"Too much agreement kills a chat." - Eldridge Cleaver
Most people assume that dissenting viewpoints squash utopian visions of collaboration and teamwork. (Beware that compromise is not collaboration.)
I watched bits and pieces of an animated movie last night as I was cooking called, Happy Feet. In it, a young penguin dares to contradict the tribal elders and the wisdom of the crowd (funny, his name is Mumble yet he speaks up) to claim that the dwindling fish supplies are caused by the "aliens" he's seen (i.e. humans).
Oh, and he loves to tap dance, which I guess is a definite no-no where this young Emperor penguin hails from. One of the chiefs declares forcefully, "Dissent leads to division and division leads us to doom!"
Typical. The young penguin is immediately exiled.
Typical. "Many deal with conflicting opinions by shutting off the conversation" and "people assume that truth lies in numbers," I'd just read that earlier...
... in a research paper titled, Rogues and Heroes: The Value of Dissent, by University of California at Berkeley's Charlan Nemeth. Her research shows that "majority [viewpoints] induced compliance," while "minorities [views] stimulate more originality."
One of Nemeth's most cited studies on free association is the one that evokes a lot of intrigue around the question how do we get beyond rote, reactive, predictable--how do we grow fresh and creative?
"In study after study, when people free-associate, they turn out to not be very free. For instance, if I ask you to free-associate on the word "blue," chances are your first answer will be "sky". Your next answer will probably be "ocean," followed by "green" and, if you're feeling creative, a noun like "jeans". The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of cliches." - Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex blog
And by "chances," we're talking roughly 80% of folks take the predictable road, blurting "sky" to a prompt of blue, or "grass" in reply to green.
"How do we escape these cliches? Charlan Nemeth, a psychologist at UC-Berkeley, has found a simple fix. Her experiment went like this: A lab assistant surreptitiously sat in on a group of subjects being shown a variety of color slides. The subjects were asked to identify each of the colors. Most of the slides were obvious, and the group quickly settled into a tedious routine. However, Nemeth instructed her lab assistant to occasionally shout out the wrong answer, so that a red slide would trigger a response of "yellow," or a blue slide would lead to a reply of "green". After a few minutes, the group was then asked to free-associate on these same colors. The results were impressive: Groups in the "dissent condition" - these were the people exposed to inaccurate descriptions - came up with much more original associations. Instead of saying that "blue" reminded them of "sky," or that "green" made them think of "grass," they were able to expand their loom of associations, so that "blue" might trigger thoughts of "Miles Davis" and "smurfs" and "pie". The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. More recently, Nemeth has found that a similar strategy can also lead to improved problem solving on a variety of creative tasks, such as free- associating on ways to improve traffic in the Bay Area.
The power of such "dissent" is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer - this is the shock of hearing blue called "green" - we start to reconsider the meaning of the color. We try to understand this strange reply, which leads us to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so our comfortable associations - the easy association of blue and sky - gets left behind. Our imagination has been stretched by an encounter that we didn't expect." - Jonah Lehrer, The Frontal Cortex blog
The beauty of this is not that we're converted over to another view: "We believe that the minority [viewpoint] “influenced” individuals, not so much on the perception of color but, rather, on the importance of saying what you believe, says Charlan Nemeth in her paper, http://bit.ly/rogueheroes.
By the way, by the finale of the movie Happy Feet, that young exiled penguin named Mumble, yep... Typical: He's the hero.
I first heard of Charlan Nemeth's research through the chapter on Error (my favorite chapter) in Steven Johnson's new book (recommended), Where Do Good Ideas Come From? So many people drown out voices that don't agree with them, not realizing that they don't have convert over to allow another their expression. Here Johnson sums up why one of his SIX keys for an environment conducive to good ideas is encouraging, rather than shutting out errant, "noisy" thoughts:
"When one of our peers calls the blue painting green, or [in a jury deliberation] comes to the defense of a suspect who is clearly guilty, he or she is, technically speaking, introducing more inaccurate information to the environment. But that noise makes the rest of us smarter, more innovative, precisely because we're forced to rethink our biases, to contemplate an alternative model in which blue paintings are, in fact, green." - Steven Johnson, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?
Here's a Charlan Nemeth's take on "diversity" for a speech to the National Bar Association. The first two Powerpoint presentation slides open like this:
The usual approach
• Most talks on diversity deal with legally protected categories e.g. race, age,
gender, sexual orientation and
• the dream is to “imagine” a world where categories don’t matter and where
differences are submerged
An immodest proposal
• I suggest to you that the differences will always exist and, moreso, they SHOULD
exist
• Instead IMAGINE a world where they are celebrated and utilized
Bravo! That's precisely my dream, too. "IMAGINE a world where they are celebrated and utilized."
Why? Because I think that is the type of world where each person can freely share their gifts and be thoroughly creative blooming towards the widest outskirts of their potential, never shuttered if they don't "fit" in. Who wants to outlaw all flavors of ice cream but just one.
Here's a related observation, I stumbled across while searching on LeWeb:
"Rush Limbaugh, a conservative syndicated radio host, became popular because he’s a credible voice that confirms people’s existing beliefs. This is exactly how I felt about Chris Pirillo’s presentation about community. Better known as preaching to the choir, my sentiment was evidenced by the number of tweets that echoed “I agree with him” rather than “I learned something.”" - David Spark, "The Cool and Not-So-Cool of LeWeb"
So, you see, I don't want you to agree with me. I want you to agree with you. Yet, let's keep learning and growing and glowing from each other.
p.s. In comments below, do you mind sharing how you include more dissenting views into your life? Or your organization?
Bonus: A good summation of Charlan Nemeth's Rogues and Heroes: The Value of Dissent paper from the paper is: "Our own experimental studies have found that minorities stimulate a search for information on all sides of the issue while majorities stimulate a search for information that corroborates the majority view (Nemeth and Rogers, 1996); minorities stimulate the use of multiple strategies in problem solving whereas majorities stimulate the use of the majority strategy (Nemeth and Kwan, 1987); minorities stimulate the detection of solutions that otherwise would have gone undetected whereas majorities stimulate adoption of the majority solution, right or wrong (Nemeth and Wachtler, 1983). Further, minorities stimulate more originality while majorities stimulate more conventionality of thought (Nemeth and Kwan, 1985). As a consequence, those exposed to minority views come up with more creative solutions to problems (Nemeth, Brown and Rogers, 2001)."
art credits Spice Market, Orchha, India by Stanislaw Urbaniak; Yves Klein (I'm not sure name of this painting; Klein serendipitiously found he liked how the natural sponges he sued to dab on blue added texture to the canvas, and so his tools became his raw material); and even though if this is tempting scrumptious, I wish to be spared from a world where latte e mirtilli (blueberries and milk) is the only choice of gelato flavor on earth.
Hi Evelyn,
This is a really great post! It is near and dear to my heart. I could write a book of things I have done as a Project Leader in Corporate America to knock people and cultural norms out of their comfort zone. I will give a team example here.
Teams:
Regarding free association, I have used a process called the "Six Thinking Hats" to find creative solutions to a problem. However, I have altered the process as it is normally taught. Each Hat designates a phase of the process. The one I use is as follows:
Blue Hat - Organize the meeting roles (e.g., Recorder, Timekeeper, etc.)
White Hat - What is needed? Background Information is provided.
Green Hat - Generate Multiple Solutions (Brainstorm)
Yellow Hat - Benefits of Each Solution
Red Hat - Feelings & Intuition about each alternative
Black Hat - Decision Making/Voting
This works really well, and I have used it A LOT. The Green Hat phase is the free association phase that is to generate every possible input no matter how ridiculous. I usually start the brainstorming process by giving the null solution which is don't do anything. That tends to knock the participants into a creative zone, because the usual assumption is that we HAVE TO DO something!
We list everything no matter how wild. I will take pieces of solutions and combine them with something new to keep the juices flowing. This part is really fun.
Because I work with very analytical engineering, business analyst, and developer roles, their tendency is to want to analyze all the reasons the specific offerings won't work. Also, they tend to be highly opinionated.
So, that is where the Yellow Hat comes in. I force them to tell me what is positive about each potential solution. We have horn blowers with actual bicycle horns and if someone starts to negate a solution they get the horn! It is funny! I have even blown the horn on myself. What this tends to do is open the group to possibilities in their thinking. Analytical types tend to dissect and find fault with solutions in their thinking first, so this moves them out of that mode to become more possibility oriented.
By the time we get to the red and black hats, it is almost always the case that everyone has moved on their previous positions.... changed their minds because they were forced to weigh the merits of the brainstormed solutions.
Typically (not always), we end up in a place where none of the proposed solutions are selected. Instead, the team usually takes the best pieces and parts of some of the potential solutions and weave them into a totally new solution. And here is the best part, they end up working together to pick what is the BEST parts and create TOGETHER a new solution not previously conceived.
This works like a champ. It slows people down, knocks them out of their thinking paradigms, and therefore something new can emerge.
Posted by: Ben | Dec 01, 2010 at 11:05 AM
In my career, I have found myself at the center of changing cultural norms. The current company I work for has a group of leaders (typically sales) who ran the show based on the fact that they were considered strong leaders in charge and delivered significant sales results. They were not challenged, and what they said went.
Behind the scenes people would grumble and give their power away to these leaders for fear of not fitting in or advancing their careers.
The history of the culture is that Operations and Technology would implement new systems and business processes and these field leaders would partially comply or not comply at all wasting time, money, and resources implementing new systems and process not getting the desired results.
I came along from outside this culture to lead a team to design, develop, and deploy a new process enabled by system changes. We discovered through data mining & analysis that the current systems and processes were not being fully utilized to a greater or lesser extent depending on the location. It gets worse. Not only was it totally provable that they weren't following business processes certain high level leaders were standing in front of Executive Leadership and telling them that they were complying with system and process usage. In the past that would have been the end of it.
We were heading down the same old path of spending BIG BUCKS for no gain or positive change. So, what I did is I had the team compile data that pointed to the truth of usage by mining data from the systems. I picked a couple of simple usage metrics, and published the results of the data mining for each district location ranking them by highest to lowest users to display actual behavior. All I did was post and send out the data. I did not judge them. I did not argue with them. I did not say they were bad people, I just sent out an email to all the leaders in North American including Senior and Executive Management and waited.
My goodness, you would have thought that I shot them through the heart with an arrow. They railed, they resisted, they argued, and they got angry with me and my manager. The found fault, nit picked, complained, etc... It was too late. The truth was out. The sponsoring Senior Leader asked certain V.P.s why they lied about their usage and compliance. That kicked open the door on an old paradigm. From their, Executive Management tied system usage and commission, and that was the death knell for this cultural norm. Now so many other groups and programs are now doing it, and we are doing a better job of managing the business. It also brings problems to the surface and things we missed so they can be addressed and improved. So, we are accountable as well which helps justify improvements.
I call this Open Kimono. By taking something simple and bringing in front of everyone's attention, behavior changed and cultural norms began to pass away.
Posted by: Ben | Dec 01, 2010 at 11:27 AM
One more cultural norm buster...
What typically happens in our corporate culture is that associates especially field leaders are trying to be seen as having their ducks in a row and reliable leaders according to what is expected.
What happens in the world of more for less (less people due to layoffs) is that these large projects get deployed to the field and then the problems internalizing the changes in the field occur. Then the victim mentality comes to the surface and says "look at what you did to me!"
Corporate then scrambles to fix things and close the gaps and it is a push pull relationship primarily based on resistance to change using the victim role strategy although I have to say that a new way of doing projects is also needed.
So, I said enough of the big huge bohunking project and let's go grass roots and find out what is really going on to see if we can help at a local level. A great book about how this works is "Switch" by Chip & Dan Heath.
Anyway, in one instance, we picked what appeared to be a resistant and noncompliant district location and launched a project. We performed what is called a Murphy Analysis (Six Sigma Tool) to flush out all the issues and complaints. Shew! For a day and half we caught volumes of complaints. Then we did another process called an input\output analysis to see what inputs were affecting the outputs and which ones we could control. That revealed the misses locally. Then we went to data mining again and discovered what the behavior was under the covers.
I built the case for what they weren't understanding or doing based on the above, and I met with the local leaders. After I presented the information I employed the "nonresistance" tactic. I asked them if they wanted to proceed with a project to fix and if so what did they want to take on.
I went on to say, you can elect to do nothing, and that is perfectly fine, I will move on to other locations. I told them if they did want to move ahead then we would work together, and our role would be to support them as much as possible.
What I did was take away the push strategy that they could resist or push back against. Talk about blowing some minds. They have no idea what to do with it. I don't go where they don't want to go. It really put them in a quandary. They couldn't complain that we were hammering solutions down their throats. Also, they were facing the possibility that we just leave and not help them which was no good either.
We continue to move forward albeit slowly.
There is much more, but I will leave it there.
Great Stuff!
Posted by: Ben | Dec 01, 2010 at 11:45 AM