Why Are We Yelling? The Art of Productive Disagreement

"A weed is but a flower unloved." - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A man is yelling obscenities in his backyard. His neighbor, overhearing this ruckus, walks up to the short fence between their yards and asks if everything is okay.

“No! Everything is not okay!” he yells back, before catching his misdirected anger and becoming apologetic. He stands up and tries to shake off his rage. His fi sts clench giant tangles of pulled weeds: dandelions, sour grass, and other local varieties that the neighbor recognizes as the scourge of homeowners. The man gestures to his garden. “These stupid weeds! How do you keep these pests out?”

The neighbor can tell that he’s given his yard a lot of attention, despite his frustration with it. A beautiful lemon tree grows along the back wall, and a variety of fl owering plants off er secondary focal points that pleasantly zigzag across the yard, ultimately returning her eye to the lemon tree. She says, “I think you might be pulling them up the wrong way. These plants have long, fragile roots, and their bulbs break off and stay underground. They’re sneaky weed hydras: every time you chop off one head, twelve grow back.”

“Ugh—weed hydras are the last thing I want to deal with right now!” the man says. “I don’t have time to excavate each precious weed one by one. I work all day and just want to come home to a nice yard.”

“I can show you how to do it,” the neighbor offers. “It can be pleasant work. Also, these weeds you have aren’t all bad; they do good things too. Their long roots bring nutrients up to the topsoil and help hold the soil together during rains. And their leaves make a good salad topping.”

The man scoffs. “Salad’s not my thing. Thanks for the offer to help, but no thanks. I’m just going to do what I always do and then move on to more important things.” He yanks a few more weeds out and hurls them into the compost pile with an angry force reminiscent of a knight swinging his sword at a dragon. “Maybe I’ll just burn the whole yard to the ground,” he mumbles under his breath, and he marches back inside.

Arguments and weeds are similar in many ways. They sprout in our gardens and minds. We usually don’t want them in either place; they’re nuisances at best and mortal enemies at worst. Many of us approach disagreements the same way this man approaches weeds—as things to battle and destroy.

This book is about the art of productive disagreement, which requires a shift in mind-set akin to the one the man’s neighbor tried to suggest. To begin to see it, first we need to remove a few common misconceptions about what arguments really are.

MISCONCEPTION 1: Arguments Are Bad

They’re not bad, but they can be unproductive. We aren’t taught how to argue productively.

We argue with our annoying alarm clock that insists we wake up. We argue with our clothes that wear out or stop fitting. We argue with our bodies, we argue with our pets, we argue with bumps in the sidewalk that we almost trip on, we argue with cars in traffic, we argue with our bosses and teachers and parents, we argue with computers and technology, we argue with our friends and relatives, we argue with our spouses and children, we argue with the television, we argue with the sky. We argue with ourselves. And when we asleep, arguments creep into our dreams as well. No wonder we’re yelling—it’s exhausting!

To add insult to injury, when I asked people what they think about the way we argue, nine out of ten people classified arguments as unproductive.

Why do we argue if it’s both unpleasant and unproductive?

Despite how pointless they often seem afterward, don’t arguments feel unavoidable in the moment? It’s true: in the moment, arguments perform a crucial—and underappreciated—job for us by waving a flag that something important to us is being endangered, whether it’s a personal preference, a hunch about the best strategy for meeting a shared goal, or a core value of ours. This endangerment sparks strong emotions. Often, we notice the emotional buildup and push it back down, waiting for a better time or telling ourselves that it’s not worth our energy. And we advise others to pick their battles wisely, doing everything they can to keep the peace. But if we make a habit of pushing the frustration too far down, sometimes we begin to believe we’re at fault for being frustrated, and we beat ourselves up about it. If we do that, the arguments decrease in frequency, but we’re left with a constant low-level anxiety that slowly wears away at our mental and physical health. Today, one in five adults in the United States has some form of anxiety disorder, and the rate of deaths from the three despair-related causes (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related illness) has been increasing for the last decade, causing our average life-span to actually dip for the first time in decades. Hiding from our negative emotions doesn’t make them go away. They always find a way out.

We need weeds, and we need disagreements too. Famous marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman says that a relationship without conflict is a relationship without communication and is bound to fail. Conflict is inevitable whenever two or more people are talking about things from their own unique perspectives. Disagreements are a sign that the relationship’s soil is healthy. (Gottman recommends a 5:1 ratio of positive encounters to negative encounters, because this ensures that the flow of disagreements is kept open—and can therefore be resolved without being overwhelmingly negative.)

And yet, most of us were never taught how to argue, how to navigate the negative encounters so that they acknowledge the negative and strengthen the positive. How we argue matters. Luckily, this is a solvable problem. We can learn this skill.

But first: how did I end up obsessed with productive disagreement, and why should you listen to me? When my mom asks me, every couple years, what I actually do for a living, it’s always tough to explain. I’ve spent the last twenty years as an entrepreneur, engineer, and product leader at high-profile, hyper-growth tech start-ups like Amazon, Twitter, and Slack. I’ve worked with engineers, designers, marketers, researchers, data analysts, customer support reps, business leaders, and customers—each with different plates spinning, different anxieties clashing, different incentives to pursue, and different measurements for success. My job has basically been to help facilitate meaningful and productive collaboration within a million ever-changing constraints. At the same time, I’ve been studying cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and systems thinking and applying what I’ve learned to the work I do. In 2016, I published an article titled “Cognitive bias cheat sheet,” which proposed an analysis and simplification of more than two hundred cognitive biases. It went viral and has since been adopted by academics and researchers around the world as a way to reframe cognitive biases. Instead of dismissing them as mental bugs, we should consider that our brains had a very good reason for adopting these shortcuts of thinking. They continue to help us get things done in a world of information overload and scarcity of time and attention. Rather than fighting these shortcuts, our effort will be better spent developing honest bias, which means accepting our own limitations and always remaining open to evidence of our blind spots.

This mix of professional and amateur obsessions has been a Petri dish for iterating on methods of productive disagreement. I’ve spent the last few years conducting experiments, both online and in person, to test theories about our existing habits regarding bias and communication, as well as better strategies for managing those biases. This research has persuaded me that the art of productive disagreement is the most important metaskill anyone can acquire.

I’ve become much more concerned when I see people being too polite and conflict avoidant than when conflict is surfacing and being heard. Hidden disagreements are much worse than surfaced disagreements. Kim Scott, the author of Radical Candor, calls this impulse toward kindness “ruinous empathy”7 because it actually causes more problems than it solves. It’s a real thing that has begun to take hold in our companies, at our dinner tables, and even in our own heads. It happens when people care a lot about things but, for cultural or personality-based reasons, they feel it is best not to challenge them directly.

Disagreements are a sign of group health, not pathology, and cultures that allow the airing of grievances in a way that addresses them productively are more likely to create successful relationships, businesses, and communities.

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Surprising truth: people are happier, and groups are higher-functioning, when the flow of necessary disagreements is open and they have an honest chance to be heard.

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Are all arguments the same? Certainly not. We’re going take apart arguments as if we were dissecting a frog to find out what’s inside. We can’t unilaterally state that all arguments are bad any more than we can say that all frogs have brown eyes. Brown might be the most common color, but that statement hides a surprising amount of variety while simultaneously discouraging closer inspection.

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Fun fact: Frogs’ eyes come in a variety of colors from red, orange, and yellow to copper, silver, bronze, and gold. In most frogs and toads the pupil is horizontal, but many pupils are vertical, and some varieties of frogs have pupils that are round, triangular, heart shaped, hourglass shaped, or diamond shaped. When you unblind the stereotype around frog eyes, you find all kinds of fantastic diversity. The same is true of arguments.

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If we unfold our one-dimensional understanding, we’ll see that a simple generalization like “arguments are good” or “arguments are bad” won’t suffice for the same reason: it obscures the surprising variety of arguments that closer inspection reveals. Let’s begin by categorizing arguments as productive or unproductive. If we get into an argument and come away with a better understanding of what’s going on, or a better plan for what to do next, that not only cancels out the negative emotions but turns them into positive ones!

With these categories, we can ask better questions. What makes arguments productive? How can I make my arguments more productive? As we would with any work of art, we can study our subjects with curiosity, learn to see them in new ways. Let’s start simply, by unlearning some things about yelling.

MISCONCEPTION 2: Arguments Change Minds

We can only really change two things: our own minds and our own behavior.

What is a disagreement? In the simplest terms, let’s say that it’s an unacceptable difference between two perspectives. They appear in every corner of our lives, not to mention also under our rugs, and in our closets.

EXAMPLES FROM EVERYDAY LIFE:

• Someone swoops in and takes the parking spot you were patiently waiting for.
• You accidentally sleep in, making you late for work, and blame your spouse for turning the alarm clock off too soon.
• You call a retailer to complain that the pants you just bought tore in an embarrassing way and you want a refund.

EXAMPLES FROM CONVERSATIONS ONLINE:

• Your aunt defends a celebrity accused of sexual misconduct, and you think there are too many people speaking out against him for there to be any chance he’s innocent.

• Your friend’s Facebook page blows up in an argument about whether or not wearing a certain hat makes them a racist.
• You think the photo being shared around looks like a white dress with gold lace, and others think it looks like a blue dress with black lace.

EXAMPLES FROM MYTHOLOGY AND FICTION:

• Sam-I-am is insistent8 that his grumpy friend try some green eggs and ham, and his friend doesn’t want them here or there. He doesn’t want them anywhere.
• Zeus chains Prometheus to a rock, where every day his liver is eaten by a giant eagle and then grows back again, because he doesn’t think Prometheus should have given humans the gift of fire.
• Darth Vader wants Luke Skywalker to join him in a quest to end destructive conflict and restore order to the galaxy. Luke declines the offer.

EXAMPLES FROM POLITICS:

• You think taxes should be raised on the wealthy, and your parents think there should be a flat tax that’s the same for everyone.
• You think it’s important for everyone to get a free university education, and your senator thinks the federal government should only pay for people who would have qualified for a loan.
• You vote for candidate A, because you think they’re more likely to win the general election, and your friend votes for candidate B, because they think they’d do a better job if elected.

EXAMPLES FROM OUR INTERNAL MONOLOGUE:

• You feel like you shouldn’t have that third slice of pizza, but you love cheese so much.
• You want a new car, but you also want to have money.
• You want it to be sunny, but Alexa says it’s going to rain.

It’s easy to see how we go from different perspectives to the conclusion that the best way to resolve the disagreements is to change someone’s mind. If the perspectives didn’t disagree anymore, then the disagreement would disappear. So which side wants to volunteer?

The key word in our definition of a disagreement (an unacceptable difference between two perspectives), isn’t “difference.” It’s “unacceptable.” Once the clash between perspectives becomes unacceptable, our motivation shifts from understanding minds to changing them, and from that shift springs a world of trouble.

We can change our own beliefs and our own behaviors, but when it comes to changing other people our options are more limited, and the results can vary wildly. Sometimes, our attempts to change minds can actually have the opposite effect, making the other person dig in their heels even deeper in their current belief. It’s called the backfire effect.

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Trying to persuade people too much can backfire.

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For example:

• You have two good friends who start dating. When they break up, one of the friends asks you to stop being friends with the other. The backfire effect might lead you to actually reach out to the other friend, or even to sympathize with them more.
• Your boss tells you that you absolutely have to work weekends and refrain from drinking or smoking in your off hours, in order to be sharp on the job. The backfire effect might lead you to do those things even more than you otherwise would.
• Your sibling is a fan of a rival sports team to the one you both grew up supporting. Your sibling’s team wins, and he or she rubs it in, saying you should give up being a fan of your team. The backfire effect might lead you to go out and buy extra team swag and make a point to flaunt it next time you see them.

Why does this happen? The common thread among all of these behaviors that show up as a result of the backfire effect is our perception of an unacceptable demand on our freedom. We may or may not have strong beliefs about which friend is to blame for the breakup, or how much we want to indulge in drugs and alcohol on our own time, or which team deserves our loyalty, but we do have strong beliefs about what we think other people should be allowed to request of us. When others infringe on this deep core value, it sparks the backfire more than anything else.

The ancient Greek myth of Eris, the goddess of discord, chaos, and misery, shows us how much trouble we can get into when we try to change people’s minds.

When every other god and goddess on Olympus was invited to the wedding of Theseus and Peleus except for Eris, she was furious. What, they didn’t want her to ruin their good times with all of her chaos, misery, and discord? It honestly sounds like a fair enough reason to me, but Eris wasn’t having it. “It’s not my fault that I’m the goddess of discord!” When Zeus refused to change his mind, she decided to show him what chaos, misery, and discord were all about. (Classic backfire effect: Zeus tried to limit Eris’s freedom and instead sparked an escalation of the very thing he was trying to prevent. For all their might and power, the Greek gods were terrible at the art of productive disagreement.)

Eris snuck into the wedding festivities and tossed a golden apple into the crowd inscribed with “To the most beautiful.” (Now it’s Eris’s turn to try to change Zeus’s mind about ever not inviting her to a wedding party.)

Obviously, every goddess on Olympus wanted to claim the title of most beautiful (because sexist beauty ideals are not a problem the Greek gods have yet solved). Zeus, knowing that this could get messy, remembered the shy shepherd Paris was supposed to be the most fair judge in the land and appointed him to make the call.

There was only one apple, and nobody thought to inscribe a bunch of apples and avoid all this drama, and so a heated disagreement ensued among the goddesses. If the goal was to get Paris’s fair and honest opinion, they could have just asked him for it. But no, instead they each invented their biggest and boldest bribe in order to nudge Paris to their side.

Paris, weighing his options, decided that Aphrodite was the most beautiful goddess because she had the best bribe. This is how persuasion works . . . which is very different from the art of productive disagreement. Persuasion is all about piling incentives, rewards, and sometimes threats onto a decision in order to tip the scales in your favor. Aphrodite “won” the debate by promising the heart of Helen of Troy to Paris, but did winning mean she was the most beautiful? It’s not clear. In addition, there was also the small matter of causing the Trojan War, which lasted decades and led to the fall of Troy. All that in order to persuade—or, if we rewind further back, all because Eris tried to change Zeus’s mind about whether he should invite her to a party. When disagreements stack high enough, you can end up causing quite a bit of damage. At the end of the day, no minds were changed, everything backfired, and Eris’s reputation for discord, chaos, and misery was confirmed to everyone in attendance, yet again.

The lesson? When we try to “win” arguments by whatever means are at our disposal, including persuasion, bribery, threats, and other tools of force, we don’t end up getting the results we hope for. At best, Aphrodite got the meaningless apple, Eris got revenge, and excess resentment poured below the surface to feed the roots and bulbs of tomorrow’s, next month’s, and next year’s future disagreements.

Changing minds is really hard. There’s really only one mind in the universe that you can change, with some luck, and that’s yours. Think about the last time you changed your own mind about something: did you do a complete 180, or was it more of a gradual shift?

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A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because our brains don’t know how to rewire a full belief in one big haul. New neuron paths aren’t created that quickly. You might be able to get a tiny percent of someone’s mind to rewire to a new belief in a given conversation, but minds change slowly and in unpredictable ways. You might be changing it in the wrong direction.

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We have a tendency to continue to maintain old perspectives even after we’ve “decided” to change our mind. That’s called “continued influence effect,” which is one of more than two hundred cognitive biases that subtly influence how we think and which we’ll be discussing in much greater detail in chapter 3.

If we can’t change minds, at least we can change what people do, right? Changing other people’s behavior is possible, especially if you use force. But this too can easily trigger backfire effects that aren’t immediately apparent. Will Eris be invited to the next big wedding? Unlikely! Will Aphrodite be declared the most beautiful goddess next time the question comes up? Not unless you want another city to fall. Similarly, when I bribe my son to clean his room with the promise of more screen time, will the virtues of cleanliness and personal responsibility grow in his heart, leading to him clean his room without prompting in the future? Nope. Will employees do better work if you force them to show up at a certain time and to work a certain number of hours? Will loyalty programs in stores make customers more loyal? Will slaps on wrists to corporations who break the law make them more likely to adhere to it next time? No, no, and a big fat no.

Okay then. If we can’t change minds and we can’t reliably lean on changing behavior either, what other options do we have? The first step is to acknowledge the backfire effect and pay close attention to both the short-term and long-term cycles of disagreement to see how they play out in seen and hidden worlds.

If you see patterns like this in your life—problems appear, you whack them, they disappear, and then they somehow magically return again—don’t fool yourself into thinking that the weeds are actually gone half the year. They’re just hiding underground, regaining strength for next season.

The following spring, as predicted, the man’s yard is overcome again, with even more weeds. This time, instead of turning down his neighbor’s advice, he seeks it out, and she agrees to come over and assess the situation.

First, she says, “Weeds are just plants we’ve chosen to ban from our yards. If you look at what they’re good at, they can actually make the ecosystem of your yard healthier. Instead of trying to kill them, think of them as plants that are very easy to keep alive.”

The neighbor continues: “We should think of the garden as a living ecosystem that includes and benefits from weeds rather than as something that’s only healthy if they’re completely eradicated. Even if you don’t go after their bulbs, you can pull them out, thank them for their service, and compost their leaves, stems, and flowers so they can feed the other plants in your yard, even in death. They’re your cheap topsoil replenishers!”

“Wow, that’s dark. But okay.” The man pauses a second and then asks, “I’m still not quite sure I agree that a garden needs weeds. Having a weedless garden seems pretty great to me—I’d save so much time. Why would anyone ever wish for more weeds?”

“It’s not about wishing for more weeds,” the neighbor says. “Look at my yard. It has fewer weeds than yours, even though I haven’t spent nearly as much time as you pulling weeds out. When I do spend time in the yard, I decide which plants I want to have return next year and which I can dig up entirely to make room for something else. It requires an appreciation and understanding of what’s happening underground, even if I can’t see it directly. You come out once a year and have a very confrontational couple weeks with your yard, including gnashing of teeth and fists raised to the heavens and lots of profanity.”

“I come from a . . . loud family. You should meet my father. Sorry about that.”

“No need to apologize. It led to us meeting, didn’t it? Anyway, I like to spend a little time all year round in my garden, thinking about weeds, plants, insects, little creatures, and dirt. Even when I can’t see the weeds, I know they’re still there, hibernating in the soil, and I expect and even welcome them back each spring. It’s not a battle, because we’re all in this together: weeds, plants, creatures, gardeners, garden, clouds, and stars.”

“Pass the pipe; you’ve sold me!” They laugh, and the neighbor spends a couple hours in the garden investigating and narrating the grand drama unfolding among plant, dirt, and nature in his own backyard.

MISCONCEPTION 3: Arguments End

Arguments have deep roots and will always find a way to grow back again.

The story about the weeds isn’t entirely fictional. Kellianne and I moved five times during our first six years of marriage, so when we bought a house in Berkeley, California, in 2014, our intention was to put down some roots. Our first son, Niko, was four, and we wanted him to have some stability with schools and friends when the time came.

We didn’t realize till the next spring that something else had also decided to take root on our property: a cute little yellow-flowered plant called oxalis, or wood sorrel, or sour grass. I’m pretty sure it’s Eris’s favorite flower.

The first time we cleared them out we thought we were done with them. But it turns out you’re never done with oxalis. Every one you pull out leaves a dozen or more little bulbs waiting to grow into new plants in the future. As new homeowners excited about settling in and working on our yard, those little yellow flowers gave us nightmares. How could we get rid of them? I started seeing them everywhere I went, and I began to judge my neighbors by how many of them they had growing in their yards.

Every relationship is like a garden, and every garden has weeds. Arguments are the little weeds of our relationship that grow up around the things we intentionally plant. Some arguments don’t seem so bad and might be easy to work around whenever they pop up. Others might be ugly enough that you go nuclear on them, and that patch of the yard is abandoned as scorched earth for a couple years. Either way, the weeds always come back, as reliably as the days and the seasons, despite our attempts to get rid of them once and for all.

This is true not only of the arguments we have but also the ones we don’t have.

Arguments don’t end, because they have long, long roots. They might disappear from the surface of reality, but they’re just hiding. In a relationship, we have to cobble together compromises at regular intervals to help bridge the gap between our different tastes and preferences. There’s probably no effective strategy that can be found to help us permanently “convert” the other person to our tastes and preferences. This is obvious when you actually consider it, but when a disagreement over “What is meaningful to me?” is mistaken for another kind of disagreement, like “What is the right way to balance our preferences?” it can easily get stuck in a bad way. To help us figure out what kind of argument we’re having, let’s discuss the three realms of disagreement: the head, the heart, and the hands.

THE REALMS OF THE HEAD, HEART, AND HANDS

The easiest thing you can do to have more productive disagreements immediately is to remember to ask the other person: “Is this about what’s true, what’s meaningful, or what’s useful?” Is this about the head, the heart, or the hands? If you can agree on the answer, then you’re on your way.

When we’re having a disagreement with someone, it’s really useful to pay attention to which of the three realms we’re experiencing. The three realms are: anxiety about what is true (the head realm of information and science), anxiety about what is meaningful (the heart realm of preferences and values), and anxiety about what is useful (the hands realm of practicality and planning). Each of them represents a part of reality that has its own rules for validation and different implications in a conversation. What works to resolve a disagreement in one realm will not work in the other two.

🧠 Head realm: what is true?

When a disagreement can be settled with information, we will call it a conflict of head, because it’s about data and evidence that can be objectively verified as true or false out in the world. It is often concerned with the “what” of a situation.

Example: Two people have an argument about who gets to spend more time watching shows that they like versus shows that the other person likes. The resolution to this disagreement is measured in hours, with some bias toward recent days.

❤️ Heart realm: what is meaningful?

When a disagreement can only be settled as a matter of personal taste, we’ll call it a conflict of heart, because it’s about preferences and values and judgment calls that can only be determined within oneself. It is often concerned with the “why” of a situation.

Example: Two people have an argument about whether a particular show is worth watching. The resolution to this disagreement is measured by personal taste, ability to relate, appreciation for different kinds of narratives.

✋ Hands realm: what is useful?

When a disagreement can only be settled without some form of test, or by waiting to see how things play out in the future, we’ll call that a conflict of hands. It is often concerned with the “how” of a situation.

Example: Two people have an argument about the best way to balance TV time that takes into consideration differences in preferences, differences in show schedules, and differences in personal schedules to be agreeable to both parties. The resolution to this disagreement is measured by its utility in the relationship over time.

What if it’s all of the above?

Disagreements always have at least one of these conflicts going on, but some will have a blend of two or all three. When that happens, asking “What is this about?” can help us separate these different arguments and then agree on which one should be addressed first.

Acknowledge the shadow.

There’s one more realm to mention. Sometimes we think we’re disagreeing with someone and don’t realize that we’re actually arguing with a shadow projection of our own fears and imaginings—and our worst fears at that. Projections are much harder to have productive disagreements with, because they always live up to our most uncharitable stereotypes of them. They will always act that way we expect them to: as our projection, confirming our most uncharitable stereotypes is their job. The antidote to arguing with a projection is to always know whom you’re disagreeing with and make sure they’re a real human being in the conversation with you, and then actually listening to their argument rather than putting words in their mouth.

When you find yourself arguing with your own shadow, you might as well sit down, because it’s going to last a very long time.

Kellianne and I have been in our house for five years now and have definitely reduced the rascally oxalis’s claim on our yard, but even more importantly, I’ve learned to welcome the oxalis when it appears every spring. It has pretty yellow flowers. Our kids enjoy it because you can also eat it, and it doesn’t taste too bad. Of course, our instinct is still to immediately yank the plants on sight, but now this task is done with a begrudging respect for our shared enthusiasm for growing roots in sunny Berkeley. This is an argument in the realm of the hands now, which doesn’t have an end so much as an established commitment to an open dialogue that carries us from season to season.

When you learn to appreciate how arguments have deep roots in our relationships with others and ourselves, and how they participate in a cyclical dance, springing up every once in a while, it’s possible to appreciate them as partners rather than as enemies. The key is to dance between chaos and order with the rhythm of our relationships, maintaining a healthy balance of each.

THE GIFT OF DISAGREEMENT

Truth 1: Arguments aren’t bad. They’re signposts to issues that need our attention.

Truth 2: Arguments aren’t about changing minds. They are about bringing minds together.

Truth 3: Arguments don’t end. They have deep roots and will pop back up again and again, asking us to dance with them.

It’s easy to understand why we think of arguments as nuisances, like weeds. We don’t have time to deal with this crap! Having a disagreement-free week, or even day, seems like the ultimate wish. Why should we wish for more disagreements?

Done right, arguments are opportunities. A productive disagreement is something you’ll look forward to rather than dread. It’s one that leads to a mutually beneficial outcome.

A productive disagreement yields fruit: the fruit of security, by removing a threat, reducing a risk, resulting in a deal, or concluding with a decision; the fruit of growth, by revealing new information about the world or each other that makes us see and understand reality more deeply; the fruit of connection, by bringing us together and giving us opportunities to forge trust with each other; and the fruit of enjoyment, by teaching us to operate with a collaborative mindset that emphasizes playfulness, adventure, fun, and sometimes even awe.

We’ve all had good fights, clashes, disagreements—whatever you want to call them—that ended in mutual improvement rather than mutual destruction. They often surprise us, because we didn’t expect them to lead to something fruitful. Learning how to increase the chances of this happy surprise is the art we are talking about when we talk about productive disagreement.

This perspective will take time to unfold. But like the neighbor said, it’s not a question of wishing for more or fewer disagreements directly, because we don’t actually have a choice in the matter. Assuming we’re stuck with each other, how can we best get along?

The art of productive disagreement has all kinds of urgent, practical applications these days. Our world is becoming increasingly polarized, and even the most chill Zen masters have a limit.

The rest of this book will walk you through the “how” of productive disagreement with eight conversational habits and things to try that will help you turn frustrating battles into pleasant and productive exchanges. I want to emphasize just how much this change will impact your day-to-day life by telling you about three superpowers you will acquire by practicing this art.

1. Disagreements won’t be frustrating. They’ll feel less like dead ends and more like doorways into unexplored territory. You’ll learn to identify ways to keep a dialogue open when it seems like you’ve run out of viable options for moving forward.
2. You’ll end up having fewer repetitive, frustrating disagreements, not because you’re avoiding them or squashing them but because you are able to end the cycles that keep sending the same disagreements back into your life over and over again. You’ll learn to pull up disagreements with their roots intact.
3. The world will become bigger, because you won’t be cut off from all the interesting conversations, ideas, people, and opportunities that exist on the other side of disagreements. You’ll find that you’ve become more willing to engage with scary people and ideas that you haven’t poked with a ten-foot pole in years. You’ll learn that opposing perspectives are often quite different when seen from the inside and not nearly as bad as your projection of them from the outside made them look.

YOUR NEW SUPERPOWER

The art of productive disagreement is what some call a metaskill and I call a superpower, because it’s a skill that levels up all of your other skills.

It’s up there with the ability to read, or write, or think critically. Metaskills are super important to invest in, because if you get marginally better at having more productive disagreements—say even 5 to 10 percent better—your life will get 50 to100 percent better! That’s because every role you play in your life requires communication and the ability to work through disagreements that pop up. When you learn to disagree productively in different roles, the effects combine and are magnified, making you a better friend, a more competent coworker, a more loving spouse, a more active family member, and a more effective citizen of the world. It’s close to a superpower, because it’s probably one of the most high-leverage skills you can work on. Very few people have been given the right tools, rules, and environment to develop and refine their practice of productive disagreement, so we have a lot of room to grow into it.

IF YOU'RE ON THE FENCE

It’s quite okay to still be on the fence about productive disagreement. The fence is a safe place to be. You can look around right now, in fact, and see how most of us spend most of our lives on the fence, waiting to figure out what we should do and when we should do it. Cynicism, futility, and frustration aren’t pleasant, but they’re the devil we know. Before you get too comfortable on the fence, though, let me tell you one more thing that might help nudge you to one side or the other.

The choice you have is not to A) hide emotions or B) show them. It’s more like the choice Darth Vader gave Luke Skywalker in Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back: “We can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy.” It seems tempting, right? Order, in the case of Darth Vader’s vision of the Empire, is about establishing an unbreakable power hierarchy that puts the two of them at the top and everyone else below. Hiding emotions might end conflict and bring order, but it does so by pushing below the surface our true selves, which will resurface in the shadowy forms of anxiety, despair, and (if you get mixed up with the dark side) very pale and wrinkly skin. Don’t do it! Don’t give in to despair. There is a better path that is neither all chaos nor all order—if Dr. Gottman’s recipe is on the right track, we could aim for 83 percent order and 17 percent chaos. Relationships and conversations need both order and chaos to be productive.

In a nutshell, balancing order and chaos is what this book will help you get a good start on. At least, this could be the radioactive spider that bites you and recombines your mental DNA to give you this superpower. Designing your costume and coming up with your gimmicky catchphrases is on you.

THE MAP OF ARGUMENTLAND

What does this life of productive disagreement look like? We now move from telling to showing.

In chapter 1 you’ll learn to watch how anxiety sparks in your mind, and how this is a signpost pointing to your most important personal beliefs and expectations.

In chapter 2 you’ll learn how to distinguish between different internal voices that infl uence your approach to disagreement. We’ll use the example of a polarizing issue like the topic of vaccinations to show how it’s possible to move from a black-and-white interpretation to one that has a little bit more room for exceptions and gray areas, opening a door for productive one-on-one conversation.

In chapter 3 you’ll see how cognitive biases complicate our disagreements and lead to situations where there’s no practical way to be completely fair about a decision—for example, a hiring decision—and learn what we can do to reduce the damage of biases in these situations.

In chapter 4 you’ll learn how to spot speculation, stereotypes, and oversimplifi cations masquerading as smart opinions. I share an example from my life of a political conversation with close friends to show how speaking for ourselves, rather than trying to speculate what others think, can make a difference between either breaking and building those relationships.

In chapter 5 you’ll learn about the power of asking questions that lead to surprising answers. We’ll talk about belief in ghosts and the supernatural to show how questions can guide a conversation to new and insightful places that are otherwise missed.

In chapter 6 you’ll learn why we need people who disagree with us on our team. I’ll share the story of a series of attempts to discuss gun violence and gun control proposals to show how our disagreements become more productive when we build our arguments together.

In chapter 7 you’ll learn how the physical space and medium that we have disagreements in impacts the outcome of those disagreements. I’ll use this lens to dissect a heated disagreement about immigration enforcement, and you’ll learn why it’s important to cultivate a neutral space where people are expected and even encouraged to disagree with one other.

And in chapter 8 we’ll explore the topic of dangerous ideas and you’ll learn why it’s important to allow for disagreements about topics that some believe are too dangerous to even talk about.

At the back of the book I’ve added links to supplemental materials that expand on the topics of this book, and a bunch of books I recommend for further reading, organized by the chapter they contributed most to.

Like Prometheus’s gift of fire, the gift of disagreement is not intrinsically good and must be considered alongside our own value system. The gift of disagreement has never been taught within the context of the kinds of conversations we’re having today, and so we must also take responsibility for the unintentional damage we cause by participating in and magnifying unproductive disagreements. We can’t avoid disagreements any more than we can avoid weeds, and the more we try to eradicate conflict from the world, the more conflict we push into the shadows, where it only grows stronger and returns next season.

The path forward should be clear—into the heart of disagreement we must go, with an intention to acknowledge it, appreciate it, and work with it in a way that produces the world we want to live in. I invite you to accept this call to adventure, as a new responsibility required in order for us to meet the new challenges of today.