When
Wilbur and Orville Wright finished their flight at Kitty Hawk,
Americans celebrated the brotherly bond. The brothers had grown up
playing together, they had been in the newspaper business together, they
had built an airplane together. They even said they “thought together.”
These
are our images of creativity: filled with harmony. Innovation, we
think, is something magical that happens when people find synchrony
together. The melodies of Rodgers blend with the lyrics of Hammerstein.
It’s why one of the cardinal rules of brainstorming
is “withhold criticism.” You want people to build on one another’s
ideas, not shoot them down. But that’s not how creativity really
happens.
When
the Wright brothers said they thought together, what they really meant
is that they argued together. One of their pivotal decisions was the
design of a propeller for their plane. They squabbled for weeks, often
shouting back and forth for hours. “After long arguments we often found
ourselves in the ludicrous position of each having been converted to the
other’s side,” Orville reflected,
“with no more agreement than when the discussion began.” Only after
thoroughly decimating each other’s arguments did it dawn on them that
they were both wrong. They needed not one but two propellers, which
could be spun in opposite directions to create a kind of rotating wing.
“I don’t think they really got mad,” their mechanic marveled, “but they
sure got awfully hot.”
The
skill to get hot without getting mad — to have a good argument that
doesn’t become personal — is critical in life. But it’s one that few
parents teach to their children. We want to give kids a stable home, so
we stop siblings from quarreling and we have our own arguments behind
closed doors. Yet if kids never get exposed to disagreement, we’ll end
up limiting their creativity.
We’ve
known groupthink is a problem for a long time: We’ve watched ill-fated
wars unfold after dissenting voices were silenced. But teaching kids to
argue is more important than ever. Now we live in a time when voices
that might offend are silenced on college campuses, when politics has
become an untouchable topic in many circles, even more fraught than
religion or race. We should know better: Our legal system is based on
the idea that arguments are necessary for justice. For our society to
remain free and open, kids need to learn the value of open disagreement.
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It
turns out that highly creative adults often grow up in families full of
tension. Not fistfights or personal insults, but real disagreements.
When adults in their early 30s were asked
to write imaginative stories, the most creative ones came from those
whose parents had the most conflict a quarter-century earlier. Their
parents had clashing views on how to raise children. They had different
values and attitudes and interests. And when highly creative architects
and scientists were compared with their technically skilled but less
original peers, the innovators often had more friction in their families. As the psychologist Robert Albert put it, “the creative person-to-be comes from a family that is anything but harmonious, one with a ‘wobble.’ ”
Wilbur and Orville Wright came from a wobbly family. Their father,
a preacher, never met a moral fight he wasn’t willing to pick. They
watched him clash with school authorities who weren’t fond of his
decision to let his kids miss a half-day of school from time to time to
learn on their own. Their father believed so much in embracing arguments
that despite being a bishop in the local church, he had multiple books
by atheists in his library — and encouraged his children to read them.
If
we rarely see a spat, we learn to shy away from the threat of conflict.
Witnessing arguments — and participating in them — helps us grow a
thicker skin. We develop the will to fight uphill battles and the skill
to win those battles, and the resilience to lose a battle today without
losing our resolve tomorrow. For the Wright brothers, argument was the
family trade and a fierce one was something to be savored. Conflict was
something to embrace and resolve. “I like scrapping with Orv,” Wilbur
said.
The
Wright brothers weren’t alone. The Beatles fought over instruments and
lyrics and melodies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony clashed
over the right way to win the right to vote. Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak argued incessantly while designing the first Apple computer.
None of these people succeeded in spite of the drama — they flourished
because of it. Brainstorming groups generate 16 percent more ideas
when the members are encouraged to criticize one another. The most
creative ideas in Chinese technology companies and the best decisions in
American hospitals come from teams that have real disagreements early on. Breakthrough labs in microbiology
aren’t full of enthusiastic collaborators cheering one another on but
of skeptical scientists challenging one another’s interpretations.
If
no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing
things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to
groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync.
There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and
to take it.
As Samuel Johnson was growing up, his parents argued constantly. He described a family as “a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.” He went on to write
one of the greatest dictionaries in history, one that had a lasting
impact on the English language and wasn’t supplanted until the Oxford
English Dictionary appeared more than a century later. Who would be more
motivated and qualified to clean up a messy language than someone whose
household was filled with it?
Children
need to learn the value of thoughtful disagreement. Sadly, many parents
teach kids that if they disagree with someone, it’s polite to hold
their tongues. Rubbish. What if we taught kids that silence is bad
manners? It disrespects the other person’s ability to have a civil
argument — and it disrespects the value of your own viewpoint and your
own voice. It’s a sign of respect to care enough about someone’s opinion
that you’re willing to challenge it.
We
can also help by having disagreements openly in front of our kids. Most
parents hide their conflicts: They want to present a united front, and
they don’t want kids to worry. But when parents disagree with each
other, kids learn to think for themselves. They discover that no
authority has a monopoly on truth. They become more tolerant of
ambiguity. Rather than conforming to others’ opinions, they come to rely
on their own independent judgment.
It doesn’t seem to matter how often parents argue; what counts is how they handle arguments when they happen. Creativity tends to flourish, Mr. Albert, the psychologist, found, in families that are “tense but secure.” In a recent study of children ages 5 to 7, the ones whose parents argued constructively felt more emotionally safe. Over the next three years,
those kids showed greater empathy and concern for others. They were
friendlier and more helpful toward their classmates in school.
Instead
of trying to prevent arguments, we should be modeling courteous
conflict and teaching kids how to have healthy disagreements. We can
start with four rules:
• Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict.
• Argue as if you’re right but listen as if you’re wrong.
• Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.
• Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.
Good
arguments are wobbly: a team or family might rock back and forth but it
never tips over. If kids don’t learn to wobble, they never learn to
walk; they end up standing still.
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