You haven’t fully matured...
Until you realise that disagreement is not an argument
What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of inclusion? What feelings does it provoke?
It’s something I’ve thought a lot about recently. A word that has now become a spotlight and, at times, a weapon. It’s polarised and politicised. A divisive word, or as someone put it to me recently, “finally, none of this talk of inclusivity, we can take workplace culture back to the good old times”.
I’ll let you decide whether those good old times were golden or just a trip down bigoted memory lane.
Through 100’s of word clouds and interviews, I’ve asked people this question. And, of course, being thorough and diligent, I asked ChatGPT the same question: Fair. Safe. Trusting. Just. Diverse. Honesty. Empowering. Open.
This is what emerges. Much of this is hard to disagree with.
My idea of inclusion challenges the neatly filtered, algorithm-friendly definitions you’ll find in your LinkedIn feed:
An inclusive environment is one that is safe FOR disagreement, not FROM disagreement.
Not your usual definition. And I get it, disagreement can feel confronting. And before we get too excited, disagreement is not about arguments, it’s not about drama or conflict. Lord knows we have enough of that already (Blimey, I needed to get that off my chest).
Think back to a time recently when you’ve had a difficult conversation or disagreement. What was the emotion? The physical sensation? That tightness in your chest, that loop of thoughts racing through your mind? Often, the anxiety is the desire to agree. We fear facing rejection. Disagreeing can make us feel exposed, like we’re not being a team player.
For many, disagreement is a blood sport. You know, the types who love throwing a punch but hate receiving one back. Don't worry, we're not heading in that direction.
Disagreement is like going to dentist
Disagreement triggers our nervous system. It floods our brain with chemical signals because it interprets disagreement as a threat or attack. It is like going to the dentist. We know it’s necessary, but nobody enjoys the thought of doing it.
Brain research has shown that social rejection feels like physical pain. So the traditional thought of disagreement makes it hard for us to be open to other points of view. And instead, we often focus on defending ourselves or avoiding it altogether.
But conflict avoidance is not only unhelpful; disagreement is inherently inevitable in group dynamics.
I try to think of it like this. Inclusion isn't the absence of friction. Inclusion multiplies it. If you bring together a diverse group of people, each with their unique values, attitudes, and ways of thinking, differences are inevitable. This cocktail of differences creates a whirlpool of messiness.
So within this very sense of inclusion, it's fertile ground for conflict. And that's why 'disagreeing well' must be encouraged and developed.
And we know this. Building something worthwhile, be it a product, a culture, or a relationship, is like creating a diamond. It requires pressure, heat and friction. Ideas must come into the open and collide with one another. This needs to be done with intention.
In high-trust, high-care cultures, people describe disagreement as joyful, healthy, a means of learning, and a source of meaningful insights.
Yet, many cultures get stuck. They confuse comfort with psychological safety. They chase a kind of harmony that’s more about politeness than progress.
Disagreements can either unite us, or divide us
Problem arises when we attempt to stop, fix or avoid friction altogether. When we endlessly search for the utopian world of a perfectly well-oiled, ‘harmonious’ culture, we cause greater dysfunction. I’ve written before about how the pursuit of workplace comfort has created cultural misery. Spoiler: our obsession with positivity and niceness has become a velvet prison - one that shields us from necessary, honest dialogue to build a bright future.
Most of us prefer the comfort of working in a harmonious environment. But in reality, we know that the workplace is incredibly messy, uncertain, and volatile. The question is not whether conflict will happen, it’s how we choose to engage with it. Disagreements can either unite us, or divide us. What pill you take depends on your mindset around it.
Inclusion is about feeling seen and heard, and that’s not being fluffy, it’s biology. We are wired for connection. To truly connect, to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, to listen deeply, and to speak honestly, requires inner emotional stability. As one of my mentors said to me “Dean, you haven’t fully matured until you realise that disagreement is not an argument.”
Disagreements are not battles to win. It’s bridges to build. I think people are generally united in one thing: They just want to have genuine and sincere conversations with one another.
World-Class Conflict Avoider
My perspective on this stems from my own lived experience. I spent years as a world-class conflict avoider. Raised on a diet of niceness, politeness, and not upsetting the applecart, I learned early that disagreement was... impolite. So I zipped my mouth. Smiled. Nodded away.
That’s what I did: I avoided conflict. I avoided expressing my opinion.
When faced with conflict, disagreements, and friction, it felt incredibly terrifying. Gosh, it even brings back memories of avoiding seminars at university because I didn’t want to share my opinions out loud. So avoidance was my thing. But if I’m being honest, avoidance created upsides. In other words, coping strategies such as empathy, listening, coaching, inquiry, and curiosity to name a few. But through therapy and coaching, and maturity (blimey, you’re getting a potted history here), I’ve been able to change my relationship with conflict and disagreement. I now see its power.
The power to be incredibly destructive and unhealthy, or productive and healthy. It’s actually one of the first things I look for in workplace cultures. Do people feel safe to disagree?
Culture as a Safety Net
I love David C. Baker metaphor in his article, ‘Your Culture = A Safety Net’. He says:
Your culture is a safety net. It’s essentially a permission structure that gives people the courage to act in certain ways. It’s acting like a responsible adult.
He goes on to say later:
Business leaders have, sadly enough, become the new parents, and your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to provide the sort of vibrant permission structure that people need to thrive in helping all of you build the sort of firm where there’s a lot of permission to do the right things and very little permission to do the wrong ones.
David’s right about permission.
If leaders role-model respectful disagreement, others will follow. If leaders get defensive or dismissive, others will stay silent. Culture is downstream from leadership behaviour. I’m learning this from my 3-year-old. They don’t copy what you say, they copy what you do.
I think about this as Mindset, Environment, Skills:
ME: Do I see disagreement as healthy? Do I have the emotional resilience to receive challenge?
WE: Is the environment safe for disagreement—or do we all tiptoe around it?
US: Are we people trained to do this well?
"If you just put people together, they're going to crash and burn unless they have conflict-resolution training” - Professor Lindy Greer.
Teams that disagree well know there’s a safety net. They know disagreement is safe because they’ve practised making it so. Their nervous system tells them, “My challenge is safe here”. This is culture. Not the laminated values on a wall, but the micro-reactions to honesty in real meetings, on bad days, under pressure. When people feel they can speak truth without punishment, that’s the safety net in action.
So what’s productive disagreement?
Well, I think it’s important to clear this up. Productive disagreement differs from debating with someone. Debating involves persuasion and changing someone’s mind. It’s a ME versus YOU mentality, and creates defensiveness.
Productive disagreement is a WE mentality. It’s adopting an open, curious, learning mentality to find a productive way forward. “We have a problem to solve, let’s put everything on the table to find the best way forward”. Changing someone’s mind is not the goal in the art of disagreeing well.
At its best, disagreement strengthens relationships. Because to disagree well means we trust each other enough to go there. You build trust in creating inter-personal relationships and taking care of the impact of how you communicate.
You cannot have civil disagreement without some baseline level of trust between people, and that takes time - Collin Anthony Chen
So if someone speaks up, and gets metaphorically whiplashed, mocked, ignored, shut down, what do you think they’ll do next time? Probably nothing. That’s how cultures of silence are born.
Final thought
I started writing, and it was going on and on and on. So I’m going to chunk these up into small pieces. However, I’ll conclude with this summary.
Productive disagreement is one of the most underdeveloped superpowers in the modern workplace. And like all superpowers, it requires practice. Your superpower might be hidden in your avoidance: it just needs some courage and, above all, safety.
And I’ll be honest. I didn’t realise how much joy and fulfilment it has given me in helping companies develop a mindset and skillset shift through productive disagreement.
Thanks for taking the time to read!