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 dutifully; 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 disagreements – 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.’
Relationships were very important to the Beatles. Paul McCartney and John Lennon came from families fractured by bereavement, and neither they, nor Harrison, fitted in at school. All of them were hungry for the camaraderie and sense of belonging that came with being in a band.
In their early years especially, the Beatles did everything, on stage and off, as a unit. By the time they met Martin, they had spent years in each other’s intimate company, in Liverpool, in Hamburg, in filthy bedsits, tiny dressing rooms and boneshaking vans. As with the Wright brothers, this personal closeness enabled honest professional disagreements. But the Beatles handled conflict in a different way to the Wrights, or the Stones, or R.E.M. There are surprisingly few accounts of them having stand-up rows or fistfights with each other, and as far we know, they generally did not engage in lengthy debating sessions. The Beatles made each other laugh, on stage and off, and they were more likely to rely on humour to see them through difficult issues.
While Lennon was the de facto leader in their early years, each Beatle had a say in how the group was run, and no major decision got taken without agreement from them all. The central relationship tension within the group was over who would dominate, Lennon or McCartney. While Lennon was the charismatic founder and lead singer, McCartney was the more accomplished musician and, over time, an increasingly confident performer, with more than his fair share of adoring fans at the Cavern. Lennon may have accepted McCartney’s equal status, but he can’t have found it easy all the time, and one way he came to deal with the tension was by teasing his partner.
We get a glimpse of this dynamic on a rough recording of the band’s performances at the Star Club in Hamburg, during their final pre-fame visit there in 1962. McCartney is taking the lead on ‘Till There Was You’, a sentimental ballad from a musical – the kind of song that made the girls swoon for him. Every time he sings a line, Lennon pitches in, one beat behind, with a galumphing great echo: (‘There were birds’; ‘THERE WERE BIRDS’ . . . ‘No, I never heard them at all’; ‘NO, HE NEVER HEARD THEM’). McCartney carries on regardless, occasionally giggling through a line. He took performing seriously – he wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to do that. But this was Lennon. This was funny.
Using humour is an important teamwork skill, somewhat overlooked by management theorists. Humour can be an important safety valve for conflict, a way of acknowledging difficult issues in a way that unites the participants through laughter rather than dividing them in bitterness. Lindred Greer, an associate professor at the University of Michigan and an expert in conflict dynamics, told me that when she teaches MBA courses, it’s the former military students who impress her most: ‘One of the many leadership skills they have is that they are able to crack a joke at the right moment. They know how to shift the mood of the group in a good way. I’ve always found that fascinating, and wondered how to quantify it.’
Teasing can go wrong if it isn’t practised with sensitivity and affection. But done well, it is one of the most valuable forms of conflict management we have. The teaser gets to say things about the other person’s behaviour that if said more bluntly might cause pain or anger, but instead can help them learn something about themselves. Everyone has eccentricities – none of us are ‘normal’ in every aspect of our behaviour. We shouldn’t aspire to be either, but we do benefit from having at least a rough idea of what others consider to be our quirks, good and bad. The teaser lets us know what those are, without insisting that we change them – and they do so while making us laugh.
Teasing can also be a way of gently testing the robustness of a new relationship. The story of George Martin’s tie has often been told to illustrate the Beatles’ cheekiness, but I think it’s also an example of how they used humour to navigate new social terrain. Even as they were being auditioned, I suspect that they were, consciously or otherwise, auditioning Martin. How would this man, clearly their social superior, react when confronted with the opinions of four young working-class men who did not take well to being told what to do? Harrison’s joke was a probe. It was also a risk: if Martin responded negatively, that might have been the end of their shot at a deal, and quite possibly the end of the Beatles. Luckily for them, and for us, the signal that came back was positive: Martin laughed.
* * *
In Cambridge in 1951, Francis Crick and James Watson were working on a joint mission to discover the structure of DNA. They knew time was short. A second pair of eminent scientists was working on the same problem, in London. Watson had just attended a conference at which one of their rivals, Maurice Wilkins, presented the first clear images of DNA.
Wilkins was at King’s College, the other main centre of DNA research in Britain, after Cambridge. In the X-ray lab there, he met a young researcher called Rosalind Franklin. On their first meeting, he managed to annoy Franklin by assuming she was one of his assistants, rather than a researcher in her own right (she had already made the crucial discovery that there are two forms of DNA). From then on, though a formidable team, Wilkins and Franklin maintained polite but distant relations.
Watson and Crick had a secret weapon, however: rudeness. Crick later recalled that if there was a flaw in his theories, ‘Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice versa. If he would have some idea I didn’t like, and I would say so, this would shake his thinking.’ Crick believed it was important to be ‘perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you’re working with’. The enemy of true collaboration, he said, is ‘politeness’.
In 1953, Crick and Watson jointly published their Nobel Prizewinning paper proposing a double-helix structure of DNA, a discovery now regarded as one of the greatest of the twentieth century. ‘We had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration,’ wrote Crick later, ‘something quite missing in the London group. If either of us suggested a new idea, the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but non-hostile manner. This turned out to be quite crucial.’
At work, there is often a tendency to deny the role that conflict plays in creative thinking. Hence the much-repeated mantra that, in a brainstorm, ‘there are no bad ideas’. Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth (one of the authors of the devil’s advocate studies) wanted to see if it was true that barring criticism made groups more creative. She organised ninety-one five-person groups, in America and France, and asked them to come up with ideas to solve a local traffic-congestion problem. Some groups were instructed to brainstorm in the conventional manner, without criticising each other’s contributions. Others were told to engage in debate and criticism. Nemeth found that the debaters generated more ideas than the brainstormers. One reason for this, she speculates, is that instituting a norm of open criticism may actually lower people’s anxiety about being judged. When criticism is framed as a way for the group to reach better answers, people take it less personally.
The sentiment of ‘no bad ideas’ is well intentioned. If people feel nervous about their ideas being judged or challenged, it is undoubtedly true that they will be less likely to speak up, leaving the conversation less fertile than it should be. But, to me, Nemeth’s research suggests that the best way to address this problem is not to try and abolish disagreement, it’s to get people feeling more confident about it – and the only way to do that is for the organisation’s leaders to model and encourage a culture in which it’s OK to be wrong, it’s OK to show vulnerability, and everyone recognises that open disagreement is a source of creative thinking. We need the bad ideas to get to the good ones.
* * *
Open, passionate disagreement blows away the cobwebs that gather over even the most enduring relationships. Disagreement throws open windows and pulls up carpets, dragging whatever we’ve chosen to hide under there into the light. It flushes out crucial information and insights that will otherwise lie inaccessible or dormant inside our brains. It fulfils the creative potential of diversity.
As we’ve seen, though, it can only do all this under certain conditions. There must be mutual trust and some sense of a shared project or common goal. The trust need not be deep; healthy disagreement does not require intimacy. In its minimal form, it means, ‘I trust that you are interested in something more from this conversation than “winning” or getting your way.’ The shared project could be as shallow as a mutual desire to get through a brief interaction on social media having learnt something from each other. But the stronger the trust and the more important the project to its participants, the more energetic and edifying the disagreement can be. In short, stronger relationships make for higher quality disagreements.
There is no guaranteed route to a good disagreement, because no one person has that in their power. But most of us, most of the time, can do something to make it go better. That’s what the next section of this book is about. I’m not going to tell you how to win arguments, because aiming to win an argument isn’t very ambitious. Win or lose, it’s more important that something new is created between you – insight, learning, ideas. Neither am I going to offer a code of civility (for more on why not, see the last section). What I am going to do is identify the primary conditions for better, more creative arguments.
What follows are nine rules of productive disagreement plus one golden rule on which all the others stand or fall. Since human interactions are infinitely variable, you should treat these rules (except perhaps the meta-rule) as provisional, but I believe they are sturdy guides to better disagreement, whether that be at home or at work or in public life (or on social media, which counts as all three). These rules are born from the practical wisdom of people who manage high-pressure, knotty, often heated disagreements for a living – interrogators, hostage negotiators, cops, mediators and therapists – and from the scientific research into tough conversations. I believe they constitute something close to a universal grammar of good disagreement. They are not intended as techniques or tactics, so much as underlying principles. Having said that, there is obviously a wealth of highly practical tips to be gleaned from our experts, and at the end of the book I’ve put together a ‘toolbox’ of techniques available to you when you next embark on a difficult conversation.