Why Do We Yell? The Art of Productive Conflict

“A weed is but an unloved flower.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A man is screaming obscenities in his backyard. His neighbor, hearing the commotion, walks to the low fence separating their gardens and asks if everything is alright.

“No! Nothing is alright at all!” he yells back, before realizing his misdirected anger and adopting an apologetic tone. He stands up, trying to shake off his rage. His fists are clutching giant clumps of uprooted plants: dandelions, wood sorrel, and other local vegetation that the neighbor recognizes as the scourge of homeowners. The man gestures wildly toward his garden. “These stupid weeds! How do you keep these pests at bay?”

The neighbor sees that, despite his frustration, he has paid a lot of attention to his garden. A beautiful lemon tree grows against the back wall, and a variety of flowering plants create pleasant focal points that zigzag through the yard, eventually leading the eye back to the lemon tree. She says, “I think you might be pulling them out wrong. These plants have long, fragile roots, and their bulbs break off and stay underground. They are sneaky weed-hydras: every time you chop off a head, twelve grow back.”

“Ugh—weed-hydras are the last thing I want to deal with right now!” says the man. “I don’t have time to dig up every precious weed individually. I work all day and just want to come home to a nice garden.”

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

The man snorts dismissively. “Salad isn’t really my thing. Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. I’ll just do what I always do and then move on to more important things.” He yanks out a few more weeds and hurls them onto the compost pile with a furious force, reminiscent of a knight swinging his sword at a dragon. “Maybe I’ll just burn the whole garden down,” he mutters quietly to himself and marches back into the house.

Arguments and weeds are similar in many ways. They sprout in our gardens and in our minds. Most of the time, we don’t want them in either place; they are nuisances at best and mortal enemies at worst. Many of us approach arguments exactly like this man approaches weeds—as things that must be fought and destroyed.

This book is about the art of productive disagreement, which requires a shift in mindset similar to the one the neighbor suggested to the man. To understand this, we first need to clear up a few common misconceptions about what an argument actually is.

MISCONCEPTION 1: Arguing is bad

It isn’t bad, but it 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 no longer fit. We argue with our bodies, we argue with our pets, we argue with bumps in the sidewalk we nearly trip over, we argue with cars in traffic, we argue with our bosses, 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 TV, we argue with the sky. We argue with ourselves. And when we sleep, arguments even creep into our dreams. No wonder we scream—it’s exhausting!

To top it all off, nine out of ten people I asked about how we argue rated arguments as unproductive.

Why do we argue if it is both unpleasant and unproductive?

Even if they often seem pointless in hindsight, don’t arguments feel unavoidable in the moment? It’s true: in the heat of the moment, arguments serve a crucial—and underrated—function for us by providing a warning signal that something important to us is at risk, be it a personal preference, a hunch about the best strategy for a shared goal, or one of our core values. This threat triggers strong emotions. Often, we notice the emotional traffic jam and push it back down, waiting for a better time or telling ourselves it’s not worth our energy. And we advise others to pick their battles wisely and do everything to keep the peace. But if we make a habit of swallowing frustration too deeply, we sometimes start to believe we are to blame for being frustrated in the first place, and we beat ourselves up over it. When we do this, the frequency of arguments decreases, but we are left with a constant, low-level anxiety that slowly gnaws at our mental and physical health. Today, one in five adults in the US suffers from some form of anxiety disorder, and the rate of deaths from the three causes of despair (suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related diseases) has risen over the last decade, causing our average life expectancy to actually drop 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 also need disagreements. The famous marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman says that a relationship without conflict is a relationship without communication and is doomed to fail. Conflict is inevitable whenever two or more people talk about things from their own unique perspectives. Disagreements are a sign that the soil of the relationship is healthy. (Gottman recommends a 5:1 ratio between positive and negative encounters because this ensures the flow of disagreement remains open—and can thus be resolved without being overwhelmingly negative.)

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

But first: How did I come to be obsessed with productive disagreement, and why should you listen to me? When my mother asks me every few years what I actually do for a living, it’s always hard to explain. I’ve spent the last twenty years as an entrepreneur, engineer, and product leader at high-profile, extremely fast-growing tech startups like Amazon, Twitter, and Slack. I’ve worked with engineers, designers, marketers, researchers, data analysts, customer service agents, CEOs, and customers—each with different tasks, different fears, different incentives, and different measures of success. My job basically consisted of facilitating meaningful and productive collaboration within a million constantly changing constraints. At the same time, I studied cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and systems thinking, applying what I learned to my work. 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 method for reinterpreting cognitive biases. Instead of dismissing them as mental errors, we should consider that our brains had a very good reason to adopt these shortcuts in thinking. They continue to help us get things done in a world full of information overload and a lack of time and attention. Instead of fighting these shortcuts, our effort is better invested in developing an honest bias, which means accepting our own limitations and always remaining open to evidence of our blind spots.

This mix of professional and private obsessions was a petri dish for developing methods of productive disagreement. I’ve spent the last few years running experiments, both online and in person, to test theories about our existing habits regarding bias and communication, as well as better strategies for dealing with these biases. This research has convinced me that the art of productive disagreement is the most important meta-skill one can acquire.

I am now much more concerned when I see people being too polite and avoiding conflict than when conflict rises to the surface and is heard. Hidden disagreements are far worse than open ones. Kim Scott, the author of *Radical Candor*, calls this impulse toward kindness “ruinous empathy” because it actually causes more problems than it solves. It is a real thing that has begun to take root in our companies, at our dinner tables, and even in our own minds. It happens when people care deeply about things but, for cultural or personality-driven reasons, feel it is better not to address them directly.

Disagreements are a sign of a group’s health, not an illness, and cultures that allow grievances to be aired in a way that addresses them productively are more likely to create successful relationships, companies, and communities.

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Surprising Truth: People are happier and groups function better 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 will take arguments apart as if we were dissecting a frog to find out what’s inside. We can no more make a blanket statement that all arguments are bad than we can say all frogs have brown eyes. Brown might be the most common color, but that statement hides a surprising diversity while discouraging closer inspection.

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Fun Fact: Frog 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 frog species have pupils that are round, triangular, heart-shaped, hourglass-shaped, or diamond-shaped. When you shed the stereotype about frog eyes, you find all kinds of fantastic diversity. The same applies to arguments.

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When we expand our one-dimensional understanding, we will see that a simple generalization like “arguing is good” or “arguing is bad” is insufficient for the same reason: It obscures the surprising variety of disagreements that a closer look reveals. Let’s start by categorizing arguments as productive or unproductive. If we get into an argument and come out with a better understanding of the situation or a better plan for moving forward, that doesn’t just cancel out the negative emotions—it transforms 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 with any work of art, we can study our subjects with curiosity and learn to see them in new ways. Let’s start simply by unlearning some things about screaming.

MISCONCEPTION 2: Arguments change opinions

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

What is a disagreement? Simply put, let’s say it is an unacceptable difference between two perspectives. They pop up in every corner of our lives, not to mention under our rugs and in our closets.

EVERYDAY EXAMPLES:

Someone steals the parking spot you were patiently waiting for. You accidentally oversleep, show up late for work, and blame your spouse for turning off the alarm too early. You call a retailer to complain that the pants you just bought ripped in an embarrassing place, and you demand a refund.

EXAMPLES FROM ONLINE CONVERSATIONS:

Your aunt defends a celebrity accused of sexual misconduct, and you feel that too many people are testifying against him for there to be a chance of his innocence.

An argument erupts on your friend’s Facebook page about whether wearing a certain hat makes someone a racist or not. You think the photo being shared 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 (from Dr. Seuss) insists that his grumpy friend try green eggs and ham, but his friend does not want them here or there. He does not want them anywhere. Zeus chains Prometheus to a rock where his liver is eaten by a giant eagle every day and then grows back, because he doesn’t think Prometheus should have given humans the gift of fire. Darth Vader wants Luke Skywalker to join him to end destructive conflicts and restore order to the galaxy. Luke rejects the offer.

EXAMPLES FROM POLITICS:

You feel that taxes on the rich should be increased, and your parents think there should be a flat tax that is the same for everyone. You think it is important for everyone to receive a free university education, and your senator believes the federal government should only pay for people who would have qualified for a loan. You vote for Candidate A because you believe they are more likely to win the election, and your friend votes for Candidate B because they believe that person would do a better job in office.

EXAMPLES FROM OUR INNER MONOLOGUE:

You feel you shouldn’t eat 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 the sun to shine, but Alexa says it’s going to rain.

It is easy to see how we arrive at the conclusion, from different perspectives, that the best way to resolve disagreements is to change the other person’s opinion. If the perspectives were no longer contradictory, the disagreement would disappear. So, which side volunteers?

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

We can change our own beliefs and behavior, but when it comes to changing other people, our options are more limited, and the results can vary wildly. Sometimes, our attempts to change opinions can even achieve the opposite, causing the other person to dig themselves even deeper into their current belief. This is called the Backfire Effect.

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Trying too hard to persuade people can backfire.

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For example:

Two good friends of yours start dating. When they break up, one friend asks you to end the friendship with the other. The Backfire Effect might lead you to turn toward the other friend for precisely that reason, or even sympathize with them more. Your boss tells you that you absolutely must work on the weekend and abstain from alcohol or smoking in your free time to be fit for the job. The Backfire Effect might lead you to do these things even more than you usually would. Your sibling is a fan of a sports team that rivals the one you both have supported since childhood. Your sibling’s team wins, and they rub it in your face, saying you should stop being a fan of your team. The Backfire Effect might lead you to go out, buy extra merchandise, and defiantly display it at the next gathering.

Why does this happen? The common thread in all these behaviors that occur as a result of the Backfire Effect is our perception of an unacceptable demand on our freedom. We might not have strong convictions about which friend is to blame for the breakup, or how much we want to indulge in drugs and alcohol in our free time, or which team deserves our loyalty, but we have strong convictions about what we think other people are allowed to ask of us. When others violate this deep core value, it triggers the Backfire Effect more strongly than anything else.

The ancient Greek myth of Eris, the goddess of strife, chaos, and misery, shows us just how much trouble we can get into when we try to change others' opinions.

When every other god and goddess on Olympus was invited to the wedding of Thetis and Peleus except Eris, she was furious. What, they didn’t want her ruining their good time with all her chaos, misery, and strife? Honestly, that sounds like a pretty fair reason to me, but Eris wasn’t having it. “It’s not my fault I’m the goddess of strife!” When Zeus refused to change his mind, she decided to show him what chaos, misery, and strife were really about. (Classic Backfire Effect: Zeus tried to restrict Eris’s freedom and instead triggered an escalation of exactly what he wanted to prevent. For all their power and might, the Greek gods were terrible at the art of productive disagreement.)

Eris sneaked into the wedding festivities and tossed a golden apple into the crowd that was inscribed: “For the fairest.” (Now it is Eris’s turn to try and change Zeus’s mind about ever not inviting her to a party.)

Obviously, every goddess on Olympus wanted to claim the title of the fairest (because sexist beauty standards aren’t a problem the Greek gods have solved yet). Zeus, knowing this could get ugly, remembered that the shy shepherd Paris was supposed to be the fairest judge in the land and appointed him to make the decision.

There was only one apple, and nobody thought to label a bunch of apples and avoid this whole drama, so a heated argument broke out among the goddesses. If the goal was to get Paris’s fair and honest opinion, they could have simply asked him for it. But no, instead, each of them invented their biggest and boldest bribe to pull Paris to their side.

Paris weighed his options and decided that Aphrodite was the fairest goddess because she had the best bribe. That is how persuasion works... which is very different from the art of productive disagreement. Persuasion is about piling incentives, rewards, and sometimes threats onto a decision to tip the scales in your favor. Aphrodite “won” the debate by promising Paris the heart of the beautiful Helen, but did her victory mean she was the fairest? That isn’t clear. Furthermore, there was the small matter of starting the Trojan War, which lasted decades and led to the fall of Troy. All that to persuade—or, if we rewind further, all just because Eris tried to change Zeus’s mind about whether he should invite her to a party. If disagreements pile up high enough, you can end up causing quite a lot of damage. At the end of the day, no opinions were changed, everything backfired, and Eris’s reputation for strife, chaos, and misery was confirmed once again to everyone present.

The lesson? When we try to “win” arguments with all the means at our disposal, including persuasion, bribery, threats, and other coercive measures, we don’t end up with the results we hoped for. At best, Aphrodite got the meaningless apple, Eris got revenge, and excessive resentment spilled beneath the surface to feed the roots and bulbs of the future arguments of tomorrow, next month, and next year.

Changing opinions is really hard. There is really only one mind in the universe that you can change with any luck, and that is your own. Think about the last time you changed your own opinion about something: Did you make a complete 180-degree turn, or was it more of a gradual shift?

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A mind is more like a pile of millions of small stones than a single large boulder. To change an opinion, we have to carry thousands of small stones from one pile to another, one at a time. That is because our brain doesn’t know how to rewire a complete belief in one big swoop. New neural pathways aren’t created that quickly. You might manage to flip a tiny percentage of someone’s mind to a new belief in a specific conversation, but opinions change slowly and in unpredictable ways. You could even change them in the wrong direction.

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We tend to hold onto old perspectives even after we have “decided” to change our minds. This is called the “Continued Influence Effect,” one of more than two hundred cognitive biases that subtly influence how we think, which we will discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.

If we can’t change opinions, we can at least change what people do, right? Changing other people’s behavior is possible, especially if you use coercion. But even that can easily trigger Backfire Effects that aren’t immediately obvious. Will Eris be invited to the next big wedding? Unlikely! Will Aphrodite be declared the most beautiful goddess the next time the question comes up? Not unless you want another city to fall. Similarly, if I were to bribe my son with the promise of more screen time to clean his room: Will the virtues of cleanliness and personal responsibility grow in his heart and lead him to clean his room without prompting in the future? No. Will employees do better work if you force them to show up at a specific time and work a specific number of hours? Will loyalty programs in stores make customers more loyal? Will slaps on the wrist for companies that break the law make them more likely to comply next time? No, no, and a big fat no.

Okay, fine. If we can’t change opinions and can’t reliably count on changing behavior, 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 the visible and the hidden world.

If you see such patterns in your life—problems pop up, you smack them down, they disappear, and then somehow magically return—don’t fool yourself into thinking the weeds are actually gone for half the year. They are just hiding underground, gathering strength for the next season.

The following spring, the man’s garden is overgrown again as predicted, with even more weeds. This time, instead of rejecting his neighbor’s advice, he actively seeks it, and she agrees to come over and assess the situation.

First, she says, “Weeds are just plants we’ve decided to banish from our gardens. If you look at what they are good at, they can actually make your garden’s ecosystem healthier. Instead of trying to kill them, view them as plants that are very easy to keep alive.”

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

“Wow, that’s dark. But okay.” The man pauses for a second and then asks, “I’m still not entirely sure I agree that a garden needs weeds. A weed-free 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,” says the neighbor. “Look at my garden. It has fewer weeds than yours, even though I’ve spent nowhere near as much time weeding as you have. When I spend time in the garden, I decide which plants I want back next year and which ones I can dig up entirely to make room for something else. It requires an appreciation and understanding of what is happening underground, even if I can’t see it directly. You come out once a year and have a few very confrontational weeks with your garden, complete with gnashing of teeth, fists raised to the sky, and plenty of cursing.”

“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 spending a little time in my garden all year round, thinking about weeds, plants, insects, little critters, and soil. Even if I can’t see the weeds, I know they are still there, hibernating in the soil, and I expect and even welcome them back every spring. It’s not a fight because we are all in this together: weeds, plants, critters, gardener, garden, clouds, and stars.”

“Gimme some of what you’re having; you’ve convinced me!” They laugh, and the neighbor spends a few hours in the garden examining and commenting on the great drama playing out between plant, soil, and nature in his own backyard.

MISCONCEPTION 3: Arguments have an end

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

The story about the weeds isn’t entirely made up. Kellianne and I moved five times in our first six years of marriage, so when we bought a house in Berkeley, California, in 2014, our intention was to put down 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 notice until the next spring that something else had decided to put down roots on our property: a cute little yellow-flowering plant called Oxalis, or wood sorrel. I’m pretty sure it is Eris’s favorite flower.

When we first removed them, we thought we were done with them. But it turns out you are never done with wood sorrel. Every one you pull out leaves a dozen or more tiny bulbs behind, waiting to grow into new plants in the future. As new homeowners looking forward to settling in and working on our garden, these little yellow flowers gave us nightmares. How could we get rid of them? I started seeing them everywhere I went, and I began judging my neighbors by how many of them were 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 around the things we intentionally plant. Some arguments don’t seem too bad and are easy to work around whenever they pop up. Others might be ugly enough that you take massive action against them, and that part of the garden is abandoned as scorched earth for a few 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 applies not only to the arguments we have but also to 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 are just hiding. In a relationship, we have to cobble together compromises at regular intervals to bridge the gap between our different tastes and preferences. There is likely no effective strategy that can help us permanently “convert” the other person to our tastes and preferences. That is obvious when you actually think about it, but when a disagreement about “What is important to me?” is mistaken for another type 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 are having, let’s discuss the three realms of disagreement: the Head, the Heart, and the Hands.

THE REALMS OF HEAD, HEART, AND HAND

The simplest thing you can do to immediately have more productive disagreements is to remember to ask the other person: “Is this about what is true, what is meaningful, or what is useful?” Is it about the Head, the Heart, or the Hands? If you can agree on the answer, you are on the right track.

When we have a disagreement with someone, it is really useful to pay attention to which of the three realms we are 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 Hand 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 won’t work in the other two.

🧠 Head Realm: What is true?

When a disagreement can be settled with information, we call it a conflict of the Head because it is about data and evidence that can be objectively verified in the world as true or false. It often deals with the “What” of a situation.

Example: Two people argue about who gets to spend more time watching shows they like compared to shows the other person likes. The solution to this disagreement is measured in hours, with some weighting for recent days.

❤️ Heart Realm: What is meaningful?

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

Example: Two people argue about whether a certain show is worth watching. The solution to this disagreement is measured by personal taste, the ability to relate to it, and an appreciation for different types of storytelling.

✋ Hand Realm: What is useful?

When a disagreement can only be settled by some kind of test, or by waiting to see how things play out in the future, we call that a conflict of the Hands. It often deals with the “How” of a situation.

Example: Two people argue about the best way to balance TV time, taking into account differences in preferences, differences in broadcast schedules, and differences in personal schedules, so that it is acceptable to both parties. The solution to this disagreement is measured by its utility for the relationship over time.

What if it’s all of them?

Disagreements always have at least one of these conflicts going on, but some will have a mix 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 is one more realm to mention. Sometimes we think we disagree with someone and don’t realize that we are actually arguing with a shadow projection of our own fears and ideas—specifically, our worst fears. It is much harder to have productive disagreements with projections because they always live up to our most uncharitable stereotypes of them. They will always act the way we expect them to: confirming our most uncharitable stereotypes is their job as our projection. The antidote to arguing with a projection is to always know who you are disagreeing with, ensuring that there is a real human being in the conversation with you, and then actually listening to their argument instead of putting words in their mouth.

If you realize you are arguing with your own shadow, you might as well sit down, because it’s going to take a very long time.

Kellianne and I have been living in our house for five years now, and we have definitely reduced the cheeky wood sorrel’s claim on our garden, but more importantly, I have learned to welcome the wood sorrel when it appears every spring. It has pretty yellow flowers. Our kids like it because you can eat it, too, and it doesn’t taste that bad. Of course, our instinct is still to pull the plants out immediately on sight, but now that task happens with a grudging respect for our shared enthusiasm for putting down roots in sunny Berkeley. This is now an argument in the realm of the Hands, which doesn’t so much have an end as it is 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 with ourselves, and how they participate in a cyclical dance by popping up every now and then, it is possible to value them as partners rather than enemies. The key is to dance with the rhythm of our relationships between chaos and order and maintain a healthy balance of both.

THE GIFT OF DISAGREEMENT

Truth 1: Arguments are not bad. They are signposts to topics that need our attention.

Truth 2: Arguments are not about changing opinions. They are about bringing thoughts together.

Truth 3: Arguments do not end. They have deep roots and will keep popping up, asking us to dance with them.

It is easy to understand why we view arguments as a nuisance, like weeds. We don’t have time to deal with this crap! An argument-free week or even just a day seems like the ultimate wish. Why would we want more disagreements?

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

A productive disagreement bears fruit: the fruit of security by eliminating a threat, reducing a risk, reaching an agreement, or concluding with a decision; the fruit of growth by revealing new information about the world or each other that lets us see and understand reality more deeply; the fruit of connection by bringing us together and giving us opportunities to build trust in one another; and the fruit of enjoyment by teaching us to operate with a collaborative mindset that emphasizes playfulness, adventure, fun, and sometimes even awe.

We have 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 anything fruitful. Learning how to increase the odds of that happy surprise is the art we are talking about when we talk about productive disagreements.

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

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

The rest of this book will guide you through the “How” of productive disagreement, with eight conversation habits and things to try that will help you turn frustrating fights into pleasant and productive exchanges. I want to emphasize just how much this change will affect your daily life by telling you about three superpowers you will acquire by practicing this art.

Disagreements won’t be frustrating. They will feel less like dead ends and more like doors into unexplored territory. You will learn to find ways to keep a dialogue open when it seems like you have run out of viable options for moving forward. You will end up having fewer repetitive, frustrating disagreements, not because you avoid or suppress them, but because you are able to break the cycles that send the same disagreements back into your life over and over again. You will learn to pull arguments out by their roots. The world will get bigger, because you won’t be cut off from all the interesting conversations, ideas, people, and possibilities that exist on the other side of disagreements. You will find that you have become more willing to engage with scary people and ideas you haven’t touched with a ten-foot pole in years. You will learn that opposing perspectives are often quite different when seen from the inside and nowhere near as bad as your projection made them look from the outside.

YOUR NEW SUPERPOWER

The art of productive disagreement is what some call a meta-skill and I call a superpower because it is a skill that improves all your other skills.

It ranks right up there with the ability to read, write, or think critically. Investing in meta-skills is super important because if you get just marginally better at having more productive disagreements—say, even 5 to 10 percent better—your life gets 50 to 100 percent better! That is because every role you play in your life requires communication and the ability to work through disagreements that arise. When you learn to disagree productively in various roles, the effects compound and amplify, making you a better friend, a more competent employee, a more loving spouse, a more active family member, and a more effective global citizen. It is almost a superpower because it is likely one of the highest-leverage skills you can work on. Very few people have been given the right tools, rules, and environments to develop and refine their practice of productive disagreement, so we have a lot of room to grow into it.

IF YOU ARE STILL ON THE FENCE

It is totally fine to still be on the fence about productive disagreements. Sitting on the fence is a safe place. You can actually look around now and see how most of us spend the majority of our lives undecided, waiting to figure out what we should do and when we should do it. Cynicism, futility, and frustration aren’t pleasant, but they are the evil we know. Before you get too comfortable on the fence, however, let me tell you one more thing that might help you move to one side or the other.

The choice you have is not A) to hide emotions or B) to show them. It is 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.” That seems tempting, right? Order, in the case of Darth Vader’s vision of the Empire, is about establishing an unbreakable hierarchy of power that puts the two of them at the top and everyone else underneath. Hiding emotions might end conflict and bring order, but it does so by pushing our true selves beneath the surface, which will reappear in the shadowy forms of anxiety, despair, and (if you dabble with the dark side) very pale and wrinkly skin. Don’t do it! Don’t give in to despair. There is a better way that is neither pure chaos nor pure 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 short, balancing order and chaos is what this book will give you a good start on. At the very least, this might 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 catchy catchphrases is up to you.

THE MAP OF ARGUMENT LAND

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

In Chapter 1, you will learn to observe how anxiety arises in your mind and how this is a signpost to your most important personal beliefs and expectations.

In Chapter 2, you will learn to distinguish between different inner voices that influence your approach to disagreements. We will use the example of a polarizing topic like vaccinations to show how it is possible to move from a black-and-white interpretation to one that allows a little more room for exceptions and gray areas, opening a door for productive one-on-one conversations.

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

In Chapter 4, you will learn to spot speculation, stereotypes, and oversimplifications that masquerade as clever opinions. I share an example from my life about a political conversation with close friends to show how speaking for ourselves, rather than trying to speculate what others are thinking, can make the difference between breaking or building those relationships.

In Chapter 5, you will learn about the power of asking questions that lead to surprising answers. We will talk about belief in ghosts and the supernatural to show how questions can lead a conversation to new and revealing places that would otherwise be missed.

In Chapter 6, you will learn why we need people who disagree with us on our team. I will tell the story of a series of attempts to debate gun violence and gun control proposals to show how our disagreements become more productive when we build our arguments together.

In Chapter 7, you will learn how the physical space and the medium in which we conduct disagreements influence the outcome of those disagreements. I will use this lens to analyze a heated disagreement about immigration law enforcement, and you will learn why it is important to cultivate a neutral space where people are expected and even encouraged to disagree.

And in Chapter 8, we will explore the topic of dangerous ideas, and you will learn why it is important to allow disagreements about topics that some believe are too dangerous to talk about at all.

At the end of the book, I have added links to supplementary materials that deepen the themes of this book, as well as a list of books I recommend for further reading, organized by the chapter to which they contributed most.

Like Prometheus’s gift of fire, the gift of disagreement is not inherently good and must be considered alongside our own value system. The gift of disagreement was never taught in the context of the kind of conversations we have today, and so we must also take responsibility for the unintended harm we cause by participating in and amplifying unproductive disagreements. We can no more avoid disagreements than we can weeds, and the more we try to eliminate conflict from the world, the more we push conflict into the shadows, where it only grows stronger and returns in the next season.

The way forward should be clear—into the heart of disagreement we must go, with the intention of acknowledging it, appreciating it, and working with it in a way that brings forth the world we want to live in. I invite you to accept this call to adventure as a new responsibility required for us to meet the new challenges of today.