Ask any leader if they’d like more innovation and the answer will be a resounding “yes.” Ask them if they’d like more disagreements and you’ll get an equally resounding “no.” But the reality is, you can’t have innovation without productive conflict and healthy disagreement. That’s because creative friction is exactly what leads to new solutions.
In the most innovative and successful organizations, people feel empowered to speak up and offer alternative points of view. Positive disagreement is a powerful way to pressure test ideas and destroy “group think.” And it requires psychological safety – the belief that people are safe to take risks and speak up, even if others disagree. Psychological safety lays the groundwork for learning, it promotes cognitive flexibility, and it ensures the freedom to ask hard questions and make mistakes. No question is too challenging or too obstructive when it’s born of a genuine desire to learn. Not only are teams that have this more innovative and productive, they’re also more inclusive and have higher job satisfaction.
Toyota is one of the most famous examples. The Toyota Production System was an innovative leadership and technology model that produced an unprecedented run of manufacturing success. What was achieved at Toyota between 1950 and 1990 has never been replicated. A cultural hallmark was the Andon Cord — a physical rope that could be pulled at any time to stop the production line if there was a problem. At the time, American factories would have been horrified at the thought of down time, but at Toyota, it was considered a good thing. The team leader would immediately thank the worker for pulling the cord. There was never any fear of punishment for finding a problem. Every defect was celebrated as a welcome opportunity to learn together. If you want to build a high-performing, innovative team, the goal is to make every team member feel safe enough to “pull the cord.”
You’re sharing time and thoughts and eventually that leads to deeper discussion on a personal level. We’ve had political conversations. We’ve had religious conversations. We’ve had racial conversations. It’s okay to say, ‘I don’t agree with your view and here’s why.’ At the end of the day, you still respect it. We can have a difference of opinion without having a disagreement.”
—ETHAN KARP, CEO OF MAGNET
Reflection Point is a window into the pure humanness that exists in the workplace, and it’s a chance to defuse egos and flatten hierarchies.”
—Reflection Point Participant
Team psychological safety is the shared belief held by members of a team that it’s OK to take risks, to express their ideas and concerns, to speak up with questions, and to admit mistakes — all without fear of negative consequences.
—Amy Edmondson, Harvard Professor
1. Establish good management practices.
Open communication, clear norms and expectations, active listening, showing humility and expressing appreciation.
2. Make it clear that employees’ voices matter.
It’s often easier to stay silent so you have to make the case for why people’s viewpoints matter and how important it is to the quality and success of your shared work.
3. Admit your own mistakes.
Show your vulnerability as a leader and demonstrate how you’ve made and learned from mistakes and how you positively take feedback.
4. Invite input often.
Use open-ended questions to actively, and often, request input from the team. What do you think? What are you seeing? What are we missing?
5. Respond with an open mind.
Use a learning mindset to overcome your own assumptions and take tough feedback and challenging input. Remember that the alternative to blame is curiosity.
6. Don’t make flawed assumptions about psychological safety.
People often assume that psychological safety means everyone always needs to be nice and it should feel comfortable. These are misconceptions. Polite workplaces often have no candor and people don’t feel safe speaking up. Plus, learning, taking risks, and pointing out mistakes is critical to psychological safety and also uncomfortable by its very nature.
Reflection Point’s approach works because it’s grounded in science and the latest research on organizational learning.
Teams with strong psychological safety learn more from each other.
Harvard professor Amy Edmondson coined the phrase “team psychological safety” in a groundbreaking research study in 1999 that studied 51 manufacturing teams. Her work found that groups who believed they were safe to speak up were more likely to engage in behaviors critical to team learning and performance such as asking for help, admitting mistakes, and discussing problems.
Productive conflict and disagreements can lead to better work outcomes.
When disagreements are managed well they can have many positive outcomes. Creative friction can lead to new solutions and better work products. Healthy debate promotes cognitive flexibility and opportunities to learn and grow. Teams that aren’t afraid to disagree have higher job satisfaction and a more inclusive work environment.
Diversity of thought creates better problem solving, innovative thinking, and more insights.
The Rotman Management Journal concluded in 2017 that diversity of thought delivers three key benefits to an organization. It helps guard against groupthink, and expert overconfidence. It helps to increase the scale of new insights being created and shared. And diverse thinkers can best tackle your most pressing problems.
In a world-renowned academic medical center in Cleveland, a diverse and cross-functional group came together with Reflection Point six times to explore issues around diversity and inclusion posed by carefully selected short stories. The doctors, nurses, administrators, and staff engaged in often searingly honest discussions, with help from facilitators to deepen their exploration and unearth shared understanding.
“Reflection Point provides a safe environment to explore perspectives regarding complex topics,” explained one participant, “The topics help us realize any conscious or unconscious biases that we have. Then those in the room help us grow to overcome these biases.”
For this group, overcoming bias meant openly offering or hearing a contrary point of view. The ability to disagree with respect and without retribution is a skill that vastly improves our ability to learn and collaborate. “These stories emphasize the importance of communication and perspective taking. It’s too easy to get into our own little framework in our head, and it takes effort to think of those other perspectives,” said one participant.
One story that invited these diverse perspectives was Jubilee, by Kirstin Valdez Quade. In the story, Andrea attends a fancy party thrown by the owner of the large California fruit farm where her father, a Mexican immigrant, works as a farmhand. She clashes with the owner’s daughter, her classmate at Stanford.
Most of the participants could relate to Andrea, while some were more sympathetic to her wealthy (but vulnerable) classmate. They debated whether the conflict in the story was one of ethnicity or socioeconomic status. They discussed the sometimes-uncomfortable extremes of working in an organization that serves a wide constituency - from the very poor to the outrageously rich.
“Jubilee…captures this first-generation college experience and out-of-placeness,” shared one participant. “So, I didn’t need to be a Mexican woman or a visible minority in order to feel the tension of the wealth and society and out-of-placeness.”
The tension in the story helped them confront the tensions in their own lives and work. Research has shown that hospitals have notoriously low psychological safety due to huge power differentials and structural impediments to speaking up. But in the safety of the Reflection Point sessions and the compelling narrative of the stories, hospital staff overcame the things that often keep them silent at work and they left the program with a whole new level of trust and connection.
Reflection Point uses hundreds of different stories, so we can choose the ones that unearth the right themes and discussions for your organization. A few examples:
“Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe
Published in 1953, the story follows Michael Obi, an eager young headmaster who is tasked with reforming a school in a Nigerian village. After a village elder pleads with Obito to re-open an ancestral path through campus that Obi has closed, the villagers retaliate. The story surfaces powerful themes around the role ego plays in escalating disagreements, the tension between tradition and progress, and the misguided inclination to equate proximity with inclusion.
“Use of Force” by William Carlos Williams
Written in 1933 when William Carlos Williams was a practicing family doctor, this is a startling story about a physical struggle between a doctor and a stubborn young patient. In a battle of wills to determine whether the girl has diphtheria, she fights the physician with all the force she has – scratching, biting, and keeping her mouth tightly shut. The story explores “justified” risk and the varying balance of safety, submission, and necessity held by individuals with divergent levels of relational power.
When we bring colleagues together to share perspectives and reflect on powerful stories like these, we start conversations we wouldn’t otherwise have. We melt hierarchies and level the playing field. We kickstart connection, relationships, and, ultimately, collective intelligence.
Every time there’s a high-profile whistleblower in the news – this week it’s one in the Internal Revenue Service – there’s a chorus of support to protect those who bravely come forward to report wrongdoing.
But if it wasn’t in the news, and instead in your organization, would you listen? If one of your employees had a concern about your business, would they tell you? Our tendency is to respond with an immediate and empathic “yes” on both counts. But research suggests otherwise.
Imagine yourself on an operating table. It’s a routine but important procedure. It’s the last surgery of the day and the (very human) doctor is tired. But you chose the best doctor and the best hospital, and you trust the system to protect you.
But will it? In an eye-opening study, more than 90% of nurses said they would not speak up to correct a doctor – even if a patient is at risk.
This is not just a healthcare problem. It’s a hierarchy problem.
In organizational cultures with rigid ladders of authority, speaking up is hard.
And in compliance-driven cultures, individual judgement is supplanted by rules and checklists.
When your boss’ boss’ boss is taking a visible risk, are you going to challenge him? Fewer than 10% of employees across industries say yes.
“The safest companies are those that replace a culture of compliance with a culture of dialogue, where candor is valued regardless of its source, and where silence is perceived more negatively than speaking up.”
Creating a culture of dialogue means practicing putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and inviting respectful debate and disagreement to surface better answers to seemingly intractable challenges. In short, it depends on your teams’ psychological safety to blow the whistle in the face of foul play.
This seemingly simple prescription is, in fact, incredibly hard. For compliance-based cultures of silence, undoing established behavior patterns takes time and patience. There’s no quick fix.
Playing your part in a culture of dialogue is more than a skill – it’s a muscle. And every athlete will tell you that muscles need conditioning and practice to stay strong.
Reflection Point provides the context, space and practice for you and your colleagues to develop psychological safety. Our approach (discussing short stories in small groups with a trained facilitator) is low-stakes and low risk, but our results are transformative. Across the board, participants tell us the program increases their willingness to take a risk in their organizations, and to bring up problems and tough issues at work. These are not random “things” but validated elements of psychological safety based on scholarly research on how to build it.
But wait, how does discussing a story raise psychological safety?
Stories provide a unique opportunity to grapple with larger issues related to communication, culture, and the human condition. They provide a safe space within the confines of the narrative to explore controversy, nurture debate and invite diverse perspectives and conclusions. Stories inspire us to share, with vulnerability and openness.
We facilitated two large events at Enpro Industries that included everyone from management to the shop floor. Two very different stories invited new voices and new perspectives.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ iconic story “The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World” offered the group a chance to examine how a single, random event can unleash a community’s transformation and the potential change we hold within ourselves.
William Carlos Williams’ “The Use of Force” inspired conversations about taking “justified” risk and the varying balance of safety and necessity held by individuals with divergent levels of relational power.
Erin Rafter, a Senior Human Resource Manager observed: “People who don’t normally speak up opened up in remarkable and respectful ways, sharing thoughtful ideas and baring vulnerabilities you didn’t know they had. It reminds you that we have this environment of deep caring, and how important that is.”
A safe and caring environment of dialogue and debate encourages colleagues to discuss the undiscussables, to feel safe escalating problems or mistakes without fear of retribution. And this is good for everyone because it means problems often get solved more quickly and collaboratively – before whistleblowers are forced to turn to the court of public opinion for help.
