How to improve your decision-making and level-up your growth by harnessing the power of disagreement
Have you ever heard someone say the following phrase: “I could be wrong, but…”?
Nine times out of ten, what follows is a long explanation that makes it clear that the speaker is pretty sure they’re not wrong. Unfortunately, most of us act this way in some area of our lives.
We all carry biases with us, and those biases — by definition — color how we perceive things. Because biases affect our perceptions, they also affect how we think, which affects how good our decision-making process is.
Many people think that the way to make better decisions is to somehow get rid of biases and make a completely objective decision. I have yet to encounter such a thing. Getting to complete objectivity isn’t the way to make better decisions, instead, the way lies in harnessing disagreement.
If you earnestly seek, understand, and integrate disagreement with your position before making a decision, you can massively increase the quality of the decisions you make. That includes deciding not to take action in some situations — which can save you wasted time and effort.
The key, then, is knowing how to harness the power of disagreement to enrich your decision-making process.
No Disagreement? No Decision!
Alfred P. Sloan —arguably one of the most effective executives of the 20th century — used to refuse to make an important decision without the presence of disagreement. As Peter Drucker explains in his beloved The Effective Executive:
Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here. Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until the next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.
As Sloan saw things, without disagreement, there was no way to even understand the importance or the substance of a decision. Sloan understood that everyone has a slightly different perspective. And he recognized that for an important decision, the likelihood of everyone actually seeing things in the same way — rather than simply not speaking up — was unlikely.
What is more likely than unanimous agreement is apathy or disinterest. And if someone involved in a decision-making process is apathetic or disinterested, the quality of the decision can suffer. This is true just as much for a single person making a decision as it is for a group.
What follows is a brief primer on how to seek, understand, and integrate disagreement to help you make better decisions — which will help you cement more robust growth.
There is no such thing as “unbiased”
Those who seek to improve their decision-making skills usually start out by seeking a way to make an “unbiased” decision. Unfortunately, there really is no such thing. Also, such a thing would be utterly useless. Think of what a bias is — it’s a way of seeing things that favors or leans on some value system or worldview. You need your biases in order to make decisions — otherwise nothing would matter to you. So it doesn’t make much sense to eliminate your biases.
The goal is not to get “unbiased” views and adopt them, but rather to identify your own biases, then identify other biases that counter your own. Once you understand the various biases at play in the domain of your decision, you can seek out opinions and ideas coupled with biases that clash with your own. Then you can start looking at arguments from various sides together — understanding where they come from (i.e., their biases).
The goal is not to completely lose your bias, but to put it up against other biases and see what sticks after the battle.
How to Find and Use Disagreement
It can be hard to find disagreement — especially if stakes are high. So you have to get creative. Your approach will likely differ, depending on whether you’re making a decision largely on your own, or in a group setting.
In A Group
If you’re in a group setting, and you’re trying to pull disagreement out, you may have to use some tricks to loosen people up and get them to reveal some qualms or worries they have.
A great way to get a group talking about disagreements is to ask: let’s say we decide to do X today; what is the craziest, worst outcome 6 months down the road that we might not have seen coming? Then let people answer.
The word “crazy” gives people license to toss out some worst-case scenarios without worry of being pinned to them. But their answers will give you insight into where their heads are at — what their biases might be. Then you walk slowly from “craziest, worst” toward the middle, until you see what people were too scared to offer up initially.
On Your Own
It can be even harder to find opposing viewpoints to your own when you’re working on a project by yourself. But if you get creative, you can find ways to solicit healthy disagreement.
These days, you need only hop on the internet, search for terminology about the decision you’re trying to make, and find a good opposing idea. You need to be careful not to find overly simplistic or poorly argued viewpoints, since it’s easy to dismiss them, and simply use that as ammo to prove your own point of view.
Having go-to sources of disagreement is key. Peer-reviewed journals for different industries are good — depending on what information you’re looking for. Having people that you trust, but that disagree with you, is key. Get to know them personally, or simply have access to their ideas for your review. There are plenty of people with whom I disagree, but who make compelling, intelligently argued points. When I’m trying to formulate a stance on something, I make sure I take in their thoughts.
Time and Charitable Interpretation
This is where time is key. You have to spend time finding disagreement — especially when you’re by yourself. You have to find the most compelling example of a disagreement with your own view that you can. Then you have to interpret it charitably. The bigger the decision, the more important this is.
Giving an idea or argument a charitable interpretation means building the strongest possible version of the argument or point of view. This way, if and when you poke holes in it, you’re doing so to a worthy opponent. Ultimately, this helps you make better decisions, because you’ve truly tested your own idea. Hopefully, you’ve actually modified your idea due to having to take into account a dissenting viewpoint.
Pulling the Trigger
Ultimately, at some point, you need to make a decision. One temptation — especially for the more introspective crowd— is to either wait for more information and/or ruminate for longer. But be careful not to use “getting more data” as a means of procrastinating. For any decision, there is a point of data saturation — meaning that more information will not help make a decision more apparent to you; it’ll simply add noise and prolong things.
Of course, we don’t want to make a decision too quickly, and without taking key data into account, either. So how do we find a balance? This is where disagreement is helpful.
Your initial inclination or beliefs give you one end of a spectrum. Seeking out disagreement and understanding it charitably then gives you the other end of the spectrum. The process of making the decision then becomes getting comfortable with your understanding of the area in between your initial position or biases and the disagreement at the other end. When you feel that you understand the spectrum of options and opinions, and have in some way altered your own initial opinion, it’s likely time to make a decision.
Here’s a final note on pulling the trigger and making a decision: deciding not to do something — to stay put — is a valid option. To invoke Drucker again, he urges executives to ask the question if we do nothing, will this issue ultimately take care of itself? If the answer seems to be (mostly) yes, it behooves us to let things be, and go after other initiatives, where our action can have a more direct impact.
We as humans often get spooked by circumstance. Something happens (or a series of things happens) and we feel that we need to do something in order to address things. But we don’t always have to react. In many cases, we can simply observe and stay put, continuing on as before, and refusing to waste energy being reactive to the ebbs and flows. That can make a huge difference.
The Takeaway
We all have to make decisions in our lives in order to grow. These decisions can be complex and seem to involve a lot of possible information to review. To make the best decision (which could be deciding to do nothing) necessitates seeking, understanding, and integrating disagreement. Doing so will allow you to leverage the power of both your biases and those of others, to modify your view of things — or strengthen your initial view through having sufficiently challenged it. Once you’ve done that, the decision you make will be stronger, due to having more thoroughly understood your options.
Learn to seek, understand, and integrate disagreement, and take a huge step toward more robust decision-making and personal growth.