Giving Compass' Take:

• In this excerpt from Why Are We Yelling? author Buster Benson discusses the approaches that parities need to come into an argument with to have a productive disagreement.

• Which of these orientations (Security, Growth, Connection, and Enjoyment) do you naturally gravitate toward? Which do you neglect? How can you better balance your conversations to increase productivity? 

• Read about the benefits of conflict at nonprofit organizations. 

Security

Pros of Seeking Security:

You gain immediate results of increased security.
This strategy can be applied to any disagreement.
By definition, it’s the “safe” option.

Cons of Seeking Security:

Squashing disagreements will prevent other fruits from being found.
Closing down disagreements prematurely in the name of security can give a false sense of alignment that eventually comes back in uglier ways

Growth

Pros of Seeking Growth:

The spectrum of possible outcomes is wide, which is another way of saying it’s risky.
By trading some security for the possibility of growth, you can potentially earn larger payoffs.
Growth can compound over time, leading to more security than a straight bet on security alone would yield.

Cons of Seeking Growth:

It requires an assessment of risks, which opens up the door for conflicts of head, heart, and hand.
Risk can also lead to losses if you miscalculate, underperform, or are just unlucky.
Growth can come in many forms, some easier to measure than others.

Connection

Pros of Seeking Connection:

Building connections with others also leads to growth and security over time.
We’re social creatures who find enormous fulfillment in relationships and are much less anxious and more resilient when we have strong relationships surrounding us.

Cons of Seeking Connection:

Trust takes a long time to build. As they say, it’s earned in drops and lost in buckets.
Trust can be betrayed in costly ways.

Enjoyment

Pros of Seeking Enjoyment:

Seeking enjoyment helps motivate us on long journeys of growth and connection.
The spark of enjoyment is a clear antidote to the spark of anxiety.
Following our enjoyment is a way of understanding our inner interests better.

Cons of Seeking Enjoyment:

Sometimes enjoyment can come at a cost, if it’s used to belittle.
[Insert all cautionary tales of chronic hedonism here.]

The battle for security is a zero-sum game. Because it assumes bad faith, it creates an eat-or-be-eaten environment for disagreement. If I’m safe, it means that the other side is weaker than my side, and the incentive for me in disagreements is to maintain that position of superiority. Security is a scarce fruit acquired in win-lose situations.

The battle for security, growth, connection, and enjoyment together, on the other hand, create a non-zero-sum game. To be “non-zero-sum” means that it’s possible for both sides to win, and it may even be the case that helping the other side grow, seeking to connect with them in meaningful ways, and finding ways to enjoy the thrill of productive disagreement together are strategies that beat a battle for security alone. Is it possible that by seeking all of the fruits together, you might expose vulnerabilities in yourself that the other side then uses against you? Yes. But that’s only more reason to listen to the voice of possibility about how connection can be improved, and how you can grow together and shift the environment away from one where the dynamic is about attacking and defending vulnerabilities in the first place.

Read the full article about productive disagreement by Buster Benson at Stanford Social Innovation Review.