Getting Hot Without Getting Mad

GETTING HOT WITHOUT GETTING MAD

A major problem with task conflict is that it often spills over into relationship conflict. One minute you’re disagreeing about how much seasoning to put on the Thanksgiving turkey, and the next minute you find yourself yelling “You smell!”

Although the Wright brothers had a lifetime of experience discovering each other’s hot buttons, that didn’t mean they always kept their cool. Their last grand challenge before liftoff was their single hardest problem: designing a propeller. They knew their airplane couldn’t take flight without one, but the right kind didn’t exist. As they struggled with various approaches, they argued back and forth for hours at a time, often raising their voices. The feuding lasted for months as each took turns preaching the merits of his own solutions and prosecuting the other’s points. Eventually their younger sister, Katharine, threatened to leave the house if they didn’t stop fighting. They kept at it anyway, until one night it culminated in what might have been the loudest shouting match of their lives.

Strangely, the next morning, they came into the shop and acted as if nothing had happened. They picked up the argument about the propeller right where they had left off—only now without the yelling. Soon they were both rethinking their assumptions and stumbling onto what would become one of their biggest breakthroughs.

The Wright brothers were masters at having intense task conflict without relationship conflict. When they raised their voices, it reflected intensity rather than hostility. As their mechanic marveled, “I don’t think they really got mad, but they sure got awfully hot.”

Experiments show that simply framing a dispute as a debate rather than as a disagreement signals that you’re receptive to considering dissenting opinions and changing your mind, which in turn motivates the other person to share more information with you. A disagreement feels personal and potentially hostile; we expect a debate to be about ideas, not emotions. Starting a disagreement by asking, “Can we debate?” sends a message that you want to think like a scientist, not a preacher or a prosecutor—and encourages the other person to think that way, too.

The Wright brothers had the benefit of growing up in a family where disagreements were seen as productive and enjoyable. When arguing with others, though, they often had to go out of their way to reframe their behavior. “Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each other’s eyes so both can see clearly,” Wilbur once wrote to a colleague whose ego was bruised after a fiery exchange about aeronautics. Wilbur stressed that it wasn’t personal: he saw arguments as opportunities to test and refine their thinking. “I see that you are back at your old trick of giving up before you are half beaten in an argument. I feel pretty certain of my own ground but was anticipating the pleasure of a good scrap before the matter was settled. Discussion brings out new ways of looking at things.”

When they argued about the propeller, the Wright brothers were making a common mistake. Each was preaching about why he was right and why the other was wrong. When we argue about why, we run the risk of becoming emotionally attached to our positions and dismissive of the other side’s. We’re more likely to have a good fight if we argue about how.

When social scientists asked people why they favor particular policies on taxes, health care, or nuclear sanctions, they often doubled down on their convictions. Asking people to explain how those policies would work in practice—or how they’d explain them to an expert—activated a rethinking cycle. They noticed gaps in their knowledge, doubted their conclusions, and became less extreme; they were now more curious about alternative options.

Psychologists find that many of us are vulnerable to an illusion of explanatory depth. Take everyday objects like a bicycle, a piano, or earbuds: how well do you understand them? People tend to be overconfident in their knowledge: they believe they know much more than they actually do about how these objects work. We can help them see the limits of their understanding by asking them to unpack the mechanisms. How do the gears on a bike work? How does a piano key make music? How do earbuds transmit sound from your phone to your ears? People are surprised by how much they struggle to answer those questions and quickly realize how little they actually know. That’s what happened to the Wright brothers after their yelling match.

The next morning, the Wright brothers approached the propeller problem differently. Orville showed up at the shop first and told their mechanic that he had been wrong: they should design the propeller Wilbur’s way. Then Wilbur arrived and started arguing against his own idea, suggesting that Orville might be right.

As they shifted into scientist mode, they focused less on why different solutions would succeed or fail, and more on how those solutions might work. Finally they identified problems with both of their approaches, and realized they were both wrong. “We worked out a theory of our own on the subject, and soon discovered,” Orville wrote, “that all the propellers built heretofore are all wrong.” He exclaimed that their new design was “all right (till we have a chance to test them down at Kitty Hawk and find out differently).”

Even after building a better solution, they were still open to rethinking it. At Kitty Hawk, they found that it was indeed the right one. The Wright brothers had figured out that their airplane didn’t need a propeller. It needed two propellers, spinning in opposite directions, to function like a rotating wing.

That’s the beauty of task conflict. In a great argument, our adversary is not a foil, but a propeller. With twin propellers spinning in divergent directions, our thinking doesn’t get stuck on the ground; it takes flight.