Think Again

THE PLIGHT OF THE PEOPLE PLEASER
As long as I can remember, I’ve been determined to keep the peace. Maybe
it’s because my group of friends dropped me in middle school. Maybe it’s

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genetic. Maybe it’s because my parents got divorced. Whatever the cause,
in psychology there’s a name for my affliction. It’s called agreeableness,
and it’s one of the major personality traits around the world. Agreeable
people tend to be nice. Friendly. Polite. Canadian.
*
My first impulse is to avoid even the most trivial of conflicts. When
I’m riding in an Uber and the air-conditioning is blasting, I struggle to bring
myself to ask the driver to turn it down—I just sit there shivering in silence
until my teeth start to chatter. When someone steps on my shoe, I’ve
actually apologized for inconveniently leaving my foot in his path. When
students fill out course evaluations, one of their most common complaints is
that I’m “too supportive of stupid comments.”
Disagreeable people tend to be more critical, skeptical, and challenging
—and they’re more likely than their peers to become engineers and
lawyers. They’re not just comfortable with conflict; it energizes them. If
you’re highly disagreeable, you might be happier in an argument than in a
friendly conversation. That quality often comes with a bad rap: disagreeable
people get stereotyped as curmudgeons who complain about every idea, or
Dementors who suck the joy out of every meeting. When I studied Pixar,
though, I came away with a dramatically different view.

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In 2000, Pixar was on fire. Their teams had used computers to rethink
animation in their first blockbuster, Toy Story, and they were fresh off two
more smash hits. Yet the company’s founders weren’t content to rest on
their laurels. They recruited an outside director named Brad Bird to shake
things up. Brad had just released his debut film, which was well reviewed
but flopped at the box office, so he was itching to do something big and
bold. When he pitched his vision, the technical leadership at Pixar said it
was impossible: they would need a decade and $500 million to make it.
Brad wasn’t ready to give up. He sought out the biggest misfits at Pixar
for his project—people who were disagreeable, disgruntled, and
dissatisfied. Some called them black sheep. Others called them pirates.
When Brad rounded them up, he warned them that no one believed they
could pull off the project. Just four years later, his team didn’t only succeed
in releasing Pixar’s most complex film ever; they actually managed to
lower the cost of production per minute. The Incredibles went on to gross
upwards of $631 million worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Animated
Feature.
Notice what Brad didn’t do. He didn’t stock his team with agreeable
people. Agreeable people make for a great support network: they’re excited
to encourage us and cheerlead for us. Rethinking depends on a different
kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point
out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to
activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise,
doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
The ideal members of a challenge network are disagreeable, because
they’re fearless about questioning the way things have always been done
and holding us accountable for thinking again. There’s evidence that
disagreeable people speak up more frequently—especially when leaders
aren’t receptive—and foster more task conflict. They’re like the doctor in
the show House or the boss in the film The Devil Wears Prada. They give
the critical feedback we might not want to hear, but need to hear.
Harnessing disagreeable people isn’t always easy. It helps if certain
conditions are in place. Studies in oil drilling and tech companies suggest
that dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed
and supported—and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when
they have strong bonds with their colleagues.
*

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Before Brad Bird arrived, Pixar already had a track record of
encouraging talented people to push boundaries. But the studio’s previous
films had starred toys, bugs, and monsters, which were relatively simple to
animate. Since making a whole film with lifelike human superheroes was
beyond the capabilities of computer animation at the time, the technical
teams balked at Brad’s vision for The Incredibles. That’s when he created
his challenge network. He enlisted his band of pirates to foster task conflict
and rethink the process.
Brad gathered the pirates in Pixar’s theater and told them that although
a bunch of bean counters and corporate suits might not believe in them, he
did. After rallying them he went out of his way to seek out their ideas. “I
want people who are disgruntled because they have a better way of doing
things and they are having trouble finding an avenue,” Brad told me.
“Racing cars that are just spinning their wheels in a garage rather than
racing. You open that garage door, and man, those people will take you
somewhere.” The pirates rose to the occasion, finding economical
alternatives to expensive techniques and easy workarounds for hard
problems. When it came time to animate the superhero family, they didn’t
toil over the intricate contours of interlocking muscles. Instead they figured
out that sliding simple oval shapes against one another could become the
building blocks of complex muscles.
When I asked Brad how he recognized the value of pirates, he told me
it was because he is one. Growing up, when he went to dinner at friends’
houses, he was taken aback by the polite questions their parents asked about
their day at school. Bird family dinners were more like a food fight, where
they all vented, debated, and spoke their minds. Brad found the exchanges
contentious but fun, and he brought that mentality into his first dream job at
Disney. From an early age, he had been mentored and trained by a group of
old Disney masters to put quality first, and he was frustrated that their
replacements—who now supervised the new generation at the studio—
weren’t upholding the same standards. Within a few months of launching
his animation career at Disney, Brad was criticizing senior leaders for
taking on conventional projects and producing substandard work. They told
him to be quiet and do his job. When he refused, they fired him.

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I’ve watched too many leaders shield themselves from task conflict. As
they gain power, they tune out boat-rockers and listen to bootlickers. They
become politicians, surrounding themselves with agreeable yes-men and
becoming more susceptible to seduction by sycophants. Research reveals
that when their firms perform poorly, CEOs who indulge flattery and
conformity become overconfident. They stick to their existing strategic
plans instead of changing course—which sets them on a collision course
with failure.
We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than
those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and
make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make
themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although
we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on
the value of a challenge network.
In one experiment, when people were criticized rather than praised by a