CHAPTER 4

Dwelling in the Conflict

Behind some of the twentieth century’s most iconic love songs is a series of prolonged, tense, irreconcilable conflicts. In the writing room and the recording studio, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were everything their music wasn’t: disharmonious, discordant, hostile. As professional partners, their worldviews couldn’t have been more different. Lennon, the Artist, was the nonconformist, always looking for the next big thing. McCartney, the Engineer, sought beauty by embracing order. Far from putting their differences aside, the diametrically opposed geniuses dwelled in the conflict. They didn’t fake accord for the sake of a peaceful working relationship. They were competitive with one another and pushed and pulled each other as they cowrote albums that managed to alternately highlight their divergent gifts. They didn’t compromise. They didn’t give in to the other. They elevated each other through their conflict. In seven years of constructive conflict, they wrote close to 200 songs and released 13 albums. The two men who made irresistible, genre-defining art out of the simple wish to hold your lover’s hand might’ve, under all other circumstances, very well preferred to be apart from each other.

This kind of constructive conflict is crucial in any creation process—not just for the collaborative production of art but for any degree of innovation in your life or your organization. And you don’t need to be a once- (or twice-) in-a-millennium virtuoso to cultivate constructive conflict.

In fact, there are concrete steps you can take to generate positive deviance in your innovation initiative. This isn’t to say that they’re easy and always guaranteed to work. Quite the contrary: this is a complicated process that takes long periods of practice and failing to finally find success. Like playing a piano, dwelling in conflict is a skill you need to try and try doing over again to perfect. And, in the process, it will take you to uncomfortable places. But that’s a discomfort—like the conflict itself—that you can and should dwell in. The very impulse to innovate comes from a negative feeling, a form of dissatisfaction: you’re unhappy with the present and so you want to make it better and new. Harness that dissatisfaction and make it into productive energy. As you work through that dissatisfaction, the discomfort will get greater before it lessens; the mess will get bigger before it becomes manageable. Don’t try to tidily clean up the mess. Get deeper in it and follow these steps:

1. Assemble a diversity of perspectives

2. Engage in the conflict

3. Establish a shared goal or vision

4. Construct hybrid solutions

Step 1:
Assemble a Diversity of Perspectives

You won’t solve your grand innovation problem by simply thinking about it on your own on the way to work or in the shower. Innovation is fundamentally dialogical in nature: it is born out of conversations with other people who may feed off of, enhance, challenge, push back against, nurture, or even totally reject our own ideas or solutions. These conversations are a form of discovery, a way of exploring new possibilities. These exploratory conversations are the early part of any innovation.

But even before you have these conversations, you need to know who to have these conversations with. Begin by taking a good and honest look at yourself—not who you want to be, but who you are now. What are you good at? What are you bad at? How do you normally approach a problem? What kind of an innovator are you? Then you need to gather people who are not like you. The ideal is to find people from all four kinds of dominant worldviews. These people don’t need to get along. You don’t need them to agree. Ideally, they won’t agree and will own their disagreement. Seek out people who aren’t afraid to speak their mind and who won’t back down from their differing opinions.

If you can’t find people from all four dominant worldviews—or if you’re trying to solve a problem on your own—you can engage in some imaginative and experimental thinking outside of your own biases. Envision a board of directors. Populate that hypothetical board of directors with people you associate with each of the four dominant worldviews, people you personally know, or outspoken public personalities who fit any given type. Ask yourself questions from the perspective of these people. How would a Sage approach this problem? What solutions would an Athlete come up with? For every viewpoint’s suggested strategy, generate a list of five strengths and weaknesses that you can then share and discuss with your chosen interlocutors.

Make Conflict Normative

The idea here is to create as many different opportunities as possible. This is something you should do all of the time and for every situation. The goal is to assemble a group of interlocutors you can consult regularly, to create a long-term, sustainable culture out of constructive conflict. Positive deviance should be part of everyday life, of doing business as usual. Conflict must become normative. In all other situations, it’s our impulse to resolve or eliminate conflict. In the world of innovation, though, we need to resist that impulse, resist alignment. Make conflict a healthy, generative element of your day-to-day functioning. Consider building a network of creativity clusters or an innovation hub—or some kind of incentive for dynamic dialogues. It’s important that these conversations happen in open and safe spaces where people feel empowered and unencumbered when they come together and talk through complicated issues. You might find a space outside of your office and headquarters, where everyone is on even ground, a neutral zone—an innovation Switzerland.

Take, for example, the story of a struggling symphony orchestra that needed the freshness of constructive conflict to launch the innovative mindset that would save its life. Symphonies across the country are facing a crisis. Symphony attendance by those under forty has plummeted over the past decade at an alarming rate. Yet endowments by patrons over forty have remained relatively steadfast over the same period. This support keeps an increasingly aged audience in orchestra hall seats at the expense of developing programming that will attract the next generation of symphony goers. So the very people who hope to perpetuate the love of symphonic music are actually unwittingly creating a barrier to that possibility. The challenge orchestras face is not to invent something new but to develop a new solution to bring their enduring gifts into new environments.

One symphony in particular met this challenge by facilitating positive deviance. The first step was jumpstarting conversations between people with different perspectives who wouldn’t have otherwise come together—and who inevitably (but productively) clashed. This involved gathering people both inside and well beyond the orchestra, from engineers, business experts, and design gurus to undergraduate students, professors, and industry professionals, many of whom had no direct investment in the orchestra itself. Rather, it was their outside expertise and experience that the orchestra hoped would spark attention toward the new solutions it needed to attract new listeners and patrons. These unlikely teams, not of friends and colleagues but of strangers and outsiders, were the start of the dialogues that launched real innovation.

Step 2:
Engage in the Conflict

Like is a four-letter word in the world of innovation. Think of innovation as the opposite of social media: whereas social media is about liking and sharing posts we agree with and building a collection—really, a bubble—of people we’re friends with, innovation is about reaching outside of our immediate circles. This doesn’t mean that you should dislike and disagree with your interlocutors just to create conflict. It just means that you should feel invested in voicing meaningful dissent.

In the case of the diverse teams of outsiders working to brainstorm ways to save the struggling symphony orchestra, meaningful dissent came in the form of fiery breakout dialogues. Naturally, the industry professionals didn’t agree with the undergraduate students. The design gurus clashed with the professors. To keep the disagreements civil, no one ever called an idea ridiculous or irrelevant. Instead, they wrote even the most ridiculous ideas down and remained open-minded.

Meaningful dissent comes from a shared investment in your project. For all their encouraged disagreement, team members should be on the same page when it comes to their goals and enthusiasm for the initiative. So, conflict doesn’t equal war. It’s not about being right or destroying the other side. It’s about understanding everyone’s point of view and using the multiplicity of viewpoints to create a hybrid solution—one that you couldn’t have come up with on your own and one that takes you to a higher place than any individual solution. Use the conflict to raise your project to another level.

Constructive conflict is conflict with empathy. Empathy is not something we usually bring to an argument. Normally, when you’re arguing with someone, you want to make sure your opinion comes out on top. In the open space of innovation, generative arguing entails understanding where the other person is coming from and seeing the value of that perspective. Imagine experiencing the world like they do and see the insights that those experiences might give you. Experience, feel, understand—be patient and open-minded.

Doing this takes courage. That’s because simply listening to opposing views is hearing criticism of your own. Even more daunting is the conscious cultivation of empathy. For putting yourself in other people’s situations may change—even destroy—your own worldview completely. But that’s the way we grow and innovate. Growth requires pain.

When brainstorming, communing, conversing—and arguing—make sure to give each participant the same amount of opportunity, regardless of his or her job title. All interlocutors need to be able to voice their ideas. Try using a communal white board and making everyone write on the board. Don’t assign a scribe. The scribe is always inevitably either the least powerful or most powerful person in the room.

It’s often easiest to recruit a third-party facilitator who can manage these fiery discussions. Outside Sages or Athletes can make the best team managers. As managers, Sages are great at eliciting participation, diffusing disagreements, and finding consensus. This is what Brian Epstein did for the Beatles, mediating their most intense and destructive inner disputes. As managers, Athletes act quite differently. They keep the team on track by focusing on goals, milestones, and timelines. That’s what George Martin did every time he reminded the Beatles that they only had so many hours to record their songs.

Step 3:
Establish a Shared Goal or Vision

What is the problem you’re trying to solve? This is a deceptively easy question. On the surface, it seems obvious. Yet the reality is that often people on the same team have different ideas of what their actual project is—especially when they come from such dramatically different viewpoints. The other thing is that often the problem itself changes through the course of its development.

Asking yourself and your teammates to describe the problem at each stage of its planning and execution is important at a practical level. If everyone can reach a common understanding of the problem, the team will avoid getting stuck arguing over ideology. At a more fundamental level, it also can be a shared motivator. The shared goal or vision can be the thing that inspires people to work through the conflict.

If you cannot agree on the initial problem or if the shared vision is not inspiring enough, dig deeper at the root cause. What is actually the root of the problem? Consider a tier-one automobile supplier company that thought it had a wiring manufacturing issue. It wasn’t until after some deeper questioning that the team members realized the actual issue was one of connectivity, that the real pressing matter was to make cars lighter and smaller. Discovering your problem is sometimes the hardest part of solving it.

The jumpstart teams behind the symphony orchestra’s innovation initiative reached surprising shared goals that dramatically shaped the direction of their future. Symphony leaders learned about how technology has been changing the delivery of musical content, why exactly the music hall has become almost irrelevant, and started to understand that patrons of the arts no longer need go to the music hall to achieve the symphony experience. They began to see that arts patrons are looking to connect more collaboratively with artists on their own time and that the current potential customers pool reveal much younger, diverse, and technologically savvy groups, who want a different type of musical experience: customized, in their own time, and accessible. This is the game-changing insight that inspired the orchestra to reinvent its outreach approaches.

Step 4:
Construct Hybrid Solutions

The point of constructive conflict is to create solutions that you’d never be able to come up with on your own. The key to surprise solutions is hybridity—putting together two ideas or approaches to create a greater one. This is exactly what the symphony orchestra did in its self-reinvention project. Symphony leaders combined the fresh insights and perspectives of outsiders with their own traditions to birth new outreach strategies, from orchestral flash mobs in IKEA to a new smaller performance space devoted to outreach concerts to live webcasts and technological interactions with fans.

To construct hybrid solutions, you need to start by finding two great ideas that are very different and then force fitting them together. This may feel awkward at first, because things don’t seem right together. But as you get better at this, this step will become more and more natural to you. Often, creating a metaphor or analogy will help. Once you have an analogy, work backwards to flush out the details of the hybrid idea. Remember the story of Sanne and Franklin? They use the image of planting a vegetable garden to bridge their differences and create something together. Your analogy or metaphor can be anything as long as it is relevant and makes sense to everyone in the team.

Hybrid solutions take initiatives to the next level because they combine the best forces of individual brilliance. Don’t settle for what geniuses can do alone. Strive for what different kinds of experts can discover when working with (and pushing against) each other.

Innovation Happens
in Phases

Start with Lennon, end with McCartney. Innovation happens in phases, and at every moment, one viewpoint is more important than the other. No one can be fully effective at all phases of innovation. It’s crucial that you understand when each worldview should be put first.

In the beginning, the Artist is likely to be the most important contributor. Her divergent point of view looks to the future and opens new possibilities. This is the moment when the Engineer should contribute least, as she’s likely to eliminate the wow factor of an innovation because her mind always goes to practical concerns, asking what’s actually possible. At the tail end of an innovation, when you need to bring the project to scale, the Engineer steps in as the driving force as her expertise with process and reliability becomes most important, and her talent for tinkering and improving things is vital. By this point, an Artist will likely have lost interest and be searching for the next avant-garde thing.

In the middle stages, Sages and Athletes are invaluable. A Sage negotiates, gets buy-in, and pushes the innovation through the organization, while an Athlete keeps the project on track, hits all the success measures, and grows momentum. These two need each other. Without the Athlete, the Sage is too busy bringing everyone along to hit important milestones. Without the Sage, the Athlete plows through without any buy-in or support.

One of the most important things about leading and managing innovation is keeping the team flexible and realizing when the current team configuration no longer produces the constructive conflict you need. Some team members can also burn out or can no longer contribute because of other commitments or assignments. Keep your network wide and platoon players in and out as you need them. Do not be afraid to try different combinations of people. Learn what makes the team work and create some rules that you can use for the future.

All innovations end. There is a natural end to any creative lifecycle. Brian Epstein’s death precipitated the breakup of the Beatles. Without the glue that held the band together, the man who helped the guys work through their conflict and maintain their shared vision, the band’s demise became inevitable. John became increasingly unsatisfied with the production of his songs and found inspiration in Yoko instead. A true Engineer, Paul wanted to make sure that the band continued to make good financial decisions without Epstein. But when he wanted to bring in a different manager, the others refused. Paul and John could no longer collaborate on songs. The constructive conflict was no longer sustainable.

The next problem and the next agents of constructive conflict that will power its solution: that’s the innovation afterlife. The hope is that if you’ve successfully created a culture of constructive conflict, where positive deviance is an everyday norm and the teams of people who practice it are ever-changing, you’re already looking toward the future.

Summary

Practice constructive conflict by moving through four steps: assemble a diversity of perspectives, engage in the conflict, establish a shared goal or vision, and construct hybrid solutions. The challenge is in resisting our normal impulses. Usually when it comes to conflict, we want to eliminate it or avoid it altogether. In the world of innovation, we need to not only dwell in it but also make it a regular part of our lives.