Episode #515: How To Get To Inclusion Even When People Disagree With You

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made the following comment on diversity in Japan, “My mission is to create a society where anyone regardless of age, gender and position would be able to play an active role and for people with various experiences and backgrounds to inspire each other”. Today, most companies in Japan would agree with that statement and are working on improving the degree of diversity in their organisation. We know that to get to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in our organisations, the starting point is to work on improving the Inclusion component. What happens though when we have disagreements with each other? Arguments tend to create division, bad feelings, distance and even hostility, which are all moving us further and further away from the goal of inclusion which we need to trigger diversity in the workplace. The reality is we will have differences of opinion within any team on how to spend the money, which projects to go forward with, who owns the client, etc.

A good starting point is to understand who we are and this will help us to better respond when arguments break out. There are basically three reactions to disagreements – passive, assertive and aggressive. Passive reactions are where we put up no resistance and we go along with whatever the more dominant personality types decide. We keep our opinion to ourselves and we try to not get involved. This is a type of denial of service because we don’t bring our full array of abilities to the workplace. Assertive reactions, on the other hand, allow the entertainment of differing opinions. You are confident in yourself and you have no hesitation to register your opinion, knowing it will not be accepted by everyone. You are willing to take personal responsibility and will hold others to account. Aggressive reactions, however, tend to be direct, confrontational and even combative. You are happy to push your opinion and drive through any resistance. You don’t care what others think. This would be me, by the way, but it is not the best choice!

Being assertive is the best mix, I believe, because it has elements of a strong opinion mixed with diplomacy, which makes it easier to keep the people together. So passive people need to speak up more and aggressive people (like me!) need to listen more.

Usually when we hear something we don’t like or disagree with, we tend to be consumed by our emotional reaction. This reaction can be instantaneous, so we may be saying things which we regret later or which we subsequently think could have been expressed more effectively. Too late. It would be a lot better if we were to slow down our speed of reaction. When we first hear the idea instead of reacting to it we can analyse it. Firstly, what do we think about this idea or proposal? Now here is a very important step – consider why we think what we do?. What have we seen, read, heard or experienced about this topic has provided us with an opinion? We are searching our memories for the evidence which was the basis for forming our belief around this subject matter. We don’t have our opinions by accident – there is a reason, so we need to dig that basis out.

Having gone through this process and we are talking seconds here not minutes, we are now in position to disagree with the other person’s point of view. Rather than starting with stating our opinion, which is the normal route to begin an argument, we start with the evidence. A very disarming way to communicate what we think is through storytelling. When a lot of people hear “storytelling” they are thinking of some convoluted long tale, but in fact, it could be completed in under a minute.

We relate where we discovered the evidence, which is the basis for forming our opinion. We should try to frame the story in context – when was it, what season was it, where was it, who was there, what happened. As an example, say we were facing a differing opinion over the marketing spend. One side is thinking to reduce the spend while others are thinking to increase the investment. Say we are in the increase the spend camp, we could make our point like this: “That is a good idea but…”. That approach is almost guaranteed to get us into an argument. “But”, “however” are trigger words indicating someone is going to push back on us and so we mentally gird our loins as soon as we hear these indicators.

Rather, we can relate our story to provide the background, the context, the rationale, e.g.

“In December, I was visiting our colleagues on a snowy day in London and was talking to the Head of Marketing there, Mary Smith. She told me that they had seen a spike in leads and a substantial reduction in client acquisition costs, when they raised their ad words spend. The found that as clients were emerging from Covid, there were becoming more active in searching online for solutions to their problems. Japan is a little behind the rest of the world in coming out of Covid, so it is likely that we will also benefit from spending more in search words over the next months here, to tap into that increasing latent demand”.

Rather than just saying “let’s spend more money on marketing” we have marshalled our argument based on evidence and after presenting the evidence in a story format, we have made our recommendation. We have tried to transport the listener to the London office, to have them see Mary Smith in their mind’s eye and to imagine a chilly London in winter. We have provided the context to the point we are making.

It is easy to argue with our opinion, but harder to argue with our context. The other side has to produce superior evidence to get us to change our position. That is quite possible though and as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions” and most of us are the same. If we have better evidence than the other person we may be able to convince them or they may be able to convince us – either way, we can avoid arguing. This process moves us closer to having an inclusive culture in the organisation and from that base we can move forward toward improving our diversity.