A Design Approach to Disagreement: How to have better arguments at work

Why dissensus may still be your most neglected asset and four steps to leverage it

Let me begin this fifth article in the “communication at work” series with a confession:

I really like to be right. I love it when people agree with me.

Doesn’t everybody? It’s only natural to feel good and validated when others agree with your point of view. We are social animals and as such enjoy consensus, group agreement, and recognition.

But more and more, I like to be contradicted and challenged, especially when this leads to a constructive discussion and – ultimately – to a higher level of understanding (and commitment) for everyone involved in a conversation. Why do I enjoy dissensus so much? Well, it’s not only my experience that it’s a great way to learn, but the evidence from a large body of research that says: It pays to fight right. We can all use dissensus as an extremely useful resource when solving problems, planning tasks or projects, innovating our products and services, or transforming our organizations. Dissensus is also particularly helpful when interpreting data or making sense of analytics, as it helps to reduce cognitive biases.

“Dissensus is a great way to learn, solve problems, or innovate. Disagreement reduces cognitive biases."

The problem, however, is that we often shy away from disagreement or handle it in an unproductive way, thus sabotaging our own learning and decision making or damaging relationships.

In this short article, I outline the benefits of designing dissensus right, illustrate how not to handle differences of opinion at work, and how you can have better disagreements by design. This will ensure that you’re not right, when you should be wrong. So let’s begin with our design perspective on disagreement.

The Value of (well designed) Disagreement

You have probably heard of the common communication biases that affect most teams: groupthink (excessive team conformity), common knowledge effect (holding back exclusive insights), or escalation of commitment, to name but three of them. While the first two lead to pseudo consensus in a team (because of self-censoring), the third bias leads to a mutual radicalization and an exaggeration of differences of opinion. All three communication biases occur frequently and severely damage the quality of decision making in teams. That is the bad news. The good news is that they can be avoided by designing disagreement right. When you design your conversations for dissensus you can steer clear of such dysfunctional team dynamics and embrace minority views rather than marginalize them. As a leader, you have a special responsibility for enabling dissensus views, acknowledging criticism or alternative viewpoints, and encouraging critical thinking.

But mere appeals to your colleagues to think critically and take an opposing view are not enough. You need to design your meetings, workshops or one-on-ones for dissensus in order to overcome the natural barriers to disagreement.

“If you design conversations for disagreement, you will generate more options, use more information, improve the quality of your decisions, and boost commitment.”

If you do this, you will generate more options, consider more relevant information, accelerate team learning, improve the quality of your decisions, and ultimately also boost commitment and team morale.

In real life, however, we often do the exact opposite and unconsciously structure conversations to marginalize disagreement. So how do managers mishandle disagreement? Let me count the ways…

Dismissing Disagreement: How not to handle Dissensus       

I don’t know if it’s because I’m Swiss (we’re notoriously bad at conflict), but I often observe how disagreements go astray. Indeed, there are many ways in which disagreement dialogues can go wrong: they can be ignored, focused on egos instead of issues and degenerate into personal attacks, get sidetracked into minor issues, or end in a pseudo consensus, where people pretend to agree with one another, when in fact they don’t.

“Disagreements can degenerate into personal attacks, get sidetracked into minor issues, or end in a pseudo consensus, where people pretend to agree with one another even when they don't.” 

The causes for disagreement are often left uncovered and they include conflicting (implicit) values, conflicting interests (that could be reconciled), or conflicting views and experiences (that should be shared). So, when a disagreement emerges, is recognized as such, and articulated, it often escalates and creates anger, distrust and demotivation and may even paralyze a team or cause unnecessary delays. How can you avoid such an eruption (see Figure 1 below that summarizes these causes, biases, phases and effects)? The unexpected answer lies in DESIGN and is given in the next section.

Figure 1: The Disagreement Volcano shows possible causes of disagreement, typical mistakes or biases along the escalation process, as well as some of the negative effects of unbound disagreements.

The Design of Dissensus: How to Fight Right

When it comes to fruitful disagreements, design may be your best ally. In a three-year research project at the University of St. Gallen, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, we have found that visualizing dissensus creates the necessary conditions for productive disagreement by triggering legitimate debates on minority views. This is especially true if you embed the visualization in a context that is conducive to merging viewpoints.

So how can you design a dialogue that leads to productive disagreement instead of an abrasive clash of viewpoints? Here’s our four-step design approach:

1.     Frame it right: Whenever discussing an issue, frame disagreement positively by inviting more perspectives, experiences, options, or insights. Don’t frame a controversial discussion as “let the stronger argument win”, but rather as: “let’s have as many angles as could be useful on this issue.” Label it as “360 degrees thinking” rather than “a crossing of swords”. Learn from designers and artists: how you label something influences its perception and use.

2.     Visualize it right: By using instant polling tools such as Mentimeter.com (which also provides anonymity) or offline means such as dots and whiteboards, you can visualize the different viewpoints in a joint framework so that minority views can be surfaced and so that you can truly see the degree of consensus or dissensus in your team. Figure 2 provides an example of such a dissensus visualization where we can see that although the average view on action item 3 is positive (it’s in the top right hand corner), there are eight colleagues who have rated it as not very impactful. This visualized variety empowers them to speak up and share their arguments on this item. Their contributions may help to re-shape that item in order to make it more impactful.

Figure 2: Disagreement visualized: Mentimeter lets team members voice their opinion anonymously and shows the true variety of opinions beyond the average voting result. Each small green dot is a team member’s vote on action item number 3’s impact and required effort.

3.     Discuss it right: Using the dissensus visualization, direct criticism at the visualized issues and not at the people in the room. Separate the arguments from the person and discuss why minority views may have merit (irrespective of seniority). Spend more time on areas with high dissensus and a bit less time on areas where agreement has already been reached.

4.     Consolidate it right: Discuss how the minority views could be incorporated in the team’s (or your own) decision and combine the proposed arguments so that it leads to a richer, joint picture and ultimately to a more refined solution. In consolidating the views of your team mates, work with visualizations that signal that they are subject to revision and work in progress. Use flipchart drawings, whiteboards sketching and the like to invite others to refine the joint level of understanding by adding new considerations or modifying existing ones.

 “A documentation may include a ranking of issues from the most to the least controversial one.”

Designing dissensus properly is thus a crucial leadership task. It requires the design of a fitting label for a dissensus discussion (i.e., “360 degrees dialogue”), designing a visual representation of the different views (such as the matrix example above), as well as designing a conversation process around minority views or counter opinions (for example with our iteration spiral tool). The last element for fruitful dissensus discussions consists of creating a fluid yet convergent design for the documentation of the results (for example through a so-called blueprint). This may include a graphic ranking of issues from the most to the least controversial one. Visual tools like these can nudge participants into more constructive debates.

In Conclusion: Be a Disagreement Designer

In today’s VUCA world, no single person has all the answers. As a leader, you must hence enable and integrate diverse viewpoints on a given issue. With a design mindset you can frame such debates productively and visualize minority views in a way that gives them voice and legitimacy. You can design dialogues so that critical information is heard, acknowledged, and considered in decision making.

Some teams may feel comfortable with this, while others need to be nudged a bit by providing them with simple graphic templates and anonymous voting and result visualizations that are then facilitated constructively. As a final nudge to give disagreement more weight in your future meetings, don’t just believe me or the dozens of scientific studies on the subject (see below); learn from these three timeless thruths:

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. Mahatma Gandhi.

The growth of knowledge depends entirely upon disagreement. Karl Popper

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. Oscar Wilde                                              

Do you agree? If not, I would love to hear from you ??

Pointers to informative research on disagreement:

Edmondson, V.C. & Munchus, G. (2007). Managing the unwanted truth: A framework for dissent strategy. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 20(6).

Mengis, J., Eppler, M. J. (2006). Seeing versus Arguing: The Moderating Role of Collaborative Visualization in Team Knowledge Integration. Journal of Universal Knowledge Management, 1(3).

Garner, J.T. (2012). Making waves at work: Perceived effectiveness and appropriateness of organizational dissent messages. Management Communication Quarterly, 26(2).

Leigh, P., Francesca, G. & Larrick, R. (2013). When power makes others speechless: the negative impact of leader power on team performance. Academy of Management Journal, 56(5).

Schulz-Hardt, S., Jochims, M., Frey, D. (2006). Group decision making in hidden profile situations: Dissent as a facilitator for decision quality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(6).