Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know Adam Grant (good books to read for beginners .TXT) 📖

notion of a spirited debate captures something important about how and why good fights happen. If you watch Brad argue with his colleagues—or the pirates fight with one another—you can quickly see that the tension is intellectual, not emotional. The tone is vigorous and feisty rather than combative or aggressive. They don’t disagree just for the sake of it; they disagree because they care. “Whether you disagree loudly, or quietly yet persistently put forward a different perspective,” Nicole explains, “we come together to support the common goal of excellence—of making great films.”

After seeing their interactions up close, I finally understood what had long felt like a contradiction in my own personality: how I could be highly agreeable and still cherish a good argument. Agreeableness is about seeking social harmony, not cognitive consensus. It’s possible to disagree without being disagreeable. Although I’m terrified of hurting other people’s feelings, when it comes to challenging their thoughts, I have no fear. In fact, when I argue with someone, it’s not a display of disrespect—it’s a sign of respect. It means I value their views enough to contest them. If their opinions didn’t matter to me, I wouldn’t bother. I know I have chemistry with someone when we find it delightful to prove each other wrong.

Agreeable people don’t always steer clear of conflict. They’re highly attuned to the people around them and often adapt to the norms in the room. My favorite demonstration is an experiment by my colleagues Jennifer Chatman and Sigal Barsade. Agreeable people were significantly more accommodating than disagreeable ones—as long as they were in a cooperative team. When they were assigned to a competitive team, they acted just as disagreeably as their disagreeable teammates.

That’s how working with Brad Bird influenced John Walker. John’s natural tendency is to avoid conflict: at restaurants, if the waiter brings him the wrong dish, he just goes ahead and eats it anyway. “But when I’m involved in something bigger than myself,” he observes, “I feel like I have an opportunity, a responsibility really, to speak up, speak out, debate. Fight like hell when the morning whistle blows, but go out for a beer after the one at five o’clock.”

That adaptability was also visible in the Wright brothers’ relationship. In Wilbur, Orville had a built-in challenge network. Wilbur was known to be highly disagreeable: he was unfazed by other people’s opinions and had a habit of pouncing on anyone else’s idea the moment it was raised. Orville was known as gentle, cheerful, and sensitive to criticism. Yet those qualities seemed to vanish in his partnership with his brother. “He’s such a good scrapper,” Wilbur said. One sleepless night Orville came up with an idea to build a rudder that was movable rather than fixed. The next morning at breakfast, as he got ready to pitch the idea to Wilbur, Orville winked at a colleague of theirs, expecting Wilbur to go into challenge mode and demolish it. Much to his surprise, Wilbur saw the potential in the idea immediately, and it became one of their major discoveries.

Disagreeable people don’t just challenge us to think again. They also make agreeable people comfortable arguing, too. Instead of fleeing from friction, our grumpy colleagues engage it directly. By making it clear that they can handle a tussle, they create a norm for the rest of us to follow. If we’re not careful, though, what starts as a scuffle can turn into a brawl. How can we avoid that slippery slope?

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