The Best Disagreements are Planned

Yes, and.....

When well known organizational psychologists post sage advice, I am excited to follow it up with some framing about what's possible and the essential elements necessary to make their nuggets of golden come to fruition. This recent post from the venerable @AdamMGrant on LinkedIn is one such example.

Disagreement is a key facet of education, and leaders, wherever they are based (classrooms, boardrooms, government institutions), need to actively foster a foundational set of practices for organic disagreement.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, committing to formalized practices for engagement facilitate authentic, liberatory sharing and unearth competing points of view. Getting to the heart of the matter does not simply take courage, it takes planning.

Leaders working to uphold DEI commitments must hold themselves accountable and build systems that start by developing trust so that inviting disagreement and valuing and learning from one another’s divergent lived experiences becomes possible.

Change moves at the speed of trust. Leaders foster that trust in community by modeling and by holding everyone accountable to a systematized set of processes that center the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

• PAUSE by committing the time to thinking and learning. Develop a shared fluency around the words and concepts for equity and inclusion in your community.

• Own and understand POSITIONALITY by making space for people to acknowledge and work together from places of empowerment by naming and addressing the power dynamics that generally drive the rules of engagement.

• Drive with PURPOSE. Prioritize community commitments and DEI fluency by consistently adhering to and modeling processes of engagement. Familiarize through repetition models for listening, speaking, offering feedback, and reflecting. Build goal setting, personal reviews, and just-in-time check-ins into the process, along with practicing a set commitments for daily engagement.

That’s the only way to cultivate cultures where disagreements that inspire change are possible.