Some time back I was reading Start-up Nation book, it’s about Israel’s Economic Miracle and why there are so many successful startups in Israel. One of the points made by the author was the team working on a project have a constructive conflict culture, so even if you are a junior there is no hesitation in disagreeing with your senior’s decisions and giving your own suggestions or ideas.
In the TED talk – Dare to Disagree, Margaret Heffernan explained beautifully how constructive conflict or disagreement is beneficial. She has made some good points which I would like to point out here –
1. Find a hard problem and solve it
This is nothing to do with the main topic of the talk, but it’s a very important point to consider when we want to work on something. Always find the hardest problem and work on it then only you will learn something new and challenge yourself, in my case when I wanted to learn a new technology I tried to build a Game instead of a web application, which worked pretty well for me and I learned a lot in the game-making journey.
2. Openness alone can’t drive change & openness isn’t the end its the beginning
There is a lot of data available on the internet for our disposal but how to make sense of it and how to use it for everyone’s benefit should be our main goal!
3. Constructive conflict
In mathematics, when you want to prove a theorem sometimes you must disapprove it and when you can’t, its proved correct! The same applies to a team working in a healthy constructive conflict or disagreement environment where everyone from seniors to juniors work as a team and can disagree without hesitation to put forward a new idea which will open more ways to achieve the goal!
4. To be creative to solve the problem to change the device
5. Whistleblower/crank OR leader
When a new disruptive idea is made by a person to change the system he or she can be called a whistleblower but when its discussed constructively then the person is considered as a leader!
6. When we create conflict we enable ourselves and people around us to do our best thinking
This point is as simple as it sounds, whenever there is a conflict there are many ideas floating around and when we discuss the ideas we do our best thinking and give some work to our neurons network 🙂
So, next time when you will have a conflict make good use of it to find new ideas!
Let me know your thoughts on the points, disagreements are welcome!
About Mahesh Jadhav
I have around 13 years of experience in various development projects. I have worked on various programming languages like java, python, swift, ruby, clojure, also worked on different platforms like iOS, Android. Currently I am working as AWS cloud architect where we are fully utilizing AWS services like lambda, apigateway etc. with automation.
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