Creating Synergy from Disagreement: My Practice in Interdisciplinary Leadership

Disagreement in teams is generally viewed as disrupting efficiency. But have we misunderstood its value? At the NEC (or National Economics Challenge), when my team was in an impasse between the objectivity of “data modeling” and the subjectivity of “behavioral insights,” I realized that we have arrived at a fork: do we go one way and leave the other alone, or is there a new, third way?

What I learnt from this experience was to go beyond either-or thinking and develop an “Integrative Thinking” framework that can be reused for other challenges. This way of thinking encourages creative reframing rather than compromising.

1. The main issue at hand is not one of Should we choose A or B? In what ways is A revealing truths about our problem which B is not, and vice versa? This transforms confrontation into a shared exploration.

   
   

2. Encourage both parties to clarify the assumptions that underlie their positions, as a way of opening them up to being changed by the other party. The data camp believes that there are patterns of human behaviour while the behavioural camp believes anomalies which disrupt those patterns. There exists a dynamic symbiosis of pattern and perturbation, which is not oppositional.

   
   

3. The analytical model built eventually engendered a symbiosis. It used a data skeleton to support behaviour flesh with this economy, the predictive power of a model and the explanatory power for complexity.

   
   

This practice tells us that disagreement is not noise to be gotten rid of. It is a signal for innovation that we must decipher. Public health faces endless such “disagreement” in which, we find them that: clinical medicine versus preventive medicine, individual treatment versus population policy, technological efficiency versus humanistic care. I firmly believe that the future resolution of increasingly complex health problems will lie in our ability to design and merge these competing perspectives. To harness the innovative power of teams, exceptional leadership turns their cognitive diversity into their greatest advantage.

Ruoxi Chen, an aspiring public health practitioner.

Reach me at tracy8505@163.com or visit my Leadership page to learn more.