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Hello Kind and Curious Leader,

Two weeks ago I made a case that a healthy democracy, like a healthy team, has room for every ism except contempt. I ended by promising a part two, on the difference between participating and opting out.

This is that part.

The instinct, when any group starts to fracture, is to call for unity. A country after an election. A company after a reorganization. A board after a split vote. Someone stands up and asks everyone to come together, and it almost never works.

The reason it fails is hiding inside the request. Most calls for unity are quietly asking people to leave their difference at the door, and nobody actually does that. People hear unity and correctly translate it as agree with me, or pretend to.

A tent means shared stakes with enough room for people to disagree while they stand under it together. The room between them is the structure.

The real question, then, was never how to get everyone to agree. The question is whether people will keep choosing to stand in a space with people they do not agree with, or opt out into a smaller space where everyone already does.

What happens in the purer room

Opting out feels righteous, and that is what makes it dangerous. The purer room is more comfortable. Everyone nods. Nobody makes you defend anything.

In 2005, three researchers ran an experiment in Colorado. They took sixty-three citizens, sorted them by politics, and put them in rooms with people who already agreed with them. Boulder liberals in one set of groups, Colorado Springs conservatives in another. Each group discussed the same three contested questions of the day.

No group found nuance. Every single group came out more extreme than it went in. The liberals moved further left on all three questions. The conservatives moved further right.

The second finding is the one that should worry you. Deliberation among like-minded people reduced the disagreement that already existed inside each group. People who had held a slightly different view walking in no longer held it walking out, and that stayed true in their anonymous written answers, where nobody could see them.

Nobody in those rooms was told to be quiet. They just stopped talking.

(Schkade, Sunstein and Hastie, "What Happened on Deliberation Day?", California Law Review, 2007.)

That is what the purer room does. It is smaller every time, because purity has no floor. There is always a heretic a little closer in. The corner you retreat to for peace keeps shrinking until the only person who fully agrees with you is you, and along the way it quietly trains everyone still standing there to stop saying the thing they were almost going to say.

What a tent cannot survive

A tent survives disagreement easily. Disagreement keeps people in the room, arguing, which is a sign the room is alive.

Contempt is the decision that the other person is not even worth the argument, and that is the moment one tent quietly becomes two.

Where you actually lead

Holding a coalition of people who do not agree with each other is the hardest thing a founder, an executive, or a board chair ever does, and most of them do it every week without naming it.

The board with three competing agendas. The merged organization carrying two cultures that distrust each other. The functions that each privately believe the others are the problem.

Leading people who already agree is administration.

Leading people who do not agree toward a shared action they will all own, that is the job, and it is punishing, because it asks you to hold the room open at the exact moments every instinct says to close it.

The one day it was hardest

I ran that discipline on the day it was most tempting to abandon it.

Every election day, at every company I led, I gave people paid time to go and vote, on the clock, no questions asked. I told them the same thing every time. I do not care who you vote for, or why, I just want you to vote.

I want to be honest about what that neutrality cost me, because it was never the easy, above-it-all kind. I had my own opinions, strong ones, about the people and the questions on those ballots. I was also the person signing the checks and setting the tone in the room.

It would have been simple to let my preference leak. To warm slightly toward the right nods. To make the tent a few inches narrower and call it culture.

The entire point was to refuse that. My job was to protect the participation, never to deliver anyone's vote, and that included the participation of the person walking out the door to vote against everything I was voting for.

A tent you only hold open for the people who agree with you is a mirror with better manners.

The counterfeit version

He is easy to find, because plenty of us have been him. He mistakes conformity for alignment. He hears a dissenting voice as a loyalty problem and manages the dissenter out instead of answering the dissent. Then he calls the quiet that follows unity.

The quiet is a room that got smaller because the people with questions learned what asking costs.

Part one left you with a test: can power be questioned without punishment. This is the same test from the other side of the table. A leader who cannot let power be questioned builds an echo, and an echo cannot carry a company, a board, or a country through anything hard.

Your own tent

The test comes down to one question. Can it hold a real disagreement without someone getting labeled, or someone getting quietly removed, or someone deciding it is safer to leave.

If the answer is no, what you have is a waiting room for agreement, and everyone sitting in it is auditioning.

Participation is a choice, and it carries a cost. Staying in the room with people you find difficult costs you the comfort of the purer corner. Holding that room open for them, when you have the power to close it, costs you the easy win.

Both are worth paying, because the alternative is a tent that shrinks until it fits one. Your silence while it shrinks has a cost too, and the bill arrives later, on the day you finally need a coalition and discover you spent years teaching everyone who disagreed with you to leave.

Keep the tent open. Especially on the days it would be easier to make it smaller.

In Community and Conversation,
Jim

A note to the newest members of The Room in the League of Radical Kindness.

Some of you joined last week after an hour we spent together on what silence costs.

This is the other half of that hour. A room worth staying in is one where the disagreement is allowed to be real, and that is the thing I am trying to build over at the League of Radical Kindness.

Come argue with me.

P.S. There are 250 Limited Edition copies of All Pride, No Ego. You can buy one in a lot of places. Only I can sign it, number it, and write your name in it by hand, and every copy that comes through my site carries thirty days in The Room.

*I number them in the order they arrive. Earlier order, lower number.*

Claim one here