going to want to do it. So when we put a norm around it, we might say, we might frame that norm. Something like, we're going to challenge ideas, but we're not challenging people. We're going to critique plans or designs, but we're not critiquing the person who crafted that design or crafted that plan. So again, we want to frame it around the ideas and we want to establish those norms. Maybe the norm is we do not make a decision until we have heard dissent. Like, that would be a good norm. We do not make a decision until we have heard dissent and like. And even a norm of like agreement is encouraged. Like that or not. Not agreement, disagreement. Listen to me. Disagreement is encouraged. Okay, that would be a great norm. Another design element for healthy disagreement is structure. So again, we would want to build the debate and build looking at an issue from maybe not even just two sides, but three sides, four sides, five sides.

What would our sales team think about this? What do our customers think about this? What does the development team think about this? What does finance think about this? And coming at something from a whole bunch of different angles. So that structure, if we build that into our decision making, into our processes, that is going to help create that space where, you know, that's going to make it much easier for somebody to say, well, finance is going to hate that because it sounds really complicated. And how are they going to account for that in our books? So when we can design into the planning and into the discussion and into our meetings, thinking intentionally about who's going to disagree with this and put that voice in there on purpose. So this could be again, in the planning phases. This could be sometimes, and sometimes we call, sometimes we might do something called a pre mortem. Now, I'm sure if you, especially for those of you who are in project management and on technical teams, you know, the postmortem, that is, after the project is complete, we're going to go back through it, we're going to look at what happened that worked, what happened that didn't work. But you could do a pre mortem.

So pre mortem is before the project even, you know, moves on. Maybe you've got the project charter or the project kickoff meeting is about to happen, and then you're going to do a pre mortem. So you're going to put yourself all the way to the end to say, like, if we execute this project exactly as we have designed now, what will we be thinking at the end? Okay, so it's a fun look forward and then look backward. So again, there's lots of different ways that we could go about building that structure of disagreement and debate right into our processes. A third design element for good healthy disagreement is roles. Having a role who is very much designed to be the person who's going to come up with some pushback, some disagreement, you know, that healthy disagreement. So again, I mentioned Devil's Advocate before.

So maybe you have Devil's Advocate specifically designed as a role into the team and that role shifts from person to person. Um, you might also have somebody who is just maybe naturally a contrarian thinker, who is going to like have a place on the agenda every time new ideas are being brought up or discussed or new designs are coming forward. So having that devil's advocate or that contrarian person baked into the process is going to help keep your diverse thinking alive. Okay, so now if we're in the UX space, of course this happens all the time, but design critiques and user testing both thrive on the idea of friction as feedback, because you don't just want like nice pats on the head feedback, you want to find out what's wrong with the design so that you can fix it before it gets out into the marketplace. And the same thing is true with ideas. Okay, so this doesn't even have to be product related, but as you're making decisions, as you are making designs and plans and so forth, we want to get that friction early into the process so we can learn from it in advance instead of actually having those mistakes happen. And then we have to go back and fix them. So leaders can do the same thing.

They can build these mechanisms for dissent into their processes before final decisions get made. So again, if you're a designer like I have been, and I mean still am, embodying design in so much of my work, and not only my philosophies, but also in the work that I do, designers don't fear critique, they plan for it. They want critique because they want to iterate and make things better before they get released into the world. So just like that, leaders can do that too. So designers know that feedback makes the product better. And what if leaders treated disagreement in the same way? What if leaders treated, you know, this policy needs to be iterated several times before it's going to be worth its salt and want, you know, and are open to that disagreement and pushback from their direct reports. All right, now let's get into the art of disagreeing. Well, because disagreement can be done poorly and can be done in a way that feels very personal.

And again, we were talking about that earlier. We don't want it to feel personal. We want it to be about the product, about the decision, about the options that are on the table. So we're going to think now we're moving kind of from design to execution, how to actually engage in productive, healthy disagreement. So I want to give you five core principles here. Five core principles for the art of disagreeing. Well, the first is listen to, understand, not to reload. Let me say that again for you.

Listen to understand, not to reload. So what I mean by that is sometimes when somebody else is disagreeing with you, you might be not listening intently to what their actual disagreement is, but you're coming up with all of your own counter arguments to what you think their counter to what you think their disagreement is. And that is not going to move the needle forward in your discussion. It that is not healthy disagreement. So most people again are listening to find flaws, not insights. So we want to listen to the other person from the perspective of like, what if they have something really important to share with me? What if there's something that I've overlooked? What if they've got something that's going to make my idea better or stronger or more viable on the marketplace, or less expensive to produce or whatever it is, but like listening with positive intent. Listening to understand the other person's perspective. Okay, so that's your first core principle.

Your second core principle is to ask curiosity based questions. So tell me more about why you see it that way or I'm not entirely sure, I totally understand. Can you give me an example? And to do that from a place of neutrality as opposed to a place of negativity or, you know, firing back at the person. So you're going to ask curiosity based questions. Now, it's one thing to get curious, it's an entirely other thing to stay curious, especially as a conversation that has disagreement in it continues to unfold bold. So get curious, stay curious. One of the techniques that I often tell audiences when I'm like giving a keynote, where we're talking about some of this stuff, is I talk about anchoring. And so here's an anchoring to your curiosity or to whatever or to listening or whatever it is you want to stay anchored to.

So keep keeping that present in the conversation. And so most of us have a left thumb and a right hand. And what I will do is I will just grab my left thumb with my right hand as an anchor. I'm anchoring to a particular body part here just to remind myself to stay curious. Because left unchecked, the minute somebody says something that I think is wrong, boom, I'm like, I knew it. I knew they were going to say that. And then I'm no longer curious. Okay, so ask curiosity based questions.

If you need to anchor by grabbing, you know, again, a body part, it could be touching your watch, the bow of your glasses, if you wear glasses, an earring, a ring, piece of jewelry, whatever it is to. To anchor yourself, to stay curious in that conversation. All right.

Your third core principle in the art of disagreeing well, is to separate people from ideas. Okay? We are going to debate ideas, we are going to disagree with ideas. We are not going to disagree with individuals because that's when we start to feel personally attacked. So here's how you do that from a linguistic standpoint. So you don't say, I disagree with Janel and what she just said, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You say, I disagree with Janel's idea for the following reasons.

And then you enumerate them, but you're very, very clearly articulating that you're disagreeing with an idea, you're disagreeing with a concept, you're disagreeing with a design, you are not disagreeing with the person. And this may take some self monitoring. You have to watch your own language because otherwise it's going to come out of your mouth. I disagree with Fred for the following reasons. And then you're going to go, oh, I didn't say Fred's idea. Okay, so you really do have to self monitor until you get the hang of this. So that you make sure that you are not necessarily disagreeing with the person. You are disagreeing with the concept, you're disagreeing with the idea, you're disagreeing with the option.

Whatever it is, it is a concrete other thing. You are not disagreeing with the person. Okay, so that is your third. You need to separate those ideas from people, and you need to be really intentional about your language. Okay, core principle number four for the art of disagreeing. Well, acknowledge valid points. Sometimes that can be very, very hard because we want to be right. Who doesn't want to be right? But we don't want to be right at the expense of putting out a product that is less well developed or an idea that is only half baked.

So when somebody has maybe it's not even their whole disagreement is good, but a piece of it, a sliver of it, there is something in it that has merit, then you want to make sure you acknowledge that. So as let's say you have just disagreed with my idea and you have voiced your disagreement with my idea, and you said for the following three reasons. And I maybe don't agree with two of those reasons, but one of them gives me pause and I say to you, oh, that third point that you just raised is not something I had been thinking of. And I bet if we paid closer attention to that, we could save money, get to the market faster, whatever it is that we're working on. So I might not necessarily find merit in all of what you said, but if there is merit in part of what you said, then I want to absolutely make sure I acknowledge that and likewise you with me. So we're going to go back and forth and we're going to be acknowledging sometimes it's just little slivers of ideas that we each have, and those will eventually merge together and, you know, help. Help us find our way through. Okay, and then the fifth core principle of the art of disagreeing.

Well, would be to model calm descent. We really want to have control over our emotions here. This is not something that should be emotionally escalating. Now, that doesn't mean we don't get animated. It doesn't mean we don't get excited, but it does mean that we can keep the negative emotion out of it because we do not want people to feel threatened. When people feel threatened, then they get defensive. And again, I'm sure you've heard me talk about this before.

If you've been a longtime listener of the podcast Fight Flight, Freeze Fawn, our sympathetic nervous system getting activated and then, you know, making other people feel threatened and defensive. So we don't want any of that defensiveness in the space. Again, it's okay for emotions to be amped up when they are excitement and energetic and so on, but we just want to make sure we're keeping the negativity out of it. And that also can be challenging. So you need to model that calm dissent, that calm disagreement. And the leader, whether that is the project manager, whether that is a key stakeholder in the project, or whether that is the leader that is like the manager of the team. The leader's tone is going to set the temperature. And we want to make sure that that temperature does not get set too hot.

We want to keep dialing that down. And if you are in a conversation where you sense the temperature going up and the goal here is healthy disagreement, not necessarily anger, provocation, defensiveness, and so on, you can call that out and you can just say something like, hey, I think we need to dial down the temperature. It's getting a little hot in here. And you can do that in a way that's, you know, playful and respectful and a little bit fun. Okay, so good. Disagreement isn't loud, it isn't angry, it's thoughtful. It's what happens when curiosity meets courage. And again, when you can create this as part of your team culture, as part of your leadership culture, it is going to be so amazing for your organization.

You are going to come up with better decisions, better outcomes, all the way across the board. So let me just leave you with a couple of practical tools specifically for leaders. But you know me, I say you can lead from anywhere in the organization. So you don't have to be, you know, at the top of the org chart in order to be using these things. So here's a couple of tangible takeaways. Pre commit to learning. Pre commit to the idea that disagreement is going to be part of your meeting. And so that would sound like starting a meeting or starting a discussion within a larger meeting with something like, hey, we might not always agree on things, and that's good.

That's where learning happens. That's what makes our product better. That's what makes our customer service better. That's what makes all of this better, is that when we have healthy disagreement in the space, so you want to just pre commit to that and to couch it under the guise of learning, we are going to learn and be better as a team, as an organization when we have that disagreement. Another thing that you might do is have a conflict audit. So after a meeting, as a meeting is closing down, or after the meeting is over and you're reflecting on how it went, ask did we disagree enough? Were there any disagreements at all? And if we weren't disagreeing, what are we missing? Where would there be opportunity for disagreement? And are there some things I need to go back and disagree with now after the fact, before they turn into implemented solutions? Because to catch it, you know, 10 minutes after the meeting is better than not catching it at all and having a product or a service or, you know, customer relationship be not as good as it could be. You could also do a conflict design sprint. And so what that would look about or a disagreement design sprint.

So this would sound something like this. So you've got your solution, you've got your idea, you've got your plan, your design, whatever it is, and then run a short exercise where you say, okay, let's poke all the holes in this we possibly can. What could go wrong? And really try to get people brainstorming and thinking broadly and creatively and really doing some of that divergent thinking about what could go wrong. And that could be a really fun exercise. And in fact, you could bake that right into your process, whether that's in rolling out plans, policies, procedures, all, any of that. And then I'm also going to go back to Jeff Bezos. Design and commit. Okay, so this is one of his core philosophies.

Once the decision is made, everyone's going to align, everyone's going to get on board, even if it wasn't the idea that they most wanted to win. Okay? So even if they didn't win, everybody gets on board, everybody gets in alignment. And I know sometimes that can be hard to do, especially if you had a lot of conviction towards the ideas that you or advocating for. But disagreement does not mean disloyalty. It means you care enough to make the idea better before it leaves the room. All right, so when Jeff Bezos said that he would take conflict over agreement every time, he wasn't saying that he liked fighting. He was saying that he likes truth seeking. So disagreement, when designed and practiced, well, it's not chaos it’s clarity.

It's what turns a collection of smart people into an actual thinking team. So the next time you find yourself in a meeting where everyone's agreeing just a little too quickly, take that as your personal cue, ask one more question, offer one more perspective, and maybe just even take a hypothetical, hey, if I were to disagree with this idea, these would be the grounds on which I would disagree with it and then share those grounds. Because the best teams aren't the ones who agree all the time. They're the ones who think together even when they don't. Yeah, they think together even when they don't, even when they disagree.

All right, my friends, this week, go create some intentional disagreement. Be mindful of the temperature that you're keeping in that disagreement. And always better to socialize the idea first instead of just going in and having raw disagreement. So let people know what you're up to. Take it on. On together as a team. It'll make your team better. It'll make your organization better. It'll make your products and your services and your client relationships. It'll make everything better, I promise.

All right, take on some disagreement this week, my friends, and I'll catch you next week.