“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
Noam Chomsky (b.1928) American thinker, critic
There’s an increasing amount of research which suggests that constructive conflict is good for not only improving our ideas, but generating new ideas as well. A recent article by David Burkus for Behance’s 99U website looks at some fascinating cases where constructive conflict helps teams develop creative solutions:
Why Fighting For Our Ideas Makes Them Better: http://99u.com/articles/7224/Why-Fighting-For-Our-Ideas-Makes-Them-Better
One of the most interesting finds in the Berkeley study that Burkus discusses is how “teams that debated their ideas produced an average of 25% more ideas than the other teams.”
If you think about it, the study makes common sense. While general brainstorming welcomes any and all ideas to the table, it lacks the rigorous intellectual questioning which might improve weak ideas into strong, usable solutions. The question, of course, is how to keep these “fights for good ideas” civil, professional, and not personal.
Pixar, as it turns out, has an ingenious method for keeping conversations productive. From the article:
“At Pixar, the animators have developed a technique that helps keep the fighting productive and intellectual. They call it “plussing.” As people criticize the work under review, that criticism must always contain a new idea or a suggestion for strengthening the original idea — it must contain a “plus.”"
In a way, it’s a twist on the old idea: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all. In this context, developing better ideas means “don’t shoot down an idea unless you can articulate how to improve that idea.”
Check out the Burkus article and see if you can’t improve your team meetings with some of the innovative techniques discussed.
Photo credit: Simon Blackley
