GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

It is not unusual, especially in the corporate world, to label someone who disrupts and challenges the status quo, or what others say, as argumentative and “oppositional”. According to Human Synergistics, the Oppositional Style, in their circumplex, when measured as a dominant leadership style, is summarized in their 360-degree Leadership Styles Inventory (LSI) by two items: “usually against things” and “opposes new ideas.” It labels the person, or leader as being aggressively defensive and causes them to disengage by avoiding engaging in any kind of conflict, dissent and disagreement. This inhibits and prevents them from unleashing their creative thinking and their innovation potential.

In my many years as a corporate trainer presenting high-performance cultures and transformational leadership programs, I learned to apply my imagination, curiosity and inquiry skills to be attentively present, listen deeply and ask generative questions. This helped me develop strategies to unleash a person’s innovation potential by encouraging and enabling thoughtful dissent and disagreement.  I learned to uncover and recognize a leader’s energy and positive intent behind many of the scary, argumentative, hostile, contrary, critical, and aggressive behaviors directed at me, especially in my years upfront as a female corporate trainer in many toxic organizational cultures.

I often found that they were compromised in some way by their personal and family needs and values, their assumptions and beliefs about themselves and their performance at work, poor physical and mental health, and/or a lack of emotional well-being. Any one of these factors made them self-protective, leading to either overt aggression toward others, passive avoidance of conflict, or an unconscious refusal to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement because they did not want to be perceived as hostile and argumentative.

All of these unconscious reactive responses inhibited them from unleashing their creative thinking and innovative potential. 

This blog explores the power of unleashing creative thinking and innovation potential through supporting people to thoughtfully dissent and disagree – by using conflict as a catalyst for better decision-making, problem-solving, and strengthened collaboration and innovation – not as a barrier.

Unconscious reactive responses

This manifests as a neurologically challenging reactive response, as people’s brains are wired to defend and protect them to ensure their survival. These defensive responses are composed of fight/flight/freeze/fawn reactions and arise when people face what their neurology (the limbic system) perceives as a threat to their security, safety, or survival.

These reactions stem from past experiences and traumas that are often stored in people’s somatic memories. They become neurologically wired and embedded in people’s habitual ways of being unless they are noticed, labelled, accepted, acknowledged and owned. Until there is a safe holding space for this to happen, it will be impossible to unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential.

Safe holding spaces

Once a safe holding space is established, an oppositional person can be carefully and empathetically challenged, disputed, deviated from, and redirected towards more self-regulated, resourceful, and emotionally healthy states and new approaches. This involves bravely engaging them in thoughtful dissent and disagreement, despite being encased in a toxic organizational culture. Its about building permission, safety and trust to encourage creative thinking that unleashes a persons innovation potential.

Fight-flight-freeze and fawn responses

The amygdala is designed to detect threats and trigger the fight-flight-freeze response to help people survive

•  A fight response involves standing our ground when we feel threatened, driven by anger, fear, and anxiety.
•  A flight response entails moving away from or avoiding a situation to reduce painful feelings.
•  A freeze response involves shutting down, feeling numb, or experiencing paralysis to reduce painful feelings, resulting in immobility.
• A fawn response involves appeasing and placating others or seeking approval while neglecting the need to feel safe.  

Role of smart conflict, thoughtful dissent and disagreement

This is particularly evident in political and organizational contexts, where people are suffering from change fatigue and overwork. As a result, they unconsciously disengage from their work, families, and daily lives through a flight-or-freeze response, driven by burnout, the pursuit of external validation (a fawn response), or frustration and anger (usually a fight response). A combination of any or all of these largely unconscious but fully present reactive responses creates toxic organizational cultures, in which leaders’ behaviors are either passively or aggressively defensive in their attempts to meet people’s core security, safety, and survival needs. Leaders avoid encouraging or engaging in thoughtful dissent and disagreement that mobilizes people’s creative and critical thinking and unleashes their innovation potential.

The constraints and challenges of the pandemic, coupled with threats to people’s stability and the desire for certainty, also led many people in organizations to fear that their needs for security, safety, and survival would not, and could not, be met. These fears unconsciously intensified people’s defensiveness and reactivity, leading to immobilization through passivity, helplessness, hopelessness, powerlessness, disengagement, and detachment. This indicates a lack of emotional intelligence, largely due to the absence of initial self-regulation and self-leadership strategies.  It is easier and sometimes safer to be a victim and blame others for any negative, pessimistic, or painful feelings of shame, guilt, and embarrassment, resulting from competing commitments, value violations, thought distortions, and emotional dissociation.

These emotionally overwhelming and cognitively overloading factors are also accepted inhibitors to unleashing a person’s innovative potential, especially when they are unable to engage in thoughtful dissent and disagreement under the influence of a toxic organizational culture.

Making the shift

To support people to effectively shift this way of being and safely unleash their creative thinking and innovation potential:

It is crucial to develop and apply the generative discovery skillset to welcome dissent and thoughtful disagreement:

• Notice: by being aware and attentively present to what is happening to, and within the person, neurologically and physiologically, emotionally, cognitively and physically.
• Disrupt: by being curious and safely asking open, explorative discovery questions, and by listening carefully to hear and notice what is really going on for them.
• Dispute: by safely summarizing and challenging their assumptions, perceptions and perspectives, asking evocative and provocative questions that encourage contrary thinking, diversity of thought, differences and constructive disagreement.
• Deviate: by safely summarizing and eliciting a mindset flip or an agility shift in the oppositional person, directing their creative energy towards constructive behaviors that deliver a positive outcome.

This enables people to redirect their emotional energy and move away from unresourceful internal thought patterns and distortions. It also encourages them to open their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement, allowing them to think differently and enter creative and innovative realms. 

This is impossible when toxic organizational cultures force people to hide behind conventional, rigid, and closed minds that won’t allow them to rock the boat and be, think and act differently by intentionally using conflict constructively by embracing dissent and thoughtful disagreement 

At the same time, it’s crucial to safely, empathically and compassionately evoke and provoke an opening of people’s hearts by purposefully and meaningfully aligning their needs and values, so that the change motivates them to change meaningfully and purposefully. This creates the safe holding space that allows them to let go of the need to be in control and be open-willed, unleashing their creative thinking and innovation potential to make the shift to the creative and innovative realms.

Empowering people and teams to redirect their emotional energy towards opening their minds to thoughtful dissent and disagreement allows them to handle hard conversations with constructive and creative intent.

Welcoming dissent and thoughtful disagreement involves daring yourself and others to be and think differently. Being able to think creatively maximize a person or a teams innovation potential, unleashes their human ingenuity in the age of AI, and mobilizes their collective intelligence to lead, manage, or implement constructive and sustainable change.

Leveraging constructive conflict, dissent and thoughtful disagreement unleashes people’s creative thinking and innovation potential and is a necessary part of enabling AI, digital transformation and innovation initiatives to succeed in uncertain and disruptive times.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™ and The Start-Up Game.™ Discover our collective learning products and tools that can be customized as playful bespoke corporate learning programs. Our blended and transformational change and learning programs provide a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation and entrepreneurship. It will also upskill people and teams, developing their future fitness within your unique digital transformation and innovation initiatives. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Gemini

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