... distinction between task conflict and relationship conflict... You say that one reason it's hard to admit we are wrong is that we sometimes confuse our beliefs with our values... we confuse challenges to our views with threats to our ego.
When a disagreement becomes personal, everything that gets raised by the other person is interpreted in the most negative light possible... people...don't even hear the substance of the idea because they're so invested in defending their ego or in proving the other person wrong.
... something that President Obama said some years ago when he invited someone he disagreed with to play a prominent role in his administration. President Obama: "We're not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans."
Tony Greenwald's term... the "Totalitarian Ego." [We] have an inner dictator policing our thoughts...to keep out threatening information...when your core beliefs are attacked, the inner dictator comes in and rescues you with mental armor and activates confirmation bias where you only see what you expected to see all along, triggers desirability bias where you only see what you wanted to see all along and you can feel like you're not under threat after all.
...think of a time when [you] did something wrong and apologized for it...When you refuse to apologize it actually makes you feel more empowered, that power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth...the act of resisting influence only further fortifies our convictions, because we basically get inoculated against future attacks.
...we often spend time thinking like preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. Preaching is basically defending a set of sacred beliefs and saying, "Look, I found the truth, my job is to proselytize it." Prosecuting is the reverse. It's saying, "Okay, my job is to prove you wrong and win my case with the best argument." ...thinking like a politician [trying to] get the approval of an audience that you care about. And so you might be campaigning and lobbying and sometimes that means adjusting and flexing at least what you say you believe in order to fit in and win them over. The problem is that we're doing it because we want to prove our allegiance to a tribe not because we're trying to get closer to the truth.
[Orville and Wilbur Wright] would sometimes even shout for hours back and forth... they seemed to get a kick out of it, they called it scrapping. ...They never saw an argument as personal. Their mechanic used a phrase that I think about it almost every day. He said, "I don't think they really got mad but they sure got awfully hot."
... expert versus average negotiators... We want to build areas of consensus before we find out where we're opposed...We should think about disagreements less as wars and more as dances...You actually have to be willing to step back and let your partner lead from time to time.
...the very important idea of psychological safety - the belief that you can take a risk without being punished or penalized... psychological safety is one of the foundations of building a learning culture and making it easy for people to rethink things. Because we've seen this in studies of hospitals, for example, that when teams have psychological safety they actually admit the errors that they've made, and then everyone else can learn from them and rethink their routines and practices. Whereas if they lack psychological safety people are motivated to hide their mistakes and then they repeat them and no one else ends up rethinking the way that they're operating either.
"Solution Aversion." The idea behind solution aversion is that if you propose a way to fix a problem and people don't like your solution, they often reject not only the solution but also the problem in the first place... [One] should say, "Well, given your views about what we should do on climate policy, how would your proposed solutions work, and how would you implement them?" And when you ask those "how-questions" something really intriguing happens. Psychologists call it "The illusion of explanatory depth," and it's the idea that we think we understand complex systems much better than we actually do. And the best way to make us a little bit more intellectually humble, curious, nuanced, more doubting, less dogmatic, is to ask us to explain those various systems and their impact.
...flexibility is a virtue, so is persistence. And I think that art much more than science is figuring out when to stay the course and when to shift gears.
"If you want to walk fast you should walk alone, but if you want to walk far you should walk together."... we spend too much of our time listening to people who think fast and shallow and not enough time paying attention to people who think slow and deep.
"Okay, I'm about to make a decision...let me take five minutes and just think about all the reasons why that plan might be wrong, not just the reasons it might be right. Let me reach out to somebody in my challenge network and ask them, 'Can you see some holes in my reasoning? Is there any way that I might regret this decision?." And that can be a quick reconsideration process.
Adam Grant is the author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know.
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