🧱Yes, And...

The nuances between disagreeing and arguing

Disagreements, Not Discord

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” -Winston Churchill

In my last post, I talked about how we should be standing up for principles, but not fighting. Fighting is how we lose. But then how do you stand up without taking a combative stance?

I didn’t truly understand how subtle the nuances between disagreeing and arguing could be until I joined my first board of directors. A great board is there to challenge assumptions, to refine plans, and to help a management team think of the unknowns they haven’t thought of. The first leader of the board I joined would ask me to “tell me all the reasons why I’m wrong.”

Not many people can welcome this feedback — only those truly interested in progress and learning will want to immediately understand where they are wrong. For these typically owners and founders — all they care is that they get it right, and move onto the next thing. They care about results and progress. They don’t care about always being right, in fact, they know they will often be wrong, and will want to avoid executing on those mistakes.

Unfortunately, career managers typically rise the corporate ladder by always appearing right. They often get where they are by charming colleagues and superiors, and will likely be great at collaborating along the way, but not often at being told they are wrong. Their entire career path and aspirations depend on them siding with the “right side of history.”

I think this also helps explain the phenomenon I described in “I Had Better at Hello,” whereby executives have an incredible start to their careers, but end in an ego circular reference that inevitably backfires. By design, they need to be charming to get to the top, but after a while, may get duped into thinking they did it by themselves.

🧱I Had Better At Hello

Collaboration is easier when everyone needs to be your friend (to rise to the top), but after a while, it’s easier to ditch collaboration — as it slows execution down. Alternative viewpoints are often inconvenient to our most well laid plans.

But embracing alternative opinions is a necessary part of the value creation process. It not only helps bring balance between perspectives — a fundamental requisite for scaling whatever venture you are working on — but also helps correct mistakes before they are made. It corrects the areas where we are just flat out wrong, as all of our left brains are highly vulnerable towards.

Whether you’ve been in a board room or not, you’ll understand this concept immediately if you have kids. Telling your kids “yes,” to every request, and going along with their every whim and wish is a recipe for total disaster. Saying no is often the most loving thing to do.

Yes, And...

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. “ – Mark Twain

More often in an economic setting, it’s less love on the line than a successful outcome. So it’s much more nuanced than yes or no, but it doesn’t take away the power of the truth any less. Often times the right answer to a dilemma is both perspectives, not one or the other.

Even more importantly than having healthy disagreements with colleagues is being honest with ourselves. As Iain McGilchrists’ extensive work has shown, our organized, logical and linear left brain is often completely devoid of the facts as they are. Instead, it prefers to live in its own world of mental models.

It’s most often our own selves that are the easiest people to fool. It isn’t until we articulate our thoughts can we begin to surface the truth or illusion behind these theories and machinations. It’s helpful to remember this the next time a colleague confronts you with inconvenient feedback. The ego is great at being an imposter, and it takes a loving colleague to check your ego when it needs to be checked.

For not only is it easy to latch onto wrong opinions, but the left-brain heuristic of anchoring will often make us dig our heels in on a belief, even if we have spent little time verifying that this belief is, in fact, based on reality.

I’ve personally seen this first hand with the CEO of Swatch, who criticizes not just me, but all “minority investors” as not having put capital into the company at inception. The funny thing is — neither did he. It was his dad. But the ego can fool us into thinking nearly anything. That’s where candid feedback is not only useful, but absolutely essential to success.

Everyone likes to frame my firm’s governance proposals as a “fight” against him, but even after impolite responses to every olive branch I’ve extended, I am not against him. In fact, in a Bloomberg interview on Monday, I think I bent over backwards to make sure he would hear loud and clear our efforts are not about us vs. him.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-02-09/the-battle-over-swatch-video

It’s more about the golden rule of improv — “yes, and...”

A star-studded improv crew before they were famous…

Two different points of view don’t need to necessarily need to conflict or be mutually exclusive to be true. In fact, often the right answer, particularly in value creation, is BOTH.

Unfortunately, even validated by Harvard Business Review, most boards of directors no longer offer constructive feedback. A worryingly small 26% of company boards have a mentoring or partnering relationship with the managers.

The rest are passive companies, or those where the board over-rides the management team in a controlling manner.

That is so sobering. These boards are supposed to be the icons of advice to the most well-informed managers in the world. And yet, ¾ of these boards have a downright hostile, or even worse — passive atmosphere.

To Build, you need to do it differently.

Disagreeing Constructively

“The differences arise because of the ways our separate mental models shape what we see. I’ll say it again: Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.” -Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc

No firm’s culture does candid feedback better than Pixar’s, which not only reinvented animated story-telling, and then massively upgraded them with compelling storylines, but then saved the moribund Disney Studios with the same crucial tool of candid feedback.

In its “Notes Day,” or “Braintrust” meetings, all employees are empowered to articulate their feedback, and the company’s culture acknowledges that many times the initial storylines “suck.”

One thing I love about Pixar’s process is that the director listens to all candid feedback, and then he or she gets to decide what to do with it. It’s not up to the critic to fix it — it’s up to the creative director.

Unfortunately, most of us are not working in a culture that embraces candid feedback so well. We’ve already seen 3/4 of board cultures are passive or aggressive, so we know this counterproductive culture is probably pervasive.

That shouldn’t stop us from giving and receiving candid feedback. The trick is in the delivery.

For cultures that are not used to candid feedback, here’s a list of tools that I use to ensure that disconfirming feedback is not viewed as hostile or disagreeable. This list is not exhaustive, but rather is my go-to top tools:

• Me: If it’s personal feedback and critical, bring it back to a time when you made the mistake yourself: “I know when I’ve made this mistake before...” or, “may I really messed this up when...”

• We: When any mistake has negative personal consequences, throw yourself into the accountability ring. I’ve used this a handful of times in a board room by saying something like, “my investors are going to fire me if...” People will feel less threatened if it’s not their ass on the line, but “all of ours;”

• Blame the Ego: Any time I’m triggered, and I want to alert the other, I don’t even claim it — rather, I say, something like, “boy, my ego got very triggered by that statement.” I don’t claim it to be my own perspective, and I try and disown it from the beginning. It takes an argument away from a pissing match and instead tries to resolve the impasse through rational means — not emotional;

• Who’s View? Offer an alternative stakeholder’s perspective. From a customer’s, employee’s, shareholder’s or suppliers eyes — all of these views have different versions of reality, and they are equally valid;

• Yes, And: Perhaps the most powerful of them all, the improv function. Validate the alternative view point, but also advocate for another point being equally valid. The world is not mutually exclusive. Most times there are competing ideas at work simultaneously. That’s why balance matters.

If you have another useful tool to soften candid feedback, I’d be keen to have you leave a comment. We can’t use the same one too repetitively, so a variety is key here.

If you’re going to be part of a value-creative endeavor, you’re going to need to hone this skill, as value creation requires balance and continuous iteration. What better activity to look to, than, for continuous iteration than improv acting. It’s one of the hardest human challenges I can think of, and there’s only 1 rule to the entire challenge.

Yes, and...