Most people instinctively avoid conflict, but as Margaret Heffernan shows us, good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counterintuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers — and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.
Unfortunately, most organizations will go out their way to avoid conflict and essentially stop thinking and stop progress. Why? Heffernan points out that it takes a significant amount of courage, effort and work:
to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them.
It is not that organization don’t want to embrace and engage with these divergent and disruptive thinkers it is that they can’t. And as Heffernan points out, organizations limit their thinking and progress:
because the people inside of them are too afraid of conflict.
Fortunately, Heffernan doesn’t leave us hanging without a solution to this problem. The challenge is that the solution is an age old human shortcoming of not facing the hard truth or reality that circumstance demand. Perhaps Heffernan’s closing challenge needs repeating:
But truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it.
