Latest / Fire That Gathers / The Boardroom, Fireworks and Butterflies: On Disagreeing Well
Transcript
- Amanda Swiger: Welcome to Fire That Gathers, fuel for purpose-led leaders forwarding what's next. Leading in a way that meets this moment is a stretch, not just for what must be done, but for how you're called to lead. Fire That Gathers is a movement of leaders choosing to use this moment of breakdown and possibility as a catalyst for the systems you're creating and for who you're becoming. At this hearth, there is fuel for your movement. From the field, real conversations with purpose-led leaders forging what's next. Not the polished case study, the live questions they're walking, where the map runs out. At the edge, breakthrough moments for my coaching rooms and me walking my own developmental edge in real time. I'm gathering too. Come with me. Every episode anchored with an alchemical question, the kind that transforms what you see. Because shifting our paradigm is among the highest leverage points for systems transformation. How we see shapes what's possible. Welcome to Fire The Gathers. Welcome to Fire That Gathers. This fuel for purpose led leaders forging what's next. And I'm so grateful that you're here. Today I've been reflecting on a recent conversation I had with Kirti Jayakumar. She is a brilliant, wise, warm leader. I had the pleasure of working with, co facilitating at World Pulse. social enterprise that has a community spanning a hundred and ninety countries. And we worked together as the organization was forging its power shifting committee, moving leadership and decision making responsibility outside of just the board and bringing in community voices. So we partnered there. And we've partnered recently facilitating for Connected Power. She shares more about that organization and its initiative in her episode. But it has me reflecting on this question that she brought in and she shared in her work, which is what might we gain if we disagree well? What a gorgeous question. Feel like so often we're thinking about how do we drive to agreement, how do we paper over disagreement, how do we treat that as though the disagreement is the problem? And yet so much of my work around collaboration and leadership for decades now has been on seeing that our differences are a resource, our source of value creation, whether that was early on in my work. Teaching collaboration and negotiation at Stanford, or now most recently with leaders and leadership teams doing purpose-led work. And so it is an inquiry that I brought with me as I was heading to a two-day leadership offsite with a team that I've been working with over the four past four months. I've worked with the CEO on and off for the last decade, but really coming back to our work together recently. Whereas we began the leadership team was, I think, sitting where many are in a place of polite conversation in their offsites, going, taking the time to go through each person's goals and doing the careful report outs and making sure people were informed. But as we click just one layer deeper, as I really inquired, okay, what's needed to reach your objectives for this year, what I heard was, I don't really feel like there's anyone I can lean into. We share our report outs, but there's not much actual dialogue. It reminds me of a moment from Kirti's episode where the CEO in an organization she was working with said, we don't disagree. And finally there was a moment of recognizing like that's part of the problem. And so my work over the last four months with this organization, it has been creating clear, measurable goals for the remainder of the year, cascading them through the organization. But a layer deeper, the inquiry was actually why do you do this work? And how might we shift our conversation so that it is truly generative and not just kind. So I was heading out to this off site and I'm in the airport. And as I walk through, I see on the newsstand the front cover of HBR. So the cover article from this summer, July, August 2026 says the false alignment trap. Leaders often behave as if they agree on why, what, and how to change when they actually don't. That's why most transformation efforts fail. I grabbed the magazine and I brought it with me to this offsite. And just before the team was about to engage in their most important work, I passed out the article. Let everyone take a look on break. Remind them of the gift of their disagreement. And then instead of engaging goals this time from a progress report, from a quick update. That was handled in the pre-read. The conversation was framed as three things. What are you celebrating? What progress has actually been made? What do people need to know? Inform them for their work. What they might not have seen when they read on their own. And the third thing is, what's a question you're wrestling with that the team needs to engage on together? And the article really set the stage. And the holding, the question was intentionally bringing in how do we disagree well? How do we know that our alignment is coming from something deeper than just the desire to be kind or to get to the next piece of the agenda? And with that, at the end of our two days, I heard from multiple people in the team, this was the best meeting they ever had. Best meaning, most productive, most generative, and also the most fun. And so As a leader, I just get curious about how do you make space to disagree well. It reminds me of a time early in my career as an attorney when I was working on a deal in Japan. We had negotiated at off hours a small small startup that I was working with against large Sony at times, so the behemoth. And we were navigating questions around. Culture and language when we were in the room and really struggling to reach resolution on some core points. And so there's a moment when I I suggested, can we, can we project the contract on the screen? And I invited the other team to sit with us all on one side of the table and the screen with a contract. was the problem we were going to collectively try and solve. The disagreement didn't go away. We didn't automatically fix our points about the indemnities and our limitation of liability and the core questions that we had on the business terms, but we reframed the conversation to all of us on the same side of the table, working on a shared problem of getting the language right. Right enough that it could hold what each of us needed. Here's the underlying piece. When I taught collaboration at Stanford, when I work with teams, I know that collaborative leadership requires three skills. It requires our capacity to know what we really want and need, ourselves and our organization, and to really have the agency to speak that, to claim it, to name it. To advocate. At the same time, we need to be able to put our attention on the others, their needs, to be genuinely curious about what matters to them. And then to be willing to sit in that unknown long enough for something to emerge. I think that's what it means to disagree well, to do those three pieces, to be willing to share what matters to us. To be genuinely curious about another's perspective and to sit with some faith, some intention, that if we hold those two, both of those, with reverence, that a possibility w will emerge. And I'm just thinking back to a moment when I was this summer with my daughter who's eight at Disneyland. And After every Disney movie played, you know, at the beginning, actually, when they the castle and the fireworks come on. And I promised her someday we're gonna go. So this was the year we went to Disneyland. We had already seen the parade at night, but the lights and the floats once. But it was a highlight for us, and we wanted to go back and see the fireworks. So we got there an hour early, put my blanket down in a spot right in front of the castle because I really wanted to see the image. We hadn't seen sh when she was little with the fireworks behind the castle. We sat there for an hour. We had our snacks. We were all settled. And like five minutes before the parade was gonna start, she stands up and she says, I wanna go over there. And she points across the way, across the little walkway to like this curb where she saw a spot. And I looked at her like kind of frustrated, ghast. We had already had a really long day, and we ate all this staked out, and I was like, What? You know, we're not going over there was my first reaction. Maya, we've been talking about seeing the castle with the fireworks since you were little, since you were like one and your first saw Cinderella. You know, I want to be over here where we can see the fireworks behind the castle. And she said, Okay. And she sat down, but I could see she was disappointed. I said, wait. Take a breath. Okay, Maya, I'm curious. Why do you want to move over there? We've sat here, but why? No, it's okay. No, really, Maya. Why do you want to sit over on the curb? She said, Mama, my favorite thing at the parade. And I looked at her, I said, Yeah, they're the floats. They're up high. And she said, and I looked at her and I didn't get it right. I said, Okay, I'm listening. What was your favorite thing at the parade? And she said, it was the little butterflies that are walking on the ground. And we can't see them from where we're sitting. Standing because there's people in front of us. I can't see what's on the ground. ⁓ I had no idea. I had no idea that what mattered most to her wasn't high in the sky in the parade on the float. It was what was walking right in front. Thank you. Thank you for telling me. Now we can move. And we had just a minute left to kind of squirm our way to the very front right corner. Where I could see the castle and the fireworks, and so could she, but she could see the butterflies walking on the ground. That's what I mean. This is where personal growth meets strategy. As a leader, I could have just said, My way. We're sitting here. I know the objective. But I got curious and I waited. And I drew her in and I waited. And in the end, maybe I'll share with this. episode, one image of the fireworks and one of the butterflies, because we got to see both. So I'm coming back to this idea whether it's a practice ground that we have in our families and the small decisions that we make or bigger in our organizations where our intention is to create an impact, to make a difference, to lead in a participatory way, so that our outcomes aren't just creating impact in the world, but our process. engages the voices that are needed to get there. Where we know that no one hero, no one organization, no technology has sufficient capacity or hero can't do it. We need the resources, perspectives, insights of many. And to get there, we need to lead collaboratively with my agency. Yours as a leader, with curiosity about matters to one another, with a tolerance to sit in an unknown, and with our capacity to disagree well. So I come back to Kirty's question. She named in her episode a CAO CEO who said we never disagree. And that was the false alignment trap. Sitting in a room in Bangalore. Her invitation in her episode was to treat disagreement as a friend. It's a character in the story we're building together. And then each of these stories has disagreement as a character in the boardroom, in a negotiation, on a curb in a theme park. And this is where personal growth meets strategy, where the move at the table was available to me because of the move I made inside first, to get curious, to know that my perspective matters, and to know that there's value in and possibility. When we disagree? What might we gain at work in our families if we disagree well? If you love this episode, you might be a leader who's interested in joining me for the Collective Council. The Collective Council is a curated circle of purpose-led founders, funders, and executives who gather twice monthly for 90 minutes. Together we slow down enough for you to sense into your most alive strategic questions and to be able to not only receive your own insight, but to have peer counsel in my coaching on what's next. You bring Your questions, your opportunities, the tensions and challenges that you're walking, what you're really wrestling with. And we work them here together. This isn't another course. There aren't any modules. It's time for your real work of leadership. Clients who've worked with me include a funder who came in to move a million dollars fast for immigrants from refugees. We're able to pause long enough for her to see what was truly needed. To shift what from what she could deploy with her team to what she could move with an ecosystem, moving $3.5 million within weeks and funding an additional 80 organizations. There was an executive who stepped into the largest role of her career, feeling the edge of imposter syndrome, moving out of being the expert and stepping into bold delegation. And even more possibility as she gathered leaders who could challenge and invite her bigger vision. All of this made possible because of exactly the way we're moving inside of collective council. If you're curious, let's have a conversation. You can schedule directly at www.onpurpastogether.com slash call. You'll see the link in the show notes too. On purpose together.