How to disagree better

Healthy, resilient and fulfilling personal and professional relationships have conflict — sometimes a lot of it. How you navigate conflict, and what you do to foster the relationship in general, matter at least as much as, and perhaps more than, the amount or degree of conflict.

Couples can have big fights, frequent conflict, and even bicker all the time and still have healthy, fulfilling, and lasting relationships. But discord by itself does not determine if a relationship can thrive. What does? Research points to factors that contribute to better disagreements — factors like feeling understood by your partner and refraining from self-immersive behavior after a fight (self-immersion = dwelling on hurt and angry feelings).

Similarly, robust disagreement is a hallmark of many successful, collaborative workplace teams. How do you prevent conflict from damaging team dynamics and interfering with good decision-making? Research points to factors that contribute to disagreeing better — factors like responding effectively to a co-worker’s anger, promoting forgiveness in the workplace, and negotiating well with colleagues.

These examples all underscore the idea that if you want to turn a difficult conversation into a more rewarding one, it’s less effective to try changing who they are (good luck with that) or tamping down unpleasant disagreement than it is to change your approach to the conversation.

This is one reason for the existence of facilitators and mediators — we know how to help people change the way they’re approaching the conversation or problem to get better results. In most situations, of course, you don’t need a mediator or a meeting facilitator from outside.

To disagree better, you can make your own adjustments.

Every conversation contains the four layers defined above, though we may not have conscious awareness of all the layers all of the time.

When a conversation gets difficult, it can be frustrating to figure out what you can change in the conversation to get better results. That’s where the four layers — I call them dimensions — come in: You can use them to get immediate insight into why the conversation is struggling.

Put another way, there are four good ways we can try to disagree better:

1. Improve communication.
2. Question the mental models that inform our thinking, and avoid cognitive traps.
3. Hone our ability to stay calm and mentally agile during tension.
4. Organize the conversation differently.

These are not sequential; I number them only for easier reference. They’re also not isolated from each other; in fact, they influence each other. For instance: How you think about a problem or a person influences how you handle yourself during tension with them. And how calm you are influences how you communicate.

Now let’s look closely at each dimension and how to use it for insight into conversations you lead or participate in.

It’s common to hear disagreement and conflict blamed on communication problems. While communication problems are not the root of all conflict, the attribution is popular because communication does play a vital role.

Elements of effective communication at work and home include:

• Good listening habits,
• Attentive word choice,
• Framing good questions,
• Awareness of non-verbals, including body language, eye contact, and tone of voice, and
• Giving full attention to others.

Is a communication problem causing or contributing a conflict?

Questions for assessing communication’s impact

• Are questions used more to gain insight and understanding, or more to trap, manipulate, or convey disapproval?
• Do individuals acknowledge and try hard to understand each other, even when they disagree?
• What are tone of voice, voice volume, and other body language signals saying about how people are feeling?
• How well are individuals listening to each other when they disagree? What signals tell you this?
• Is there willingness/ability to productively confront difficult matters with each other (to avoid the “spiral of silence“)?
• Is communication still taking place face-to-face or are participants primarily relying on email, texting, or communicating through another person (like an assistant)?

Questions to reflect on together

• How can we strengthen the way we talk when there’s disagreement?
• What could help us be better listeners?
• Do we acknowledge and try hard to understand each other, even when we still disagree?
• How can we model good attentiveness to others when conversations get difficult (instead of, for example, interrupting or multitasking)?

We use mental models to make sense of our world and experiences. Mental models are the beliefs, frameworks, mental images, and generalizations we use to understand and explain what’s happening.

The way we think about people and problems has an important impact on how effectively we solve problems, resolve conflict, and make good decisions.

Using mental models is such an innate experience that we may not even be aware of the models we’re using. Do you believe that to win a negotiation you have to get more and the other person get less? That’s a compromise mental model. Have you mentally placed your nemesis in a personality category, such as “bully” or “difficult person”? That could be helpful if your diagnosis turns out to be accurate (of course, odds are good that it isn’t), and it can also cause a category error, a type of thinking error that can make things worse.

Mental models aren’t “wrong” or “right.” But unexamined mental models can make our problem solving less effective, send us down blind alleys, and cause us to escalate conflict. Common “thinking errors,” such as the sunk cost fallacy and confirmation bias, can lead us to poor decisions.

So one way to disagree better is to examine our mental models and make sure we’re applying models that are useful to our present circumstances. Put simplistically, to disagree better, we need to think better.

Teams can examine the mental models they’re using to make an important decision. Business partners, co-workers, and couples can discuss what presses their buttons, mental models about the way they want to be seen by others. Individuals can reflect privately about the mental models that inform their thinking, actions, and decisions.

Are limiting mental models or cognitive traps causing or contributing a conflict?

Questions for assessing the impact of mental models

• What beliefs or assumptions (about the problem, each other, the situation, culture, etc) are guiding participants’ thinking?
• How are private characterizations of someone involved (“angry,” “manipulative,” “freight train,” “passive-aggressive,” “wimp,” “bully,” etc) playing a role in the problem?
• How is an area of expertise (engineering, social work, law, dog training, homemaking, etc) informing mental models? How could it be contributing to blind spots?

Questions to reflect on together

• What kinds of assumptions are we making about each other, the situation, or the solution? What are “pictures in our heads”?
• How are our assumptions/conclusions/diagnoses/judgments about the situation or other people interfering with problem solving?
• If we could pretend, for just a few minutes, that our characterization about someone is completely wrong, how would we view the problem differently?

The best conflict resolution and communication skills in the world are little use if we can’t access them when we need them most. Self-mastery is about being able to choose our responses rather than reacting automatically in ways that may not serve our best interests in the long and/or short run.

Elements of self-mastery that serve us well in ongoing personal and professional relationships include:

• Maintaining equilibrium in the face of stressful interactions or circumstances,
• The ability to think clearly under stress,
• The ability to respond nimbly and communicate well during tension,
• Awareness of triggers and how to mitigate them, and
• Choosing behavior strategically instead of reactively.

How well are individuals’ able to handle the pressure and discomfort of disagreement and conflict?

Questions for assessing self-mastery’s impact

• Do people get seriously thrown off balance in interactions where disagreement and conflict exist? If so, are they able to regain their balance reasonably well?
• Are individuals aware of their own “growing edges” and able to compensate for them in discussions?
• Are participants generally able to strike an effective balance between being honest and forthcoming, and fair and considerate?
• Does tension seem to interfere with clear thinking and/or communication?

Questions to reflect on together

• What could improve our interpersonal dynamics? (Pro tip: What gets in someone else’s way may not bother you — but don’t discount it.)
• What kinds of words or circumstances tend to throw us off balance, individually or as a pair/group?
• What can we each do to keep our own balance when conversation gets difficult? How can we help others when they’re thrown off balance?
• When we’re frustrated, do we address it early on or allow it to fester? If the latter, what could change that?

Most conversations unfold organically, without much thought to structure or sequence. That works just fine much of the time. When conversations get difficult, however, process pitfalls tend to amplify the difficulties.

Good problem-solving process is like a road map — it orients us to where we are and how we’ll know when we’ve arrived at a good destination. We may not need a road map to go to our local green grocer, but if we’re driving into unfamiliar territory to visit a different one for the first time, even the simplest of road maps can save us hours of frustration.

Good problem-solving processes have hallmarks like these:

• Effectively framing the problem to be solved (Pro tip: When problems get stuck, one reason is that the problem hasn’t been properly or sufficiently named. Another reason is that people are often solving different problems, figuratively going down different train tracks),
• Attention to time and place for discussion,
• Spending quality time and attention to understand the problem fully before trying to solve it,
• Generating and considering multiple options before selecting,
• Commitment to giving real voice to stakeholders’ opinions and preferences, and
• Using decision-making methods appropriate to the setting and circumstances.

Could your discussion process benefit from a clearer roadmap?

Questions for assessing the impact of process

• Is there a general process we use when we’re navigating a difficult conversation or important decision? Would those involved describe the process similarly?
• Is there clarity about how a decision will be made? Does everyone share that clarity and accept it?
• Do we hurry through or avoid parts of the problem that feel uncomfortable to discuss? (Pro tip: Don’t hurry through the Groan Zone.)
• Where do things tend to get stuck when trying to collaborate?

Questions to reflect on together

• What is the problem we’re trying to solve? If we each were to name out loud the meaningful problem we are trying to solve together, would we be on the same page? (Pro tip: Go ahead and do this; don’t guess.)
• Could this conversation benefit from us approaching it in a different way?
• How will we recognize an effective decision when we see it?
• How will we decide? Will our usual decision method serve us well in this situation?

When you look hard at any conversation, you can usually identify problems in every dimension. Don’t let this overwhelm you. You probably don’t need to address small problems in all of the four dimensions. Focusing on 1-2 dimensions that stand out most strongly will help you disagree better and achieve rewarding results.

For the dimension(s) you identify has having the biggest impact :

• How can we improve the problems identified in that dimension?
• What elements in that dimension would benefit from discussion by those involved (workplace team, family, clients, etc)?
• What elements in that dimension might benefit from private discussion with an individual?
• What will I do differently? (Don’t skip this one!)

© 2020 Tammy Lenski