Think Again

CHAPTER 4
The Good Fight Club
The Psychology of Constructive Conflict
Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everybody in good society
holds exactly the same opinions.
—
OSCAR
WILDE
s the two youngest boys in a big family, the bishop’s sons did
everything together. They launched a newspaper and built their own
printing press together. They opened a bicycle shop and then started
manufacturing their own bikes together. And after years of toiling away at a
seemingly impossible problem, they invented the first successful airplane
together.
Wilbur and Orville Wright first caught the flying bug when their father
brought home a toy helicopter. After it broke, they built one of their own.
As they advanced from playing together to working together to rethinking
human flight together, there was no trace of sibling rivalry between them.
Wilbur even said they “thought together.” Even though it was Wilbur who
launched the project, the brothers shared equal credit for their achievement.
When it came time to decide who would pilot their historic flight at Kitty
Hawk, they just flipped a coin.
New ways of thinking often spring from old bonds. The comedic
chemistry of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler can be traced back to their early
twenties, when they immediately hit it off in an improv class. The musical
harmony of the Beatles started even earlier, when they were in high school.

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Just minutes after a mutual friend introduced them, Paul McCartney was
teaching John Lennon how to tune a guitar. Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream grew
out of a friendship between the two founders that began in seventh-grade
gym class. It seems that to make progress together, we need to be in sync.
But the truth, like all truths, is more complicated.
One of the world’s leading experts on conflict is an organizational
psychologist in Australia named Karen “Etty” Jehn. When you think about
conflict, you’re probably picturing what Etty calls relationship conflict—
personal, emotional clashes that are filled not just with friction but also with
animosity. I hate your stinking guts. I’ll use small words so that you’ll be
sure to understand, you warthog-faced buffoon. You bob for apples in the
toilet . . . and you like it.
But Etty has identified another flavor called task conflict—clashes
about ideas and opinions. We have task conflict when we’re debating whom
to hire, which restaurant to pick for dinner, or whether to name our child
Gertrude or Quasar. The question is whether the two types of conflict have
different consequences.
A few years ago I surveyed hundreds of new teams in Silicon Valley on
conflict several times during their first six months working together. Even if
they argued constantly and agreed on nothing else, they agreed on what
kind of conflict they were having. When their projects were finished, I
asked their managers to evaluate each team’s effectiveness.
The teams that performed poorly started with more relationship conflict
than task conflict. They entered into personal feuds early on and were so
busy disliking one another that they didn’t feel comfortable challenging one
another. It took months for many of the teams to make real headway on
their relationship issues, and by the time they did manage to debate key
decisions, it was often too late to rethink their directions.

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What happened in the high-performing groups? As you might expect,
they started with low relationship conflict and kept it low throughout their
work together. That didn’t stop them from having task conflict at the outset:
they didn’t hesitate to surface competing perspectives. As they resolved
some of their differences of opinion, they were able to align on a direction
and carry out their work until they ran into new issues to debate.

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All in all, more than a hundred studies have examined conflict types in
over eight thousand teams. A meta-analysis of those studies showed that
relationship conflict is generally bad for performance, but some task
conflict can be beneficial: it’s been linked to higher creativity and smarter
choices. For example, there’s evidence that when teams experience
moderate task conflict early on, they generate more original ideas in
Chinese technology companies, innovate more in Dutch delivery services,
and make better decisions in American hospitals. As one research team
concluded, “The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.”
Relationship conflict is destructive in part because it stands in the way
of rethinking. When a clash gets personal and emotional, we become self-
righteous preachers of our own views, spiteful prosecutors of the other side,
or single-minded politicians who dismiss opinions that don’t come from our
side. Task conflict can be constructive when it brings diversity of thought,
preventing us from getting trapped in overconfidence cycles. It can help us
stay humble, surface doubts, and make us curious about what we might be
missing. That can lead us to think again, moving us closer to the truth
without damaging our relationships.
Although productive disagreement is a critical life skill, it’s one that
many of us never fully develop. The problem starts early: parents disagree

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behind closed doors, fearing that conflict will make children anxious or
somehow damage their character. Yet research shows that how often parents
argue has no bearing on their children’s academic, social, or emotional
development. What matters is how respectfully parents argue, not how
frequently. Kids whose parents clash constructively feel more emotionally
safe in elementary school, and over the next few years they actually
demonstrate more helpfulness and compassion toward their classmates.
Being able to have a good fight doesn’t just make us more civil; it also
develops our creative muscles. In a classic study, highly creative architects
were more likely than their technically competent but less original peers to
come from homes with plenty of friction. They often grew up in households
that were “tense but secure,” as psychologist Robert Albert notes: “The
creative person-to-be comes from a family that is anything but harmonious,
one with a ‘wobble.’” The parents weren’t physically or verbally abusive,
but they didn’t shy away from conflict, either. Instead of telling their
children to be seen but not heard, they encouraged them to stand up for
themselves. The kids learned to dish it out—and take it. That’s exactly what
happened to Wilbur and Orville Wright.
When the Wright brothers said they thought together, what they really
meant is that they fought together. Arguing was the family business.
Although their father was a bishop in the local church, he included books
by atheists in his library—and encouraged the children to read and debate
them. They developed the courage to fight for their ideas and the resilience
to lose a disagreement without losing their resolve. When they were solving
problems, they had arguments that lasted not just for hours but for weeks
and months at a time. They didn’t have such incessant spats because they
were angry. They kept quarreling because they enjoyed it and learned from
the experience. “I like scrapping with Orv,” Wilbur reflected. As you’ll see,
it was one of their most passionate and prolonged arguments that led them
to rethink a critical assumption that had prevented humans from soaring
through the skies.