"Underneath every disagreement, a wordless negotiation over a relationship is taking place. If we don’t settle that, the conversation doesn’t stand a chance."

Ian Leslie

As the demand in our lives routinely exceeds our capacity, new technologies question our future value, what little attention we have left is drawn, addict-like, into digital echo chambers that leave us feeling restless, depressed, or angry and powerless. As a result, more people are unconsciously developing a defensive mindset at the very moment when they need it to be open. Being able to argue productively is becoming even more difficult in a polarising world. But it is an essential component of progress. 

Even in the relatively short time since I was born, argument has improved our world. When I emerged at St Mary’s Hospital in London, my mother had no right to the money she earnt, saved or the house she’d bought with my father. By law, her money and property were his to decide how to be used. For nearly half her career she was paid considerably less than her male colleagues despite being more experienced and qualified than most of them. Over the course of her life, vigorous arguments by feminists gradually changed the views of men’s entitlement to holding the balance of social, political, and economic power. Feminist argument changed our fundamental beliefs about gender equality and altered our culture, changed our laws, professions, how children are raised, the media, and the world of work. It changed our part of the world for the better.  But not fast enough. Gender parity is still decades off at the current rate of progress. Because we have not learnt to argue well enough. 

At university, I joined the debating society and mostly enjoyed playing at disagreement, but it taught me little about how people argue in the real world. I read books on intellectual reasoning, all of which were insubstantial on what seemed to be the unspoken challenge of argument – that it’s always more than just our ideas on the line, it’s our whole self.  

Advice urging us to ‘try and stay calm, not retaliate when we felt anger’, was easy to say, and often, I found, impossible to act upon. It didn’t get to the root that our identity, worldview, and sense of value are often at stake when we argue. Looking back, when my arguing went badly, the underlying cause was often an inability to express my emotional experience of injustice, unfairness, or diminishment. Despite being better at it, it still is.

For many of us, a purely rational and behavioural approach to argument stands little or no success in the face of opposing views, particularly when there’s an emotional subtext of disapproval, rejection or even disgust. Arguing well requires a mindset that recognises how our emotions, assumptions and lenses operate as we bring alternative beliefs to the table.    

Today, using the word argument in most organisations creates an immediate inference in people’s minds of unproductive conflict and emotionally charged disagreement. Arguing to find a better-shared understanding is uncommon in most corporate cultures. Our growing insecurity about race, gender, and age politics amplifies this aversion to healthy conflict.  

Lee Siegel, the cultural critic, believes that a true argument is not a quarrel, which is a ‘disagreement inflamed by the ego’, but ‘an intense concern for the matter at hand that extends beyond merely winning or losing the argument, and the ability to live the thoughts and emotions behind the counterargument.’  This description is shaped by the fundamental importance of self-awareness and empathy; as he puts it, ‘The most relentless, intellectually merciless arguments are acts of caring about the world – again, persuasion as the vision of a better life – with a grasp of your opponent’s inwardness as the instrument of mastery.’ 

So, the definition of argument used here is not of a combative and polarising exchange but a determination to explore alternative views whilst paying deep regard for one another’s core needs.  

Feeling and Argument

The most common advice about arguing and emotion is to ‘put aside your feelings’ and establish a common goal so you can intellectually disagree without your feelings being experienced as a judgement on someone’s perceptions or ideas. This seems to make sense, except when you recognise that our sense of certainty is more often an emotion than an objective data piece. This doesn’t invalidate our conviction - we may be right - it just asks us to approach it differently. In any argument, it’s worth helping others to pull apart their feelings and beliefs so we can all understand what’s going on.

The implications on conflict adverse cultures are striking when it comes to innovation that relies on productive disagreement. Randall S. Wright, a programme director at MIT, believes organisations fail to innovate because leaders see and want innovation outcomes without the inherent conflict required to achieve it.

Wright sees innovations as arguments[i] . This is because they involve a hypothesis, essentially a set of beliefs we set out to prove through social and technical experimentation. ‘Arguments can always be expressed as if-then statements: If we agree to a proposition being true, sound or valid, then we can infer a conclusion.’  

Within organisations, these arguments take two forms – task or relationship conflict[ii] . Task conflict is a disagreement between functional departments about ideas, priorities and contrasting perspectives. Relationship conflict is what Lee Siegel describes as when an ‘individual’s aggrieved self-interest runs up against another individual’s aggrieved self-interest’, resulting in negative feelings.  When these conflicts are avoided, an organisation starts to create what team performance specialist Liane Davey calls conflict debt[iii] . This is the sum of unacknowledged and unresolved issues that block progress. 

Davey believes that our aversion to conflict is grounded in the language and metaphors about teamwork we’ve adopted that paint an unrealistic and unachievable goal of harmony and happiness being the end state.  Having the productive conflict and disagreement necessary for innovation and performance means resetting expectations that there should be healthy tension and arguments between departments and people. Marketing should be fighting for creativity and operations for efficiency. In Davey’s work, she makes a virtue of getting people to identify where tensions exist within and between teams and, more importantly, how these cause unresolved arguments and emotional strain. She often finds that what people have interpreted as interpersonal battles are normal task conflict arguments waiting to be had.

A few years ago, I was asked to help two teams to resolve a failing technology project that was costing the organisation millions of dollars a week in lost revenues. It was one of the most memorable and satisfying pieces of work I’ve ever participated in.  At the heart of the problem was the absence of a productive argument. On one side was a group of technologists and commercial leaders; on the other, a team of financial experts, including bankers and lawyers. I interviewed them before a workshop to understand what they thought was happening. What stood out immediately was that they agreed on almost everything, except they used different language and metrics. But there was a simmering pot of negative emotions that both sides were suppressing and only acknowledging oblique terms. 

Counter to what each side thought, neither wanted to dominate the solution. What seemed to be happening was that they felt diminished in the eyes of the other. The commercial and technology people were experiencing a group of suited bankers judging them as inferior regarding their market expertise and seriousness. The financial teams felt awkward and ‘uncool’ in the presence of the casually dressed and hip digital natives. So, a fragile sense of identity stood in the way of solving a huge financial problem. And remember, these were some of the smartest, best educated, and most motivated people on the planet. 

I got each side to describe their mindset and that of the other team by breaking apart how their frames, assumptions and feelings informed the picture of what they ‘knew’. This allowed a deeper conversation about how their value felt in the eyes of the other side. As the individuals opened up about their feelings of diminishment and resentment, a new realisation of possibility emerged almost immediately. Within three hours, they had socially merged into one team to solve the problem. It still feels like a remarkable moment. The losses were being staunched four weeks later, and the venture became a commercial success.  Without the ability to have calm disagreements, we can’t win together. But we cannot suppress emotions to achieve this; they must be the first port of call in our dialogue when they block reason. 

[i]  Wright, R., 2012. Why Innovations Are Arguments. [online] MIT Sloan Management Review. Available at: <https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/why-innovations-are-arguments/> 

[ii]  De Clercq, D., Thongpapanl, N. and Dimov, D., 2008. When good conflict gets better, and bad conflict becomes worse: the role of social capital in the conflict–innovation relationship. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 37(3), pp.283-297.

[iii]  For Liane Davey’s comprehensive Conflict Debt Assessment go to:

https://www.lianedavey.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/GF-Conflict-Debt-Assessment_print.pdf