Conflicted Read online

  Dedication

  For Douglas, on whom we all agree.

  Epigraph

  At every opposition, we do not consider whether it be just

  but, right or wrong, how to disengage ourselves. Instead

  of extending our arms, we thrust out our claws.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Without contraries is no progression.

  William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

  Ian McEwan, Amsterdam

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Interview

  Part One: Why We Need New Ways to Argue

  1. Beyond Fight or Flight

  2. How Conflict Brings Us Closer

  3. How Conflict Makes Us Smarter

  4. How Conflict Inspires Us

  Part Two: Rules of Productive Argument

  5. First, Connect

  6. Let Go of the Rope

  7. Give Face

  8. Check Your Weirdness

  9. Get Curious

  10. Make Wrong Strong

  11. Disrupt the Script

  12. Share Constraints

  13. Only Get Mad on Purpose

  14. Golden Rule: Be Real

  Part Three: Staying in the Room

  15. The Infinite Game

  16. Rules of Productive Argument Summarised

  17. Toolkit of Productive Argument

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Ian Leslie

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue: The Interview

  I know very little about the man I’m about to meet except that he is suspected of a horrific crime and that he regards me as the enemy.

  I’m sitting in a brightly lit, sparsely furnished room, in an anonymous hotel somewhere in rural England. Thick curtains are drawn across the only window. In front of me is a table; opposite, an empty chair. To my right sits a police officer, who is telling me about the suspect, who, I’m told, is waiting outside. The officer talks me through the excruciating details of the crime. He tells me what we know about it and what we don’t, and about the crucial information that I somehow need to extract from the suspect. He tells me that this man is proud, angry and cunning.

  I’m trying to concentrate on what the officer is saying, but my brain is whirring away on the encounter to come. This man doesn’t want to be here. He doesn’t like people like me. How am I going to get someone with whom I am so fundamentally at odds to open up – to tell me anything at all, let alone the truth?

  The briefing is finished. I keep my hands flat on the table so that the officer won’t see them shaking. ‘Are you ready,’ says the officer. ‘Yes,’ I lie. A door opens. The suspect swaggers into the room.

  His name is Frank Barnet. He’s a delivery driver, a burly man who carries himself with a confidence I certainly don’t feel. A minute ago, I was briefed that Barnet had been behaving aggressively while in custody, shouting at the officers. Apparently, he was upset that he had been arrested while dropping off his children at school. Barnet takes the seat opposite and focuses a cold gaze on me. Trying not to betray any evidence of nerves, I start by asking if he can recall what he was doing last Sunday afternoon.

  ‘Why the fuck should I tell you anything?’

  Oh man. I am not used to this. Most of my conversations are with people who at least want to talk to me. They usually want it to go well, and so do I. Even if we don’t agree on what we’re talking about, we agree on how we’re going to talk about it. The removal of that unspoken consensus feels alarmingly disorienting. I try again, explaining to Barnet that I just want him to help me understand what he was doing that day.

  FB: Why are you talking to me?

  IL: We’re talking to people who were in the area –

  FB: I don’t give a fuck about people, why are you talking to me, Frank Barnet? Why me?

  My stomach lurches. A part of me wants to return his hostility, with interest. What right does he have to be so aggressive? He’s the one suspected of a crime, not me. Another part of me wants to avoid any confrontation at all and apologise. I feel confused, uncomfortable, stuck.

  * * *

  For years now, I’ve been fascinated by the question of why so many of our public disagreements go so badly. People with differing views seem to find it increasingly hard to argue productively, instead becoming mired in acrimony or stuck in a grinding neutral gear. Then I noticed that the same problems apply to our private lives too. Whether it’s parents arguing with their children or workplace quarrels, our inability to disagree well seems to act as a roadblock to progress. Shouldn’t we be able to express conflicting views without getting into toxic rows or fruitless stalemates? What’s getting in our way?

  Unable to answer these questions to my satisfaction, I started to do some research. I spent time reading about the principles of good intellectual debate as established and refined by thinkers over thousands of years, from the ancient philosophers onwards. Principles like ‘assume good faith’, ‘get to know your opponent’s argument as well as your own’, ‘don’t argue with straw men’. It was wise and enlightening stuff, but something nagged away at me. Like healthy eating or exercise, it seemed much easier to know what you ought to do in disagreement than to do it. I grasped the theories, but the moment I got into a row with my boss or my wife or a stranger on social media, theory went out of the window. I came to think of productive disagreement not as a philosophy so much as a discipline, and a skill.

  People are not logic machines. We are egotistical, proud, impulsive, insecure and needy. Rather than being a pure exchange of opinions and evidence, an argument is nearly always entangled with how we feel about each other. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: emotions can help us fight our corner or make us sympathetic to another’s view. But emotions can work against healthy disagreement too. Primordial instincts kick in, clouding our minds and distorting our behaviour. Unspoken tensions simmer under the surface of the politest disagreements, sometimes boiling over into anger, sometimes leading us into sullen withdrawal, but other times pushing us towards truthfulness and intimacy.

  When we disagree, we bring the whole of our selves to the conversation: head, heart and gut. The trouble with most treatises on debate or argument is that they only focus on the first. I wanted to address all three. That’s why I persuaded an interrogation expert to let me role-play the part of a police interviewer. Most of the disagreements you or I have in our everyday lives do not obviously resemble criminal interviews. Our arguments might be about the best way to run a project at work, or whether it’s OK to eat meat, or which of us is drawing too heavily on the joint account. But they do have something fundamental in common with the one I had with Frank Barnet, and it’s this: they are, at least in part, related to how we feel about each other. Underneath every disagreement a wordless negotiation over a relationship is taking place. If we don’t settle that, the conversation doesn’t stand a chance.

  The most difficult disagreements can be transformed into productive conversations by paying close attention to this hidden dimension. Some people do this for a living. We can learn a huge amount from those who manage highly charged, high-stakes, adversarial conversations in the course of work: police officers, hostage negotiators, diplomats and others. I’ve found remarkable similarities between the challenges faced by these experts and those faced by any of us in a marital row, political debate or workplace dispute. By combining this lived expertise with ideas and research from communication science and cognitive psychology, I’ve been able to identify a
universal grammar of productive disagreement, available for any of us to apply to our lives.

  In the course of doing so I’ve not only role-played the part of a criminal interrogator; I’ve travelled to Memphis to watch cops being trained in how to handle tense encounters on street corners where the prospect of violence is never far away. I’ve talked to divorce mediators about how they get two people who can barely stand to be in the same room as each other to come to an agreement. I’ve asked therapists about how they talk to patients who resist every piece of advice they are given, and I’ve learned how hostage negotiators talk people out of blowing up a building or throwing themselves off a bridge. These professionals do very different things but they are all experienced at retrieving something valuable from the most unpromising of circumstances. They are masters of the conversation beneath the conversation.

  I’ve learnt a lot about humans along the way, including the one writing these words. I’m not one of life’s natural warriors; even mild confrontation can make me itch with discomfort. But I’ve learnt that conflict is not something to be avoided at all costs, and that in the right circumstances, it has immense and gratifying benefits. I’ve learnt that children are happier when they have open disagreements with their parents – as long as those disagreements don’t turn poisonous – and that couples who have vigorous arguments are often more content than those who avoid confrontation. I’ve learnt that workplace teams function at a higher level when they know how to disagree directly, even passionately, without tearing at the fabric of their relationships. I’ve learnt that too much agreement is bad for us, and that we can only make the most of our differences when we disagree well.

  Knowing how to disagree in a way that leads to progress and understanding instead of stasis and acrimony can help each and every one of us. Productive disagreement is more than just a crucial life skill, however. At a time when humanity is struggling to cope with unprecedented existential challenges, it’s a vital necessity for our species. Disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have, critical to the health of any shared enterprise, from marriage to business to democracy. We can use it to turn vague notions into actionable ideas, blind spots into insights, distrust into empathy. We have never been more in need of it.

  In case you’re under any illusion: disagreeing productively is hard. Evolution has not equipped us for it. Nor is it something for which we get trained. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that most us are pretty hopeless at it. That needs to change, or else our increasingly vociferous disagreements are destined to generate heat without light. Either that or they won’t generate anything, because we refuse to have them. And the only thing worse than having toxic arguments is not having arguments at all.

  Part One

  Why We Need New Ways to Argue

  1. Beyond Fight or Flight

  We live in a society more prone to disagreement than ever before, and we’re not remotely prepared for it.

  In 2010, Time magazine described Facebook’s mission as being to ‘tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, anti-social world of random chance into a friendly world’. During the first decade of mass internet use, this was a popular theory: the more that people are able to communicate with others, the more friendly and understanding they will become, and the healthier our public discourse will be. As we enter the third decade of this century, that vision seems painfully naive. Howling mobs clash day and night. The internet is connecting people, but it doesn’t always create fellow-feeling. At its worst, it can resemble a machine for the production of discord and division.

  Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham has observed that the internet is a medium that engenders disagreement by design. Digital media platforms are inherently interactive and, well, people are disputatious. As Graham puts it, ‘Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing.’ Readers are more likely to comment on an article or post when they disagree with it, and in disagreement they have more to say (there are only so many ways you can say, ‘I agree’). They also tend to get more animated when they disagree, which usually means getting angry.

  A team of data scientists in 2010 studied user activity on BBC discussion forums, measuring the emotional sentiment of nearly 2.5 million posts from 18,000 users. They found that longer discussion threads were sustained by negative comments, and that the most active users overall were more likely to express negative emotions.

  We live in a world in which toxic disagreement is ubiquitous, in which people are more frequently offensive and offended, in which we do ever more talking and ever less listening. The technologies we use to communicate with each other have clearly played a part in making us this way but, tempting as it is to blame Facebook and Twitter for our ills, that would be to miss the significance of a wider and more profound shift in human behaviour that has been decades, even centuries, in the making. Socially, as well as electronically, there are fewer one-way channels. Everyone is starting to talk back to everyone else. If we are becoming more disagreeable, it’s because modern life demands we speak our mind.

  * * *

  The American anthropologist Edward T. Hall introduced a distinction between two types of communication culture: high-context and low-context. Like all good theories, it simplifies reality to illuminating effect. In a low-context culture, communication is explicit and direct. What people say is taken to be an expression of their thoughts and feelings. You don’t need to understand the context – who is speaking, in what situation – to understand the message. A high-context culture is one in which little is said explicitly, and most of the message is implied. The meaning of each message resides not so much in the words themselves, as in the context. Communication is oblique, subtle, ambiguous.

  Broadly speaking, countries in Europe and North America are low-context cultures, while Asian countries are high-context. To give an example, bubuzuke is a simple Japanese dish, popular in Kyoto, made by pouring green tea or broth over rice. If you’re at the home of a Kyoto native and they offer you bubuzuke, you might decide to answer yes or no, depending on whether you feel hungry. But in Kyoto, offering bubuzuke is the traditional way to signal that it’s time for a guest to leave. You would need to know the context to get the message.

  High-context societies such as Japan’s tend to be more traditional and more formal. Good communication means having a deep understanding of shared symbols and unspoken rules of civility, such as deference to seniority of age and rank. The primary purpose of communication is to maintain good relationships, rather than to exchange information or get something off your chest. An emphasis is put on listening, since the listener in a high-context exchange must read between the lines in order to understand what is being said. Speakers in high-context cultures tend to be economical with words, comfortable with pauses, and happy to wait their turn to speak.

  Low-context societies, like the USA’s, are less traditional and more diverse. They involve more short-term relationships, more flux and less deference. When it comes to speaking or listening, knowledge of tradition, protocol and rank doesn’t help quite so much; everybody speaks for themselves. Since you can’t trust the context, people rely on language itself. Low-context communication is characterised by what one scholar calls ‘the constant and sometimes never-ending use of words’. Intentions are articulated, desires expressed, explanations given. People use first names and engage in small talk. There is more interruption and cross-talking – and more arguing.

  This brings us to the most important difference between high-context and low-context cultures: the degree of conflict each generates. In Asian cultures, expressing your opinion directly and forcefully is unusual. It can be interpreted as callow or even offensive. Westerners are more willing to ‘speak their mind’ and risk confrontation. Differing opinions are expected, even when they generate friction. The difference is relative: even in the West, we have developed cultural strategies to avoid too much argument, like the custom of not discussing politics or religion over dinner. But as
such traditions fade, so does their dampening effect on conflict.

  HIGH context LOW context

  • Implicit • Explicit

  • Indirect, subtle • Direct, confrontational

  • Emotional • Transactional

  • Stronger relationships • Shallower relationships

  • Higher trust • Lower trust

  I’m making broad-brush comparisons between countries by way of illustration, but Hall’s high- and low-context culture model is applicable at any scale. People who live in villages where everyone knows each other engage in more high-context communication – nods and winks – than people who live in big cities, who are used to encountering strangers from different backgrounds. In long-established organisations, staff may be able to make their intentions known to each other in a way that leaves newcomers mystified, whereas in a start-up, anything that isn’t explicitly articulated will not be heard. Individuals shift between high- and low-context modes: with family or friends, you probably do a lot of high-context communication, but when talking to someone in a call centre, you go low-context. Low-context cultures are better suited to societies undergoing change, with high levels of diversity and innovation. But they can also feel impersonal, brittle and unpredictable, and contain greater potential for strife.

  Most of us, wherever we are in the world, are living increasingly low-context lives, as more and more of us flock to cities, do business with strangers and converse over smartphones. Different countries still have different communication cultures, but nearly all of them are subject to the same global vectors of commerce, urbanisation and technology – forces that dissolve tradition, flatten hierarchy and increase the scope for arguments. It’s not at all clear that we are prepared for this.

  For most of our existence as a species, humans have operated in high-context mode. Our ancestors lived in settlements and tribes with shared traditions and settled chains of command. Now, we frequently encounter others with values and customs different to our own. At the same time, we are more temperamentally egalitarian than ever. Everywhere you look, there are interactions in which all parties have or demand an equal voice. Take the way that marriage has changed. Seventy years ago, there would have been little need for the partners in most marriages to discuss who was going to perform which household chores, or who looked after the children – such things went unsaid. People outsourced those decisions to the culture. With the rise of gender equality, the modern household requires more explicit communication and negotiation. Context no longer tells us who should be doing the laundry. You can believe, as I do, that this change is overwhelmingly a good thing, and still recognise that it increases the potential for thorny disagreements.