The Importance of Dissent in Organizational Culture

How is our fear of uncertainty holding us back? Could an acceptance and willingness to embrace the unknown unlock new potential and innovation?  

Margaret Heffernan is a professor of Practice at the University of Bath, an entrepreneur, and a mentor to CEOs. Her books include Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future, and most recently Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world.

Margaret and Greg discuss the importance of embracing uncertainty in business and life, the value of creative thinking, and the pitfalls of over-reliance on predictability and data models.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Why dissent is the secret engine of creativity and better ideas

34:46: Our obsession with efficiency means that we may prioritize management over productivity, and critical to productivity is diversity, debate, dissent, because this is how bad ideas get turned into good ideas. I mean, as a CEO I could waltz into work one day with an idea, which I thought was fantastic. And the great gift I was given were  a lot of employees who would think, "Oh God, here she comes back with another terrible idea," and say, "Well, I don't know. What if we did it like this? So what if we did it like that?...[35:31] But at the end of a very long process, you end up with something which started with my bad idea and gradually got a lot better because of everybody else's input, and turns out to be marvelous at the end. But that dissent is absolutely fundamental to the creative process.

What's the relationship between being a noticer and being creative?

39:11:  It's impossible to be creative without being a noticer, for a start. And I think that the great value of being observant and thinking about what you see is it keeps you much more in touch with what's going on in the world.

The danger of mental models and the power of an open mind

45:55: The danger of mental models is that they will attract confirming evidence and marginalize, or disguise disconfirming data. And so, the antidotes to that are certainly about having enough time to be in different places with different people who think differently. Having a sufficiently open mind to be prepared to notice this confirmation. Having an open mind prepared to change one's mind. And having, I guess, a way of thinking that tends more towards skepticism.

Why embracing uncertainty means loosening up, not tightening down

57:32:  Engineers talk a lot about tight and loose. I think much that has gone wrong in organizational life is a function of being too tight. And it sounds very counterintuitive because it is counterintuitive, but uncertainty requires that we loosen up in order to be able to respond more flexibly. And I think you are exactly right that pertains as much to us as individuals, as it does to the largest corporations in the world.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Gerd Gigerenzer
• Richard S. Fuld Jr.
• The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness 
• “The role of art in difficult times” by Margaret Heffernan | Financial Times
• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Max H. Bazerman
• Patrick Kavanagh
• Seamus Heaney

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at University of Bath
• Professional Website

Her Work:

• Embracing Uncertainty: How writers, musicians and artists thrive in an unpredictable world
• Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
• Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future 
• A Bigger Prize: How We Can Do Better than the Competition
• Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes
• The Naked Truth: A Working Woman's Manifesto on Business and What Really Matters