Be Curious, Not Right - How to not Recycle Conflict

Is your team struggling?  Do you seem to recycle the same conflicts over and over?  While there could be lots of reasons that happens, one reason could be that people are more invested in being right than in learning and growing as an organization… and that can hinder your growth and your mission!

Trying to prove that we are right and the rest of the world (or the team) isn’t is exhausting!  And the truth is that none of us fully grasps reality. Instead, we create mental models (ideas we create about a person, event, or experience based on what we see and the stories we tell ourselves about what we see to help us understand the world.) 

The rub comes when our mental model conflicts with someone else’s. At that moment, our human tendency to protect our ego kicks in, and we put energy into being right about our mental model and asserting/proving that the other is wrong. Communication shuts down as we become more invested in defending our mental model (and our ego) than being curious and learning new perspectives.  This pattern expends a lot of emotional energy and rarely changes anyone's mind.

And so when people get exhausted, they go to their corners until they have enough energy to have another go at it and recycle the same conversations and conflicts. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

I've spent the last few years exploring different systems & models. that help organizations and individuals make sense of their teams and the world. (See Polarity Management, Human-Centered Design, Systems Thinking, and Conscious Leadership.)  As I've explored and used these models with groups, I find one core idea seems to transcend each model and also leads to some breakthroughs in their conversations:

Invest more energy in being curious than being right.

Navigating complex challenges requires holding mental models loosely and being willing to affirm, revise, or adapt them with new information.  Adam Grant calls this “humble confidence” – being confident in our ideas while at the same time being humble in recognizing that there could be new information that would change our ideas.

Peter Senge calls this becoming a learning organization – our first goal is to learn so that we can be better in achieving our mission and not getting stuck in the skirmishes of ego that focus on the rightness of our mental models.

So, next time your team gets stuck and starts to recycle the same conflict, here are two questions that you can have each “side” ask to move them to curiosity:

 What information am I missing that would make that decision, belief, or perspective make sense?

What assumptions am I making to shape my mental model?  What assumptions are others making that shape their mental models?

Is your team stuck recycling the same conversations?  Sometimes you need an objective third party to help ask these questions and others that can move you all to focus beyond being right and onto what your team needs to learn to move your mission and impact forward.