Insist on (and Reward) Dissent
Disagreement About The Right Things is Good
One sign of a psychologically healthy culture is vigourous debate about ideas, people challenging the status quo in service of improved outcomes, and nuanced discussions of hard problems with people who care about the results.
Most People Are Trained to Comply with Implied Authority
Children are born with the ability to learn and a complete dependence on others to provide the necessities of life. They quickly learn how to get adults to take care of them.
Crying is the infant’s earliest mode of communication.
If parents respond reasonably quickly to children’s cries and do a reasonable job of relieving whatever need prompted the crying, children cry moderately and get their needs met quickly. When caregivers don’t respond quickly or unable to identify and meet the child’s needs, infants cry more until they eventually give up.
Parents are responding to this escalate and extinguish cycle when they let a baby “cry it out” as part of sleep training. The caretaker intentionally ignores the request for help in order to force the child to take care of themselves. The child learns to not ask for help.
Later, the child starts school. Parents train children to do whatever it takes to get good marks. Children learn to read between the lines when teachers and parents are unclear about the conditions of success. They learn to respond to what is actually enforced rather than what is stated.
Even later, adults do this.
How many people reading this believe that a posted speed limit is a hard limit and consistently drive slower than the posted limit?
People follow the implied rules.
Leaders in organizations, communities, or families have situational power to make other people’s lives better or worse.
The people around them who will be subjected to the impacts of such power will spend a great deal of energy interpreting their behaviour and guessing how to act to influence them.
Any behaviour that can be interpreted as an implied request or instruction will be interpreted that way by someone.
Questioning Authority Is Inherently Risky
In order for it to be safe to challenge a supervisor, an employee needs confidence that any price they pay for it will be worth the cost.
The possible costs of questioning authority are many:
Being seen as a trouble-maker
Having intelligence, competence, or judgment questioned
Verbal, physical, or written chastisement
Career sidelining within job
Job loss
Indivduals assess the risk involved in questioning authority in light of their past experiences and possible future alternatives and fall-back plans if things go badly.
Explicitly Request Challenge of Ideas
If you have formal or informal authority in a stuation, you must explicitly counter the risks of challenging your ideas. You must ask people to challenge you and let them know repeatedly that it is expected.
In a recurring meeting, it can be useful to have a Dissenter role that rotates so everyone has a time when they are explicitly tasked with dissenting. This normalizes dissent and protects courageous individuals from becoming the only person willing to challenge ideas.
Implicitly Request Challenge of Ideas
You must also counter the risks of challenging your ideas through your behaviour. If you ask for dissent or challenge but don’t establish a process or framework for receiving challenge, the uncertainty around process will stop many people from speaking up.
Here are two techniques that help create safety.
Present Half-Baked Ideas: Introduce an idea you are working on when you know it isn’t ready for public consumption. Ask for help completing the thinking before it looks coherent. This makes the opportunity for influence obvious.
Ask for Input and Demonstrate Influence: Ask people for their thoughts on a topic. Respond by acknowledging what is good about people’s ideas even if you think they are incomplete solutions and let people see your thinking shift in response to new input. Even if they bring ideas you had already thought of, only add anything new ideas or information that hadn’t alredy been mentioned.
Innovation IS Dissent IS Innovation
Any suggestion for improvement to an internal process or a product or service is dissenting from the status quo. No matter how well it may be received in practice, the risk of speaking is the same.
Every one of us has ways we like to be seen. At work, we usually want to be seen as smart and competent. If dissent, disagreement, or challenge feel threatening to that image we have of ourselves, we tend to react badly.
If we notice we are getting activated in response to a challenge, we would do well to look for how incorpoating the wisdom of the challenge will enable the whole team to look better.
What learning or better solution is possible because of the introduction of this new perspective or information?
Reward Dissent
The act of dissent is courageous.
For most people, it only takes observing someone being punished in some way for dissenting once to extinguish the behaviour.
For others, it’s okay until they suffer consequences
The content of the dissention doesn’t always need to turn into action, but the act of dissenting itself needs to be acknowledged and rewarded. If only the dissent that turns into successful action is reward, the fear of being wrong will continue to keep people from speaking up.
Celebrate and reward the act of dissention itself.
Teach People How to Dissent Well
Disagreeing well is a skill set. If your people don’t have it, invest in training that includes opportunities for them to practice in risk-free and low-stress environments before expecting them to dissent well in high-stress situations.