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GETTING HOT WITHOUT GETTING MAD
A major problem with task conflict is that it often spills over into
relationship conflict. One minute you’re disagreeing about how much
seasoning to put on the Thanksgiving turkey, and the next minute you find
yourself yelling “You smell!”
Although the Wright brothers had a lifetime of experience discovering
each other’s hot buttons, that didn’t mean they always kept their cool. Their
last grand challenge before liftoff was their single hardest problem:
designing a propeller. They knew their airplane couldn’t take flight without
one, but the right kind didn’t exist. As they struggled with various
approaches, they argued back and forth for hours at a time, often raising
their voices. The feuding lasted for months as each took turns preaching the
merits of his own solutions and prosecuting the other’s points. Eventually
their younger sister, Katharine, threatened to leave the house if they didn’t
stop fighting. They kept at it anyway, until one night it culminated in what
might have been the loudest shouting match of their lives.
Strangely, the next morning, they came into the shop and acted as if
nothing had happened. They picked up the argument about the propeller
right where they had left off—only now without the yelling. Soon they were
both rethinking their assumptions and stumbling onto what would become
one of their biggest breakthroughs.
The Wright brothers were masters at having intense task conflict
without relationship conflict. When they raised their voices, it reflected
intensity rather than hostility. As their mechanic marveled, “I don’t think
they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.”
Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than
as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting
opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person
to share more information with you. A disagreement feels personal and
potentially hostile; we expect a debate to be about ideas, not emotions.
Starting a disagreement by asking, “Can we debate?” sends a message that
you want to think like a scientist, not a preacher or a prosecutor—and
encourages the other person to think that way, too.
The Wright brothers had the benefit of growing up in a family where
disagreements were seen as productive and enjoyable. When arguing with
others, though, they often had to go out of their way to reframe their
behavior. “Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the
beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly,” Wilbur
once wrote to a colleague whose ego was bruised after a fiery exchange
about aeronautics. Wilbur stressed that it wasn’t personal: he saw arguments
as opportunities to test and refine their thinking. “I see that you are back at
your old trick of giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel
pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good
scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways of
looking at things.”
When they argued about the propeller, the Wright brothers were
making a common mistake. Each was preaching about why he was right and
why the other was wrong. When we argue about why, we run the risk of
becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other
side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight if we argue about how.
When social scientists asked people why they favor particular policies
on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their
convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in
practice—or how they’d explain them to an expert—activated a rethinking
cycle. They noticed gaps in their knowledge, doubted their conclusions, and
became less extreme; they were now more curious about alternative
options.
Psychologists find that many of us are vulnerable to an illusion of
explanatory depth. Take everyday objects like a bicycle, a piano, or
earbuds: how well do you understand them? People tend to be
overconfident in their knowledge: they believe they know much more than
they actually do about how these objects work. We can help them see the
limits of their understanding by asking them to unpack the mechanisms.
How do the gears on a bike work? How does a piano key make music? How
do earbuds transmit sound from your phone to your ears? People are
surprised by how much they struggle to answer those questions and quickly
realize how little they actually know. That’s what happened to the Wright
brothers after their yelling match.
The next morning, the Wright brothers approached the propeller
problem differently. Orville showed up at the shop first and told their
mechanic that he had been wrong: they should design the propeller Wilbur’s
way. Then Wilbur arrived and started arguing against his own idea,
suggesting that Orville might be right.
As they shifted into scientist mode, they focused less on why different
solutions would succeed or fail, and more on how those solutions might
work. Finally they identified problems with both of their approaches, and
realized they were both wrong. “We worked out a theory of our own on the
subject, and soon discovered,” Orville wrote, “that all the propellers built
heretofore are all wrong.” He exclaimed that their new design was “all right
(till we have a chance to test them down at Kitty Hawk and find out
differently).”
Even after building a better solution, they were still open to rethinking
it. At Kitty Hawk, they found that it was indeed the right one. The Wright
brothers had figured out that their airplane didn’t need a propeller. It needed
two propellers, spinning in opposite directions, to function like a rotating
wing.
That’s the beauty of task conflict. In a great argument, our adversary is
not a foil, but a propeller. With twin propellers spinning in divergent
directions, our thinking doesn’t get stuck on the ground; it takes flight.
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