Who’s your dissenter?
At the OD Network Conference, Ori Brafman spoke on his new book, Sway: Why rational people make irrational decisions.
He’s covering some familiar ground, not least that covered by Daniel Gilbet’s fantastic book Stumbling Into Happiness.
But one point he talked about really grabbed me – the importance of the dissenter.
He’s looking out for stories of cultures that manage to keep the dissenter and not have them turn into a scapegoat.
One institituion that seems to have done just that is the US State Department, which actually has a Constructive Dissenter Award given out annually.
It reminds me of the quote by someone who said “If you’re working with a ‘yes man’, one of you is redundant.”
==> Where are you getting your creative friction and resistance from?
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Tags: Daniel Gilbert, dissenter, Ori Brafman
Hi Michael,
How timely to read your blog post. I had just finished Stumbling on Happiness and have picked up Vital Lies, Simple Truths by Daniel Goleman. His book is about our mental ‘blindspots’ and the simple truths we tell ourselves to avoid seeing things that might cause us anxiety. He has a terrific quote from R.D. Lang from Knots:
The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that
we fail to notice
there is little we can do
to change
until we fail to notice
how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds.
Amen
/Bradley