In her 2012 TED Talk, Margaret Heffernan recounts the tale of Alice and George, two researchers who sought to prove the other wrong. Alice, a physician and epidemiologist, studied the rising rates of childhood cancers in the 1950s. She eventually identified X-rays as a statistically significant and likely culprit. More specifically, she identified women who received X-rays while pregnant as the likely culprit. Her findings were initially applauded, then silenced by years of conventional wisdom which “held that everything was safe up to a point” (TED, 2012). Alice’s findings provoked no real action or change within medicine for nearly 25 years.
To prove her findings correct, Alice partnered with a statistician named George Neil, who was “pretty much everything (she) wasn’t” (TED, 2012). George was charged to play the Devil’s Advocate role—to find errors in Alice’s research, only he didn’t find any. The moral of the story: Alice intentionally “synced” with a partner who wasn’t an “echo chamber”; one who openly challenged her research, especially her models and statistical calculations. In doing so, George gave Alice “the confidence she needed to know she was right” (TED, 2012), and the world was a safer place because of it.
There is a pervasive and inherent belief held by individuals that all “conflict is bad” (Levi & Askay, 2020, p. 133). This isn’t necessarily true. Levi & Askay (2020) state that conflict is generated when a person or a team perceives that another person or team acts in a manner that negatively affects the person’s or team’s interests. In Alice’s case, their positions were different, but their interests were the same: The pursuit of truth. Heffernan’s TED Talk perfectly underscores the importance of task conflict and interest alignment for discovering new truths. When interests are aligned, any task or process conflicts that arise are more easily resolved. In fact, moderate amounts of task conflict (i.e. differences in opinion) can be healthy and improve team performance and innovation (Kolb, 2011; Levi & Askay, 2020).
Heffernan’s TED Talk was enlightening, especially when listened to before and after reading the Kolb and Levi and Askay text. My two takeaways include: Seek diversity in all forms, and task conflict can be incredibly helpful when process and relational conflict is low (due to team cohesion and psychological safety). Facilitators should embrace diversity in personality, culture, thinking, discipline, experiences, etc., as it will likely lead to “better and more creative decisions” (Levi & Askay, 2020, p. 136). As a facilitator, if my clients want to be a “thinking organization” (TED, 2012), when appropriate, I will encourage senior leadership to empower all employees to “stand up to (their) authority”, and challenge their ideas and the status quo. The research clearly suggests that it is from these challenges that innovative products and processes are developed, and organizations are improved.
Playing the Devil’s Advocate, and I feel a bit silly for this call out, but I would counter Heffernan’s argument: Engaging with diverse populations requires “a lot of patience and a lot of energy… that’s a kind of love” (TED, 2012). Perhaps this is a semantical argument, but I can be incredibly patient and exert tremendous amounts of mental and physical energy on projects/tasks that capture my curiosity. I wouldn’t necessarily call it “love”, but I can appreciate that certain groups of people may, and another group may call it their “duty”.
Ryan West
References
Kolb, J. (2011). Small group facilitation: Improving process and performance in groups and teams. HRD Press Inc. ISBN: 9781599962283. (chapter 9)
Levi, D. & Askay, D. A. (2020). Group dynamics for teams. (6th ed.). Sage Publications, Inc. ISBN: 9781544309699. (chapter 7)
TED. (2012, August 6). Dare to disagree [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY_kd46RfVE