Do you ever feel like we’re surrounded by arguments?
In the news, on social media, in the workplace,
people seem to disagree about almost everything,
and this constant conflict can be exhausting.
Clichéd though it might be, it’s natural to feel
that life would be so much sweeter if we could all just get along.
But although disagreement is uncomfortable,
and can be incredibly draining,
it’s important to remember that it’s also a valuable tool,
one that’s been key to many of our greatest achievements.
But to get the most out of our tendency to disagree,
it helps to understand where it comes from,
and how to use it effectively.
Over the course of human history,
evolution favoured groups who could solve problems that threatened their survival -
finding shelter, for example, or hunting wild animals.
Groups whose members could come up with different plans,
give reasons for why theirs would work,
and point out the problems in each other’s,
were more likely to arrive at the best solution.
...or at least, one that meant not freezing to death,
or being stomped on by a wooly mammoth.
In this way, rather than being the group’s weakness,
disagreement could be its strength,
allowing them to survive and pass on their prehistoric superpower:
the ability to argue constructively.
Great - what could go wrong?
Well, for this to work properly
each of the group’s ideas had to be thoroughly interrogated
– like a kind of survival of the fittest, but for ideas –
and natural selection determined that the best way to make that happen
was for each person to care more about proving themselves right
– and everyone else wrong –
than about simply finding the best solution.
The downside is that this resulted in a certain amount of...
sheer pigheadedness being hard-coded into human nature.
So yes, we can all benefit from disagreement,
but that’s really just a happy by-product of our brains’ basic desire to be right.
The good news is that we have a long history
of making this innate stubbornness work to our advantage.
For thousands of years,
humans have found ways to make arguments the basis of collective decisions:
lawyers in courts, politicians in parliaments,
scientists at conferences and in research journals:
We’ve built disagreement into the fabric of society
- and even introduced a degree of civility into it.
Well, sometimes.
For an especially resonant example of this,
we can look to Milton Wright,
a bishop living in Dayton, Ohio in the late nineteenth century.
Each evening after dinner, he would play a game with his sons
giving them a topic to argue about, letting them engage in healthy debate,
and then having them switch sides and argue for the opposite perspective.
Years later, when the boys
- Orville and Wilbur -
were grown up and running a bike shop, they carried on arguing.
But by then, the topic had become
how they would pull off the world’s first manned, powered flight,
and the end result was the birth of aviation as we know it –
which makes this a particularly compelling testament to the power of disagreement.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that this doesn’t have much bearing
on the background noise of disagreement which plagues us today -
the internet will probably always be home to social media shouting matches,
and understanding the upside of disagreement
doesn’t begin to touch on the root causes or complexities of political polarisation.
But I do think that it’s possible for us to have better arguments.
That’s what the Wright Brothers learned from their father:
not just the value of disagreement, but also how to disagree productively.
That meant not clinging too tightly to a single viewpoint;
not attacking each other personally for seeing things differently;
and above all, keeping their shared goal in sight.
These are simple, though sometimes surprisingly challenging, habits,
and they can serve us well in a whole host of different contexts.
In my experience, this is one of the most important aspects of managing a team.
Authority often gives us the power to ignore dissenting opinions
and just plough ahead with whatever we’ve already decided.
But doing this misses out
on the wide array of benefits that disagreement has to offer
and which might end up resulting in a better decision,
or even averting a disaster.
The most effective teams are those that can handle differences of opinion
without losing focus, or letting them be a source of friction;
so the best leaders will be those
who cultivate an environment where this is possible -
encouraging others to speak up, managing any emotional fallout,
and steering debate in pursuit of the shared goal.
Ultimately, we need to learn not to be afraid of arguments –
so long as we can acknowledge that we all have an evolved tendency to double down,
and remember to keep it under control.
If we can learn these skills, we’ll be able to
harness the brain’s desire to be right, and use it to get things right.
Because as strange as it may sound, disagreement can be a powerful ally –
a collaborator that will challenge our views,
hone our thinking, and lead us to achieve
far more than we ever could by “just getting along”.