Patrick McKendry

This past week, an estimated 1 billion people across the planet celebrated Earth Day, an annual event to demonstrate support for environmental protection. The original seed of an idea to have an honorary day for the Earth grew to become a US-wide teach-in, which, in turn, became a 20 million person walk-out and the largest protest in history.¹ Interestingly, the turn away from the debate-focused teach-in strategy came from one simple fact - there would not have been a debate because nobody was “pro-pollution”. In Earth Day’s first year, polling showed that Americans viewed pollution as the second most serious problem facing the country.² That trend holds today as 61% of Americans believe that concerns with climate change are either correct or underestimated, 78% see climate change as a critical or important threat, and 71% worry about climate change at least a fair amount.³

Support to this degree is practically unheard of - for reference, only about 69% of Americans consider themselves to like dogs!⁴ However, when we hear about the environment in the news it is generally in the framing of entrenched debate and opinionated conflict. The disconnect between our opinions and our experiences makes no sense. But, this is a universal problem and something that most of us experience in our daily work. You probably only need a minute to think of a time where you debated at length with someone on your team before realizing that you were both trying to solve the same problem. In the worst case, that underlying alignment gets overlooked and leads to relationship breakdowns that hurt team dynamics and business performance.

For this post, we will talk about the math for why disagreement is a common outcome even in cases where we all agree. We will cover the Triple A method for how you can debate vigorously without permanently damaging interpersonal relationships. And, for those work relationships that seem ruined, do not despair, we will talk about how to repair what seems to be broken.

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It’s Not Disagreement, It’s Just Math

We need to update our default assumptions. Every conversation we go into we are going to inherently favor our own ideas, assume that everyone else will too, and fail to readily find a common ground. Humans are prone to all sorts of cognitive biases, which influence our day-to-day interactions. In this case:

We know and favor our way of thinking as a result of the familiarity bias.⁵ Solutions we design are given more positive evaluations because they pair well with our individual way of thinking and working through problems.
We generally overestimate the degree to which people agree with us due to the false consensus effect.⁶ When predicting the reactions of others, we expect that they will generally align with what we have found.
When presented with new information we tend to do insufficient updating to our opinions because of conservatism bias.⁷ Most people are not very open to feedback - even if we say we are - and often make only mild changes to their initial plans and thought processes.

As a result, we may be thrown off when someone flat out disagrees with us. This unexpected challenge can lead us to act defensively and quickly escalate a brief check-in to an entrenched all-out disagreement.

From what we study about resilience, we know that an important factor in maintaining progress in the face of adversity is mindset. The most resilient mindset to have is one that expects difficulty and challenge to happen. That rule should apply here as well. If we expect, are comfortable with, and even seek out disagreement with our thinking then the conversations we have should be less defensive and more productive.

Overcoming cognitive biases often starts with building awareness of the bias, identifying and breaking down its faults, and recognizing and keeping that focus on it at key times.⁸ For our biases that anticipate agreement, it is pretty easy to show why they have things basically completely backwards. We just need math. Looking at our Earth Day model for reference, a case where agreement actually very clearly seems like the norm, we see that the probability of agreeing with anyone you talk to that climate change is a problem is roughly 80% or 8 out of 10.

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Although realistically, concern is not binary. For example, someone could see climate change as a concern but not enough to warrant economic disruption. In fact, about 40% of Americans hold this opinion.³ Suddenly, the odds that you will find someone who agrees with your specific point of view is in every case less than 50%. Mathematically, disagreement is more likely, a direct contradiction to what our biases lead us to expect.

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Further, we have to recognize that up to this point we have only looked at aligning on a problem statement. In our work, we have to go a step further and try to identify solutions to put into motion. For climate solutions, we could think about whether strict limitations should be placed on the release of methane during the production of natural gas - a solution that 60% of Americans favor and about 40% oppose.³

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Is it a surprise that the complexity of problems leads to differing opinions on what is and is not worth concern? No.

Is it a surprise that there are multiple solutions that can help to solve problems and that the natural complexity of the world creates variations in favored opinions? No.

So, it also should not be a surprise in our day-to-day work when someone disagrees with our problem statements and desired solutions. Yet, pushback on our ideas catches people off guard almost every time. There are multiple shades of gray to most situations making disagreement not the exception, but the norm. Approaching conversations and meetings with this updated default mode can keep us from being surprised by pushback and preempt any defensive response. This can help us to get the full value out of disagreement and lead to productive conversations and more effective solutions.

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The Triple A Method - Harmonious Conversations about Differing Views

Realizing that the world is chock full of disagreements, we need to figure out how to effectively navigate them. At work, when we encounter challenges, it can be difficult to not take the counters personally. We have, afterall, put a good deal of work into the solutions we have defined. Our ideas represent, in a way, ourselves, and when those ideas are threatened our psychology reacts immediately with a fight or flight response. We might choose to abandon garnering buy-in from that one team and instead pitch our idea elsewhere in the organization. Or we might fight back, and jump to calling out what pieces of the other person’s argument are irrelevant or misinformed.

Both are suboptimal responses. In the flight case, we fail to collect potentially valid feedback on our ideas and also leave a part of the organization excluded from its future potential benefit. In the fight case, we damage our working relationships and set the stage for more difficult and confrontational conversations in the future.

The Triple A Method provides a framework for more productive and collaborative conversations.⁹ You may have also heard of the concept as “Yes, and” responses. Overall, the goal is to find common ground while creating opportunities to highlight and work through disagreement rather than avoiding it. When responding to disagreement with the Triple A Method, you:

Agree - Find common ground. Surprisingly, this is generally as easy as it sounds, particularly in a work environment where everyone wants to help grow the business so that they can reap the financial rewards. Even in our climate example, both those who do and those who do not think that climate change is a concern likely appreciate the beauty of nature or the value of clean drinking water. Start there. To be most effective, begin your response to conflict with “Yes” or “I agree” or “Completely aligned on that” or whatever phrase feels genuine to you.

Augment - Expand on how or why you agree with a specific point that the other person mentioned. This is important because it highlights that you are listening, are genuinely interested in better understanding, and can give you the chance to process the other person’s argument more completely. In our climate question of the trade-off of environmental and economic impacts, this might look like “Yes, I agree that an economic slowdown is a legitimate potential side effect of environmental protection if we are too heavy-handed with regulations…” The augmentation step is an important distinguisher of the Triple A versus the Yes, And method. In some cases, I have seen people devalue the spirit of healthy disagreement by saying “Yes, and” before completely ignoring the other person’s comments and providing a rebuttal that offered no common ground. It is totally disingenuous. Getting in the practice of including an augmentation helps to prevent this.

Add - Start with “and” and add more context around your opinion and why you think it better solves the underlying issues. This is your opportunity to give your own counterpoints or further clarify your initial stance if it was misinterpreted. Expanding on our climate example one more time, this might look like “Yes, I agree that an economic slowdown is a legitimate potential side effect of environmental protection if we are too heavy-handed with regulations…and, my sense is that the greater economic risk is further in the future if we fail to take sufficient preventative action now. We can’t know for sure but that is why I am more willing to make some trade-offs in the near future.”

Conversely to how cognitive biases were a problem for us earlier, the Triple A Method is effective because it makes bias work in our favor. As social creatures, people like to find ways to create social connection. The common ground that we can establish by agreeing creates a miniature group and both parties will inherently want to be included, driving more collaborative behaviors. Further, when we apply the Triple A Method, debates often become less heated. Reciprocity bias is at play here and when we genuinely offer a path to collaboration with our augmentation, the other person is encouraged by social norms to match our open style.¹⁰

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Fix What’s Broken

Ok, so you got into a disagreement on a project at work and I hadn’t yet written this post, so you didn’t follow these practices and now you’re stuck with a soured relationship at work. The good news is that all relationships are repairable if you put in the effort. Let us take a look at some things you can do to start turning these problem interactions into your next strongest collaboration.

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Get Back on the Same Side of the Table

The first critical step is to reset the conversation and remind everyone that you have the same goals. It may seem simple but we can often lose sight of the forest for the sake of the trees. We can forget that we are working to the same end, even if we disagree on the path to get there. Taking a moment to gain back the broader perspective can be powerful in breaking and redirecting the path of a disagreement. If your organization uses OKRs, this can be an effective method to do this reset. Review the high-level objective that is relevant to the problem you are debating and have each group speak about their solution as it relates to that objective. This can then serve as an objectively common ground anchor point to restart the conversation.

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Break Bad Schemas

In psychology the idea of a schema defines a cognitive framework that we use for processing information more easily and that can be used to describe patterned behaviors or ways of thinking.¹¹ A lot of the unproductive behaviors in disagreement come from ineffective schemas that we have learned over time through societal norms. Regarding disagreements, we tend to develop an understanding that we should “win” and both sides will tend to approach disagreements with that framework implicitly driving their behavior. This creates a nearly thoughtless adherence to unwanted default actions..

Breaking those schemas is highly effective at creating a more intentional conversation. It is also fairly easy. One tactic for this is to respond to opposing viewpoints with phrases that start with “Thank you, because”.¹² Saying thanks in response to a particularly barbed point is incredibly jarring to expectations, breaks the schema, and requires the other person to actively rethink how they want to carry forward the conversation. Expanding on your response with a reason like “thank you, because I was not sure if I had effectively identified all of the potential edge case problems” shows your gratitude is not just snide sarcasm but that you are invested in building a collaborative solution.

Similarly, you can break the traditional disagreement schema by hedging your statements and expressing uncertainty. This usefully avoids dogmatic opinions but also prevents a schema focused on nitpicking at details and requires the conversation to remain focused on the core problem that is mutually shared. This also sets the stage for mutual respect by implicitly acknowledging that you may not be an expert and are hoping for support from the other person.

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Invest in Relationship Capital

Not every rigorous debate ends in relationship disarray. In fact most of us have much harder conversations at home, with the people closest to us, than we do at work. It is not surprising then that focusing on building up relationship capital with co-workers is an effective way to prevent disagreements from leading to broken relationships at work. I like to think of relationship capital the same way you would manage your bank savings account. Hard conversations represent a withdrawal from the account. If you start with no capital invested, a withdrawal will create significant penalties right away. Instead, you need to make small deposits consistently over time in order to grow your account to the point that you can make large withdrawals while remaining net positive. Further, with enough investment your account can begin to see the benefits of interest compounding where small withdrawals are easily covered by the normal growth of existing goodwill you have built up. I like focusing on building up relationship capital, not only because it works, but also because it represents a kinder and more person-centric way to operate cross-functionally.

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Conclusion

We should remember that not only is disagreement common, it is also good when approached the right way. Whether we are solving for climate change or launching a new tech product, the goal of healthy disagreement is to collaboratively collect new perspectives and build better solutions. In this way, it is the healthiest teams that actually disagree the most. But, through each disagreement, these teams keep themselves on the same side of the table, do not fall prey to bad schemas, and continuously find points of agreement throughout the process. For our teams, these behaviors are important to instill as operating principles and also keep top of mind through regular reminders. If we can do that, then it should be alright when we all “agree to disagree.”

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References

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Earth Day and Being Agreeably Disagreeable