About Ian Leslie
Ian Leslie is a writer and author of acclaimed books on human behaviour.
Ian’s first career was in advertising, as a creative strategist for some of the world’s biggest brands, at ad agencies in London and New York. He now writes about psychology, culture, technology, and business for the New Statesman, the Economist, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. He co-hosted the podcast series Polarised, on the way we do politics today, and created and presented the BBC radio comedy series Before They Were Famous.
Ian Leslie advises CEOs and CMOs on communication and workplace culture. Ian is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He lives in London with his wife and two young children.
Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
For most people, conflict triggers a fight or flight response. Disagreeing productively is a hard skill for which neither evolution nor society has equipped us.
It’s a skill we urgently need to acquire; otherwise, our increasingly vociferous disagreements are destined to tear us apart. Productive disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have. It makes us smarter and more creative, and it can even bring us closer together. It’s critical to the success of any shared enterprise, from a marriage to a business, to a democracy. Isn’t it time we gave more thought to how to do it well?
For most people, conflict triggers a fight or flight response. Disagreeing productively is a hard skill for which neither evolution nor society has equipped us. It’s a skill we urgently need to acquire; otherwise, our increasingly vociferous disagreements are destined to tear us apart. Productive disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have. It makes us smarter and more creative, and it can even bring us closer together. It’s critical to the success of any shared enterprise, from a marriage to a business, to a democracy. Isn’t it time we gave more thought to how to do it well?
In an increasingly polarized world, our only chance for coming together and moving forward is to learn from those who have mastered the art and science of disagreement. In this book, we’ll learn from experts who are highly skilled at getting the most out of highly charged encounters: interrogators, cops, divorce mediators, therapists, diplomats, psychologists. These professionals know how to get something valuable – information, insight, ideas—from the toughest, most antagonistic conversations. They are brilliant communicators: masters at shaping the conversation beneath the conversation. They know how to turn the heat of conflict into the light of creativity, connection, and insight.
In this much-need book, Ian Leslie explores what happens to us when we argue, why disagreement makes us stressed, and why we get angry. He explains why we urgently need to transform the way we think about conflict and how having better disagreements can make us more successful. By drawing together the lessons he learns from different experts, he proposes a series of clear principles that we can all use to make our most difficult dialogues more productive—and our increasingly acrimonious world a better place.
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