Conflicted Page 7

  His book, intended as a warning to the general public, was a last resort. He paid a high price for arguing that sugar was a bigger threat than fat. The world’s top nutrition scientists didn’t like having their ideas challenged so publicly. Yudkin was disinvited to scientific conferences and shunned by scientific journals. His own college reneged on a promise to let him continue to use its research facilities after his retirement, since it was no longer deemed politic to have an opponent of the fat hypothesis on the premises. Yudkin’s research eventually fell out of circulation altogether. He died in 1995, a disappointed and largely forgotten man.

  Meanwhile, following advice from the nutrition science elite, American and British governments told their citizens to reduce consumption of fat and cholesterol-rich foods. When people cut back on fat, they usually increase their consumption of carbohydrates. Food manufacturers also responded to the new directives by selling low-fat foods made more palatable by the addition of sugar. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that by turning saturated fats into our number one dietary enemy, we missed the threat of the most versatile, palatable and unhealthy carbohydrate of all.

  The story of Yudkin’s professional demise scared off any other scientists interested in challenging the consensus that fat was the chief problem with Western diets. Only in the twenty-first century did it become acceptable again, in scientific circles, even to research what sugar does to our bodies. A paediatrician called Robert Lustig led the way. After studying sugar’s effects on the metabolic system, in 2013 he published Fat Chance, a book exposing the link between sugar and obesity that went on to become a global bestseller. Yudkin’s research had been so well buried that Lustig only came across it by accident when a fellow scientist mentioned it to him at a conference. Lustig was astonished to find that it anticipated his own work. When I asked him why he was the first scientist in years to focus on the dangers of sugar, he told me: ‘John Yudkin. They took him down so severely – so severely – that nobody wanted to attempt it on their own.’

  The obesity epidemic is often blamed on the food industry, and certainly the food companies have a lot to answer for. But if the nutritional advice we have followed for all this time was profoundly flawed, that’s also because even scientific enquiry is prone to dysfunctional group behaviour: herding towards majority opinion, intense discomfort with admitting to error, and deference to the dominant.

  ‘Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?’ was the title of a paper written in 2015 by a team of scholars at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the USA seeking an empirical basis for a remark made by the physicist Max Planck: ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ The researchers identified more than 12,000 elite scientists from different fields. Searching obituaries, they found 452 who had died before retirement, and looked to see what happened to the fields from which these celebrated scientists had unexpectedly departed. What they found confirmed the truth of Planck’s maxim. Junior researchers who had worked closely with the elite scientists, authoring papers with them, published less. At the same time, there was a marked increase in papers by newcomers to the field, who were less likely to cite the work of the deceased eminence. The articles by these newcomers proved to be substantive and influential, attracting a high number of citations. The newcomers, free of the pressure to agree with dominant elders, moved the whole field along.

  Disagreements can make us smarter, as individuals and as groups, by enabling us to learn from others and forcing us to think harder about why we believe what we believe. But, as Socrates knew, for the disagreement to generate insight instead of anger, you have to manage the relationship issues that disagreements inevitably create. Only when there is shared understanding, respect and trust can you really go at it – at which point, anything is possible.

  4. How Conflict Inspires Us

  Conflict is the spark that lights the fire of group creativity.

  In Dare County, North Carolina, there is a small town called Kill Devil Hills, built on sandy ground near the sea. In September 1902, the town and its airport did not yet exist, but if you had been in the vicinity you might have witnessed a strange scene: two men among the sand dunes, standing face to face next to a piece of heavy machinery, waving their arms in the air, shouting at each other.

  For a couple of months, brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright had been going out to Kill Devil Hills with the best glider they had ever built. Using data from wind tunnel experiments, they knew exactly what wing design would provide the best lift and the least drag. But in their test flights, they kept encountering a persistent problem, which culminated in a near-death experience for one of them. On 23 September, as Orville attempted a turn, one wing suddenly went high while the other went low. The glider spun out of control and crashed into the sand. The result, according to Orville’s diary, was ‘a heap of flying machine, cloth and sticks . . . with me in the centre without a bruise or scratch’.

  The problem, which they judged as occurring once every fifty glides, was potentially fatal. The brothers called it ‘well-digging’; it later became known as a tailspin. They urgently needed to solve it if they were to realise their ambition of building the first flying machine. On the evening of 2 October, the Wrights discussed the problem, along with their friend George Spratt, and soon got to arguing. Orville, the younger brother, shouted and waved his arms around. Wilbur replied in short, staccato bursts. Spratt felt deeply uncomfortable but he would have known this was far from unusual. The Wright brothers were bare-knuckle debaters.

  We’re so familiar with the fact that the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane that the miraculous nature of their achievement can go unheralded. Wilbur and Orville were not scientists; they didn’t even attend university. They were not attached to any corporation or institution. They ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They had accomplished relatively little right up until they solved one of the greatest engineering puzzles in history.

  The Wright brothers, born four years apart, had a close relationship. ‘From the time we were little children,’ wrote Wilbur, ‘my brother Orville and myself lived together, worked together, and in fact, thought together.’ The way they thought together was through argument. The sound of their quarrelling was a familiar sound to Dayton locals, who heard it spilling out from the floor above their shop. It was their father, Milton Wright, who taught his sons how to argue productively. After the evening meal, Milton would introduce a topic and instruct the boys to debate it as vigorously as possible without being disrespectful. Then – following the classical rules of debating – he would instruct them to change sides and start again. It proved to be great training.

  ‘In time,’ writes Tom Crouch, one of the brothers’ biographers, ‘they would learn to argue in a more efficient way, tossing ideas back and forth in a kind of verbal shorthand until a kernel of truth began to emerge.’ Wilbur noted how discussion ‘brings out new ways of looking at things and rounds off the corners’. After George Spratt returned home, he wrote a letter to Wilbur expressing his discomfort at the way the brothers argued. He was particularly perturbed by the way the brothers would switch sides in the middle of an argument, which struck him as dishonest. Wilbur’s response is worth reading at length:

  It was not my intention to advocate dishonesty in argument nor a bad spirit in a controversy. No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error so false but that it possesses no element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error, he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some errors with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly . . . After I get hold of a truth I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up on an error.

  The brothers didn’t argue du
tifully; they took delight in it. ‘Orv’s a good scrapper,’ said Wilbur, fondly. In another letter to Spratt, Wilbur chastised him for being too reasonable: ‘I see you are back to your old trick of giving up before you are half-beaten in an argument,’ he wrote. ‘I felt pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled.’

  Charles Taylor, the Wright Cycle Company’s only employee and chief mechanic, described the air in the room above him, where the brothers worked, as ‘frightened with argument’. He recalled, ‘The boys were working out a lot of theory in those days, and occasionally they would get into terrific arguments. They’d shout at each other something terrible. I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.’

  How did they get hot without getting mad? Ivonette Wright Miller, a niece of the brothers, identified one crucial ingredient, when she noted that the brothers were adept at ‘arguing and listening’. The tougher they fought, the more intently they listened to each other. Another ingredient was trust, the deep trust that came from their affection for one another and their relentless focus on the same goal.

  The night after the brothers argued about how to fix the well-digging problem, Orville did not sleep. Not because he had argued with his brother but because his mind was racing through the possibilities generated by their argument. He reviewed Wilbur’s points, then synthesised them with his own. At the breakfast table, he presented the solution: an adjustable rudder. Following a few further suggestions from Wilbur, the brothers made their first fully controllable glider. Now they could move on to a whole new series of arguments.

  * * *

  In Keith Richards’s autobiography, Life, he tells a story that captures something about the workplace culture of the Rolling Stones. It’s 1984, and the Stones are in Amsterdam for a meeting (yes, even Keith Richards attends meetings). In the evening, Richards and Mick Jagger go out for a drink and return to their hotel in the early hours, by which time Jagger is somewhat the worse for wear. ‘Give Mick a couple of glasses, he’s gone,’ notes Richards scornfully. Jagger decides that he would like to see Charlie Watts, who is in bed. He picks up the phone, calls Watts’s room, and says, ‘Where’s my drummer?’ No answer comes. Jagger and Richards have a few more drinks. Twenty minutes later, there is a knock at the door. It is Watts, impeccably attired in one of his Savile Row suits, freshly shaved and cologned. He seizes Jagger by the jacket lapels, shouts, ‘Never call me your drummer again,’ and delivers a sharp right hook to the singer’s chin, which sends Jagger crashing on to a table of champagne and smoked salmon and almost out of a window into the canal below.

  It’s the kind of incident that would have ended many friendships. But the Stones have kept going for half a century because they’re entirely comfortable with the occasional dust-up. Warren Zanes, a rock biographer and former guitarist in the Del Fuegos, told me: ‘The bands that stay together aren’t necessarily the ones high-fiving each other after every concert and giving each other hugs.’

  The Wright brothers were innovators who used conflict to power their mental flights, but conflict seems to be a crucial element of any creative collaboration. You might even say that innovation and creativity themselves arise from arguments with the world. A start-up says: society is doing this all wrong – there is a more convenient way of buying groceries or getting around town. Artists often act in revolt against society or the dominant conventions of their time; the Rolling Stones pitted themselves against post-war Britain’s social conservatism. It’s hardly surprising, then, that groups of creative people punch as much as they kiss. Some level of internal conflict seems to be advantageous to creativity, but unless the group finds a way to manage that tension productively, the stresses of achieving success can rip the group apart. The history of rock bands is a rich data-set for studying the core problems of any creative enterprise: how to make a group of talented people add up to more than the sum of its parts – and, once you’ve done that, how to keep the band together.

  Successful bands have handled conflict in different ways. Creative disputes don’t have to be as fiery as that between Jagger and Watts. The members of R.E.M., one of the longest running and most successful bands of all time, disagreed with each other in a very different style. In 1979, Michael Stipe, then a college student in Athens, Georgia, was browsing in a downtown record store called Wuxtry when he got talking to the clerk, a college dropout called Peter Buck. The two men bonded over a love of underground rock and soon decided to form a band, recruiting two fellow students, Bill Berry and Mike Mills. Thirty-one years after their first gig, R.E.M. broke up amicably, ending one of the happiest collaborations in rock history. Another regular at Wuxtry Records was Bertis Downs, a law student who later became R.E.M.’s manager. He told me that R.E.M. operated – appropriately enough – like an Athenian democracy. ‘They all had equal say. There was no pecking order.’ Disagreement was still vital, though: ‘Everyone had a veto, which meant everyone had to buy into every decision, business or art. They hashed things out until they reached a consensus. And they said “No” a lot.’ (Compare this to the culture of Gerry Tan’s start-up, Posterous, where conflict was avoided to the point that hashing things out became impossible.)

  If democracy worked so well for R.E.M., the obvious question is why is it so rare. The answer is that bands tend to become competitive rather than collaborative. Jeremy Lascelles, formerly CEO of Chrysalis Music, who now runs an artist management company, told me, ‘You’re dealing with the most toxic element in human relations: ego. A musician needs a big ego to get on stage and bare their soul. But that means you can get these massive egos battling for dominance.’ In successful bands, there is plenty of task conflict – who should take this solo, whether to do that gig – but relatively little relationship conflict – why is the guitarist getting so much attention when I’m the frontman?

  Expressing a sentiment that Gerry Tan would recognise, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz remarked: ‘Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while.’ Ernest Bormann, a pioneering scholar of small group communication, proposed that every group has a threshold for tolerable tension, which represents its optimal level of conflict. Uncontrolled conflict can destroy the group, he said, but without conflict, boredom and apathy set in. Bormann believed that creative groups did not stay at the tolerance threshold but oscillated around it like a sine wave, alternating frequent episodes of conflict with calmer periods of agreement. Conflict is needed, said Bormann, to clarify goals, illuminate differences, stimulate curiosity, and release pent-up frustration (sometimes you really need to tell Mark from accounts how annoying his emails are).

  When bands split up they traditionally put it down to ‘musical differences’. When the successful British band the Beautiful South split, they explained it was due to ‘musical similarities’. Simon Napier-Bell, a manager of multiple successful bands, including the Yardbirds and Wham!, told me that bands who don’t fight tend to be creatively moribund. ‘Artists don’t want to compromise.’ When they do, he said, the music becomes safe and boring, as the group merely repeats the formula that made it successful. ‘New and interesting art comes from conflict.’ He recalled witnessing an argument between the Yardbirds in the recording studio over whether Jeff Beck should be allowed a guitar solo. Beck felt he was not being given enough room to express himself. Eventually, the others grudgingly conceded to him a few bars on a song called ‘The Nazz Are Blue’. Napier-Bell sat with the band and watched as Beck recorded his solo. When it came to his bars, Beck simply struck one note and let it bleed into feedback, while glowering with defiance at his bandmates. ‘Everything he felt was in that note,’ said Napier-Bell. ‘It’s the highpoint of the album.’

  The hard part, of course, is stopping conflict from escalating to the point at which relationships are permanently damaged. Groups and couples need ways of defusing the stress of vigorous disagreement
s – of bringing conflict back towards the tolerance threshold. One of the most effective techniques for doing that is humour. In particular, the playful, interpersonal humour we call teasing. For illustration, we need look no further than one of the greatest groups of all time.

  In May 1962, Brian Epstein secured an audition for his client with the record company EMI at its studios on Abbey Road in North London. The Beatles had an ardent fan base in Liverpool but this counted for little in the capital, the only gateway to national success. The group knew this could be their last chance to make it big. They had already flunked an audition at Decca. Another failure and they would probably never be heard of outside their home town.

  EMI’s management had assigned the recording session to an urbane, elegantly dressed producer of novelty records called George Martin. Under Martin’s supervision, the band recorded rather jumpy versions of ‘Love Me Do’, ‘P.S. I Love You’ and ‘Ask Me Why’. When they finished, at around ten in the evening, Martin invited the scruffy, likeable young men up to his control room. He explained, at some length, what they would have to do to become successful, focusing in particular on their inadequate equipment (Paul McCartney’s amp had had to be replaced during the session).

  Then he paused. ‘I’ve laid into you for quite a long time and you haven’t responded. Is there anything you don’t like?’ After a beat’s silence, George Harrison, the youngest member of the group, spoke up. ‘Well for a start, I don’t like your tie.’