Surfacing the Wisdom of "No"
You can probably think of a time when you were in a group that was making a decision, and you got the sense that things were heading rapidly in the wrong direction. Maybe someone really persuasive, well liked, or in a position of authority was convinced it was time to start a new project, and everyone else went along with their idea in spite of limited time and resources. Or maybe no one wanted to mess with the tight agenda, so no one spoke up when it was obvious item number three needed further discussion. Or possibly there was a culture of niceness where people didn’t really say what they thought because they didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Whatever the reason, you might have ended up in groupthink: when everyone gets swept along with an idea, and careful questioning and thinking about implications doesn’t happen. Possibly there were people who had a warning bell go off or an objection to the idea. But for different reasons – feeling unsafe, wanting to be liked, feeling unsure or doubting their perspective, worrying it would take too much energy to get into it, apathy about the topic, and so on – no one spoke up and a decision was made that led to problems down the road.
Agreeing often feels better (or safer) – in the moment
Looking back on that moment, what do you think kept people from speaking up? Maybe multiple people even had major reservations that, if spoken, would have staved off a problem.
Often our inherent drive to belong in a group means it doesn’t feel good – or sometimes it doesn’t feel safe – to be perceived, even temporarily, as an outsider.
We humans have a deep drive to belong. There are evolutionary survival reasons for this (the increased safety from predators that groups bring), which are hardwired into our neurobiology through hormones like oxytocin and our ability to calm our stress responses through caring connection with other people. When we feel belonging, we feel a greater sense of safety. When we don’t, the pain of exclusion activates the same regions of our brain that are activated by physical pain. It literally hurts to be excluded.
And that is just the beginning. From infancy and throughout our lives, we form our attachments and our identities based on where we find belonging and where we are excluded. There are real stakes to disagreeing with the group, especially in these times of increasing polarization. The more polarized a topic is – the more a group feels like our values or ways of doing are “right” and the other side is “wrong” – the harder it can be to voice a different perspective. What’s more, when we feel so strongly that we are “right” it becomes almost impossible to try to understand why someone might disagree.
So of course we don’t want to do or say anything that might threaten our group membership – even when we lead the group. It is a deeply courageous choice to go against the dominant perspective, and it requires psychological safety.
We need dissenting voices
But we desperately need all of us to be willing to voice our concerns when the moment calls for it. When people hide their different perspectives or doubts about a direction, we lack the information we need to make the best decisions. This shows up in day-to-day work in many ways. For example, I supported a workplace that was regularly missing important deadlines, and they made several attempts to resolve the problem before everyone finally sat down and had an honest, no fault conversation in which everyone was encouraged to share their opinions about what needed to change from the vantage point of their role. It was only when leadership slowed down and listened with curiosity to surface the divergent perspectives that people started naming things they thought needed to be addressed, for example, miscommunication, failure to delegate, and unrealistic timelines.
And these kinds of examples are only the beginning. The energies that keep people in groupthink are the same ones that lead to nationalism, polarization, and “us versus them” ways of approaching difference. It’s one of the things that keeps people from speaking out against genocide or deportations, or that keeps people from challenging injustice when it happens in their workplaces or communities. So much social change happens through people being willing to go against the norms.
Wisdom in the “No”
The Lewis method of Deep Democracy is one of my favourite ways to support groups to surface unspoken and unacknowledged perspectives that go against the dominant view. It starts from the premise that there is “Wisdom in the “No,” that even in unpopular ideas, there might be a grain of truth or information that can help us better understand our situation.
In a Deep Democracy process, we create the conditions for unspoken things to surface and be talked about. We acknowledge that no one has a total monopoly on the truth, and actively invite people to name their concerns and challenges. We openly name tensions, rather than pretending that we all agree. We build consent by asking people who disagree what they need to come along, and then modifying the group’s decision based on any wisdom in their responses. When a group is stuck cycling in competing perspectives, we get curious and dive deeper to understand the roots of the stuckness.
The key principle is that rewarding harmony and agreement drives the group’s deeper truth underground. Sometimes we need to access that truth to make our best decisions and create real belonging.
Support the bravery
In a leadership role, we can support people to find the bravery to speak up. The foundational work in our organizations and on our teams is to create enough psychological safety so that people know they will not be fired, reprised against, ridiculed or otherwise punished for raising concerns or having different perspectives. And then on that foundation, we have to build the necessary skills and practices to encourage honesty. Some of these skills and practices are:
- Building confidence for group leaders and members so that it’s possible to hold honest and respectful conversations where people disagree and things sometimes get heated
- Helping everyone to notice the the moments when they get entrenched in their point of view and suppress perspectives or information that might not match it
- Learning specific meeting facilitation methods that everyone understands, and that support members of your group to speak up when they need to
- Clarifying for everyone how conflict will be addressed if any differences of perspective escalate
Mostly, these skills and practices are about building trust over time that it’s possible to speak up without it being a major threat to belonging, wellbeing, or our ability to do our jobs.
Practice it to live it
You might be thinking that this all sounds good in theory, and maybe you even know a lot of this stuff, but you might not be feeling proficient at supporting the “No” to surface. Group dynamics are complex, and it takes practice, sometimes a lot of it, to really be able to surface difference effectively in the moment. I used to offer fractional leadership and culture support for an organization that, among other goals, wanted to get better at surfacing the divergent opinions. Early in my time with them, I did facilitation training with everyone who was responsible for leading meetings, and then they would ask me to join them as a cofacilitator in meetings where they knew there would likely be disagreement. I modeled ways of surfacing those under-the-surface thoughts, and supported the in-house facilitators to build their own comfort to do the same. After doing this a few times, as they continued to practice, they called me in less frequently, until eventually, they felt confident to do it on their own.
Other times, you may feel confident that you already know how to bring out the divergent opinions, but it seems like something is stuck. Maybe there is lots of silence no matter what you try. Or possibly you keep cycling around the same arguments with no real change in people’s perspectives. In these cases, there might be something deeper going on that would benefit from an outside perspective to be able to see beneath the surface. In these cases, we can help you get unstuck and bring more fluidity to important conversations by sniffing out what might be getting in the way.
Either way, it’s worth it to build your organizational capacity to surface the wisdom in the “no.” When people feel able to bring their authentic perspectives to the group without a loss of belonging, motivation increases and you will know that you are making the best decisions you can.
There are a range of ways we can support this surfacing work. For a simple tip sheet you can keep handy as you build these practices into your discussions and meetings, download our free resource on Hidden Insights in Meetings. For training in Deep Democracy, we offer Co-Resolve, the internationally recognized Level One training in the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy practiced in over 20 countries around the world. Or for training more targeted specifically to decision-making, take a look at Building Buy-In for Decisions that Stick.