Highlights
Five evidence-based principles from Harvard’s Dr. Julia Minson on why mastering disagreement is the leadership skill that unlocks innovation, trust, and retention.
- Curiosity over authenticity – faking curiosity beats expressing genuine irritation, and the data proves it.
- Seek before you speak – most leaders spend 90% of disagreements conveying and only 10% seeking. Flip the ratio.
- The HEAR framework – Hedge, Emphasize agreement, Acknowledge, and Reframe to stay constructive while disagreeing substantively.
“Faking your curiosity is far better than expressing your genuine irritation.”
Dr. Julia Minson delivers this line with the calm confidence of someone who has data to back up a statement that sounds almost heretical. Isn’t authenticity supposed to be the foundation of good leadership? Aren’t we supposed to bring our whole selves to conversations?
Sure—but Minson’s research at the Harvard Kennedy School reveals something most leaders miss: in disagreements, what you feel matters far less than what you signal.
“The person who is faking curiosity, for lack of a better word, is still trying,” she explains. “They are doing something to have a better conversation.”
“Faking your curiosity is far better than expressing your genuine irritation.”
Dr. Julia Minson, Harvard Kennedy School
This isn’t a license for manipulative communication. Instead, it’s a recognition of a fundamental truth about human interaction: when someone disagrees with you, they don’t expect curiosity. They expect argument. As Minson puts it: “People in disagreement don’t expect their counterparts to be curious or open-minded. They expect to be argued with.”
That expectation creates a trap. You could be genuinely curious about their perspective, but they won’t believe it—because everyone claims to be curious while quietly waiting for their turn to argue. In fact, Minson’s studies reveal something mathematically impossible: “Most people claim that they’re twice as curious as the other person.”
The solution isn’t trying harder to feel authentic curiosity. It’s using specific language that signals receptiveness so clearly that skepticism dissolves. And the data shows it works—even when the curiosity isn’t genuine at all.
Five evidence-based principles from Dr. Julia Minson that show how leaders who master disagreement unlock innovation, build trust, and create organizations where the best ideas win.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Julia Minson:
Most leaders treat disagreement like combat. They arm themselves with data, sharpen their arguments, and enter conversations determined to win. They spend their preparation time crafting the perfect case, anticipating objections, building an impenetrable wall of logic. They believe the strongest argument will prevail—that reason will triumph—that persuasion is the goal.
They’re systematically undermining every outcome they care about.
Dr. Julia Minson has spent two decades studying the psychology of disagreement at the Harvard Kennedy School, running carefully controlled experiments on what actually makes difficult conversations productive. Her research suggests that leaders who treat disagreement as a zero-sum battle for persuasion are damaging relationships, stifling innovation, and pushing away the diverse perspectives their organizations desperately need.
The transformation she teaches—helping everyone from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies turn destructive conflict into constructive discovery—reveals five principles that separate leaders who inspire loyalty and creativity from those who wonder why their best people keep leaving.
1. Replace Persuasion With Better Goals
“Most people have that intuition that when you go into a disagreement, the purpose is to persuade and to change the other person’s mind. And that could be a purpose, right? That could be a thing that we could do, but there’s all kinds of other things we could do.”
Dr. Julia Minson
The default script is seductive in its simplicity: someone disagrees with you, so your job is to change their mind. Bring better data. Make stronger arguments. Win the debate.
“I think of it as the wrong question,” Minson says flatly.
The problem isn’t just that persuasion is difficult. It’s that, as she puts it, “most of the time, changing a person’s mind in one conversation is just not a realistic goal. It’s just not going to happen.”
Yet most people never stop to consider alternatives. “Most of us don’t stop long enough to consider: Why am I having this conversation? What am I trying to accomplish—and what is realistic to accomplish?”
By fixating on persuasion, you’re treating disagreement as what negotiation scholars call a “zero-sum game”—if I persuade you, you have to give up your perspective. If you persuade me, I have to abandon mine. Someone wins; someone loses.
But Minson offers radically different goals that are actually achievable: “Probably the most productive thing we could be doing is trying to understand why the other person believes what they believe.”
Think about the workplace dynamic where a colleague challenges your approach. “If we assume for a second that the other individual is like a reasonable, intelligent human—if we are in a professional context—here is a person who was brought into this organization or brought onto this team because they have something to offer, right? Some expertise or some insight.”
Other productive goals she suggests include impressing someone (“This person is my boss, and I’m going to disagree with them in a way that makes them think I’m smarter, better, more competent”), reinforcing the relationship (“I’m going to disagree with them in a way that makes them trust me more, like me more, makes them feel more comfortable and secure around me”), or strategically deciding that this battle isn’t worth fighting.
The research bears this out. Minson’s studies show that people who score high on receptiveness don’t just listen better—they actively seek out diverse information sources. They make better decisions because they’re working with a more complete picture of reality.
Persuasion is a zero-sum game where someone must lose. Learning is value creation where everyone can win.
Persuasion is a zero-sum game where someone must lose. Learning is value creation where everyone can win. When you shift from trying to change minds to trying to understand them, you unlock insights you can’t access through argument alone.
Before your next difficult conversation, write down three goals that aren’t persuasion. Examples: “Understand why this person sees the data differently than I do,” “Ensure my team lead still trusts me after this conversation,” or “Demonstrate strategic thinking to leadership.” Pursue those goals instead.
2. Flip Your Seeking-to-Conveying Ratio
“What we do in a disagreement is mostly one of two things, right? Either you are seeking information or you’re conveying information.”
Dr. Julia Minson
Strip any conversation about disagreement down to its fundamentals and you’ll find just two activities: seeking information from the other person, or conveying information from your own perspective.
The imbalance is striking. “What people spend much too much time on is the conveying-information part. I’m going to tell you how it is. I’m going to tell you all the arguments for why I’m right and you’re wrong.”
The typical leader’s conversation ratio:
This isn’t malicious. It’s inevitable. “If you didn’t think you were right, why would you be disagreeing? The whole reason we’re in this conversation is because I think I’m right.”
But leaders who spend 90% of their time conveying and only 10% seeking are systematically undermining their own effectiveness. They’re making decisions with incomplete information, missing crucial context their counterpart possesses, and projecting that they don’t actually care what the other person thinks.
The shift Minson advocates for isn’t eliminating the conveying part. “Not to say that you never get to talk, right? Because again, you have things to say.” It’s recalibrating the balance.
“How can we shift the balance a little bit? So I go from, like, 90–10—talking about my perspective and asking one perfunctory question about yours—to really deeply seeking to understand, so that when I get to my point, I’m a little bit more equipped with information and I actually do know what I’m talking about.”
The implications extend beyond individual conversations. When leaders consistently demonstrate that they spend more time seeking than conveying, they create cultures where diverse perspectives actually get voiced instead of suppressed.
Conversations are resource-allocation problems. Most people allocate 90% to conveying and 10% to seeking. Effective leaders flip that ratio—or, at minimum, move toward balance. More seeking leads to better decisions.
In your next three disagreements, track your time split. Set a timer and note when you’re seeking versus conveying. If you’re below 40% seeking, ask three more questions before making your next point. Practice until 50–50 feels normal.
3. Signal Curiosity With Clear, Repetitive Language
“It turns out that what works remarkably well is just saying it with words. Instead of trying to tweak your brain to be more curious, you can just say things like, ‘I’m really curious about your perspective. I’d like to understand where you’re coming from.’”
Dr. Julia Minson
Here’s where Minson’s research becomes both counterintuitive and immediately practical.
The problem: in disagreements, nobody expects their counterpart to be genuinely curious. “They expect to be argued with.” That expectation creates mutual suspicion that undermines every attempt at understanding.
The evidence is in the impossible math: “In our studies, most people claim that they’re twice as curious as the other person—which is mathematically impossible.”
So how do you break through? Don’t try to engineer your internal state. Engineer your language instead.
“What’s interesting about language is that, first of all, people notice it because it’s external to our brains. People can’t read your mind, but they can hear and interpret your words.”
External signals also hold you accountable. “We often give ourselves credit for doing things in our heads that we are not doing quite successfully. I’m trying to be empathetic—but, like, am I being empathetic enough? Yeah, probably good enough. But when you hold yourself to a standard of ‘I have to express my curiosity verbally in a way that my counterpart notices and recognizes,’ it’s harder to give yourself credit for a thing you fail to do.”
And here’s the surprising part: it works even when you don’t feel it. Imagine a frustrating conversation where internally you’re thinking, This is completely wrong. But, you’ve learned to signal curiosity: “I understand this is a hard topic, and I understand that we disagree. Tell me more about why you believe what you believe.”
They don’t know your internal frustration. They hear your stated interest. Then they explain. Then you might actually learn something that makes their position more sensible.
“Those situations where we think our body language goes in the full opposite direction from our words are actually incredibly rare. It’s quite difficult to do.” That only happens with deliberate sarcasm. “When you’re being sarcastic, what you’re trying to do is convey the fact that you don’t think much of this person.”
Simply expressing curiosity you don’t fully feel? “That’s very different than ‘I’m going to try to express curiosity even though I don’t feel it in the depth of my soul.’”
Authentic curiosity is ideal. Expressed curiosity is necessary. Unexpressed curiosity is invisible. Silent irritation is destructive. Even imperfectly expressed curiosity beats perfectly felt—but unexpressed—interest.
In your next three disagreements, use this phrase before presenting your view: “I’m genuinely curious about your perspective. Help me understand why you see it that way.” Say it even if—especially if—you’re not feeling curious. Track how the conversation changes.
4. Make “Feeling Heard” Your Success Metric
“The reason people talk is because they want to feel heard. If I didn’t want you to understand where I’m coming from, there would be no point in having a conversation.”
Dr. Julia Minson
Strip away the complexity of disagreement and you arrive at one fundamental human need: people enter conversations because they want to be understood.
The research backing this is extensive. “When you look across world cultures, there’s a ton of research that basically shows that people really like that feeling of feeling heard.”
The practical implications are staggering: “In the organizational behavior research literature, people are less likely to quit their jobs if they feel their manager makes them feel heard. We know in healthcare, patients are more likely to adhere to their medication if they feel heard by their doctors.” They’re also less likely to sue for malpractice.
“This squishy soft-skill thing has these incredibly powerful real-world effects.”
“This squishy soft-skill thing has these incredibly powerful real-world effects.”
Dr. Julia Minson
So how do you create that feeling? Most people think active listening is enough—eye contact, nodding, not interrupting. Those are table stakes. Feeling heard requires something more explicit.
“I hear you, but here’s why we can’t do that”—that’s lazy acknowledgment. The but quietly erases everything that came before it.
“Acknowledgment done a little bit more artfully involves actually using your own words to demonstrate with your behavior that you heard your counterpart. So: ‘I hear that you are really concerned about the client relationship and that you have received some feedback that makes you worry that the client is unhappy with the timeline.’”
That sentence proves you were listening with evidence, not just claims.
Minson defines constructive disagreement simply: “any disagreement that leads us to have another conversation.”
“It is incredibly easy to destroy a relationship in one conversation and make that person say, ‘You know what? No. I’m not going to give this my time in the future. We’re done.’ What can you do to have one more conversation? To make this other person feel that talking to you is valuable—or at least not awful.”
The multiplier effect is decisive: every time you make someone feel heard, you increase the odds they’ll bring valuable dissenting perspectives in the future. Every time you make them feel dismissed, you train them—and everyone watching—to stay silent. Over months and years, the compounding effect is enormous.
For one week, end every disagreement by summarizing the other person’s perspective in your own words before responding. Use: “What I hear you saying is [specific summary]. Is that accurate?” Then wait for confirmation before proceeding.
5. Deploy the HEAR Framework to Preserve Goodwill While Disagreeing
“The HEAR framework is kind of a shorthand acronym for a technique we call conversational receptiveness. It’s a way of using language to demonstrate to your counterpart that you’re still actively engaging with their perspective even as you’re making your own point.”
Dr. Julia Minson
Here’s the trap every leader faces: you do everything right. You seek information. You signal curiosity. You make them feel heard. But then you have to state your actual position—and suddenly you’re back to sounding like you’re trying to win.
Minson’s HEAR framework solves this by giving you language tools to maintain receptiveness while disagreeing substantively. HEAR stands for Hedging, Emphasizing agreement, Acknowledgment, and Reframing to the positive.
Hedging means softening absolute statements. “So hedging is words like sometimes, possibly, perhaps. So I could say something like, ‘COVID vaccines are safe and effective.’ I could also say, ‘Most physicians tend to believe that COVID vaccines are largely safe and effective.’ … I still said the same thing. … But I did it in a way that recognizes the nuances and the exceptions to the general claim.”
Emphasizing agreement means naming shared values before dissecting differences. “It’s really easy to jump right into dissecting the disagreement. But you can take a few seconds to show your counterpart that you have some values that both of you hold. … It doesn’t mean compromising. It means saying: ‘We both want to work in a company that provides shareholder value while supporting employee well-being,’ or ‘I agree that the last few years have been really hard.’”
Acknowledgment means showing you heard their point with evidence: “I hear that you are really concerned about the client relationship….” You’re not claiming you listened; you’re demonstrating it.
Reframing to the positive replaces negative, contradictory language with constructive alternatives. “Try to avoid negative words—no, can’t, won’t, don’t, terrible, hate—and replace them with more positively valenced words. … Instead of ‘I hate it when people force me into rushed decisions,’ you can say, ‘I really appreciate it when people give me enough time to consider important decisions.’”
These aren’t tricks. They’re linguistic tools that preserve goodwill while still allowing real disagreement.
The data is clear: specific language patterns—hedging, agreement emphasis, acknowledgment, and positive reframing—aren’t just theoretical recommendations. They’re measurable linguistic markers that distinguish constructive communicators from destructive ones.
Minson’s NLP analysis of thousands of real conversations quantifies exactly how receptive communicators differ from unreceptive ones. The differences are striking and consistent across contexts.
HEAR isn’t about being “soft” or avoiding conflict. It’s about maintaining a constructive conversation while disagreeing substantively. It’s the difference between ending a conversation and keeping one going.
Print the HEAR acronym and keep it visible during your next high-stakes disagreement. Use at least three of the four techniques when presenting your view. Notice whether the conversation stays constructive—or slides back into argument.
The Discovery Imperative
“Why aren’t we all doing this all the time?” Minson asks. These aren’t revolutionary ideas—curiosity, listening, acknowledging others—yet most leaders default to argument mode reflexively.
One common concern: will this make me look weak? “Leaders, for example, are often concerned: Is this going to make me look weak? Is this going to make me look uncertain? Is this going to make me look like I am not actually in charge of the room or in charge of the conversation?”
Minson’s response is data-driven: “The answer is no, it’s not. … We can compare speech by leaders who express curiosity and receptiveness versus people who sound much more dogmatic. And expressing curiosity and receptiveness makes you come across as a better leader.”
The parallel to science is instructive. “If you think about any medicine and any medical professional, they will never say, ‘Do this and your headaches will go away.’ They will say: ‘In clinical trials, X number of patients with this profile observed an X percentage reduction of symptoms, plus or minus two standard deviations.’” A scientist who expresses uncertainty signals rigor—not weakness. Someone who promises certainty often signals nonsense.
Uncertainty, properly expressed, signals depth of understanding. “We actually have a great appreciation of uncertainty as a signal of depth of understanding.”
The complexity of modern biotech demands this approach. No single person can hold all the expertise needed to bring a therapy from discovery to patients. You need diverse specialists—each bringing perspectives the others lack.
When those perspectives clash—and they will—the leader who treats disagreement as an opportunity for discovery will build teams that innovate. The leader who treats disagreement as a battle to win will build teams that learn to stay silent.
“Almost every problem that is serious and important and difficult requires multiple people to solve it. … We’re at a point in life where it takes 20 different kinds of professionals to just make one home run.”
That silence is expensive—not just in lost productivity or turnover costs, but in missed insights, uncaught errors, and innovations that never emerge because the person who could have contributed them decided it wasn’t worth the fight.
The question isn’t whether your team disagrees. They do. The question is whether you’ve created an environment where people feel heard enough to voice those disagreements constructively—and whether you’ve equipped yourself with the skills to turn disagreement into discovery.
Further Reading
How to Disagree Better by Julia Minson
Publishing March 2026 • Penguin Random House
Minson’s upcoming book expands on the research behind conversational receptiveness, the HEAR framework, and practical tools for turning disagreement into discovery.
Dr. Julia Minson is a Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a decision scientist, and founder of Disagreeing Better LLC. Her research addresses the psychology of disagreement, conflict management, and negotiation. Her book How to Disagree Better will be published in March 2026. Learn more at disagreeingbetter.com.
Related Reading
- Building a Strong Speak Up Culture for Business Success — Learn how protecting difficult conversations drives innovation and prevents costly mistakes.
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