"Dare to Disagree" is the title of a TED Talk by entrepreneur, CEO, writer and keynote speaker
Margaret Heffernan. A friend sent me a feature article about Heffernan and a link to her talk. I want to share this talk with you because the fear of disagreeing is so typical; yet fear of disagreement can wring out of us our willingness and ability to talk with one another, whether in our relationships or in our work and organizational life. I hope you will enjoy taking thirteen minutes to
view the TED Talk because Heffernan tells two fascinating stories which carry lessons and inspiration for engaging in fearless conversations.
When you think about it, why is it daring to disagree? In her first story, Heffernan gives us two reasons:
1) It's daring to fly in the face of conventional wisdom.
2) It's daring to fly in the face of people's ideas about
themselves.
Daring is a two-way street of being disagreed with and of disagreeing. We know what it's like when someone flies in the face of the conventional wisdom we ourselves hold personally. We know what it's like when someone flies in the face of how we see ourselves. Daring to disagree implies choice rather than just getting hooked into a disagreement. We can choose to disagree for the purpose of changing others' minds or we can choose to disagree for the purpose of supporting relationship. The choice is ours.
In the same story, Heffernan describes what she calls a "fantastic model of collaboration - thinking partners who aren't echo chambers". The story reminds me of a personality type that the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator helps us understand, i.e. some thinking types who show high regard for your idea by pulling it apart and playing "devil's advocate". Heffernan holds up the value of increasing our capacity to think together and not being blind to what we can, even must, achieve by working through disagreement.
In her second story, Joe, an executive in a medical device company, was afraid of provoking conflict about a product his company was creating. He was tormented with worry about its design. Finally, he became more afraid of his silence.
We go through a lot before we become afraid of our silence. Joe had to abandon judgments about himself and his colleagues so that he could open the way for curiosity and the creative and enriched thinking that was needed to fix the design. When we switch from judgment to curiosity, we minimize the rebuttal-after-rebuttal dynamic that a lot of people can't or don't want to handle. Through curiosity we are steered by questions like:
"Can you tell me more about why you
think____________ ?"
"I'm confused by/ curious about ___________.
It would help me to know why it's important
[to you . . . to our conversation]?
When we are on the threshold of daring to disagree, it helps to have a little empathy for ourselves and for the other person(s). I love the way Sheldon Cooper in
"The Big Bang Theory" sitcom explained his difficulty in understanding his friends: "It's like an itch in my brain I can't scratch!" It's not in Sheldon's DNA to be willing to allow his beliefs and ideas to be challenged by what others think. But, we can scratch the brain itch a little by daring to ask: What if she's right? What if he's a little bit right? Would my world be changed? Would my thinking change?
Hmmmm. . .
