Episode 343 · 8 October 2026 · 49:23

How to disagree at work (without taking a chair to someone's head), with Rt Hon Steve Baker and Paul Dolan

Featuring Rt Hon Steve Baker, Paul Dolan

#disagreement #silence #team dynamics #workplace culture #hiring #culture fit #leadership #conflict resolution

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What has to be true in a team before disagreement can happen
panel interview#team-dynamics #disagreement #workplace-culture
Hiring for culture challenge, not culture fit
panel interview#hiring #culture-fit #culture-challenge
How leaders should handle a blow-up at work
panel interview#leadership #conflict-resolution #psychology
The bigger risk is silence, not disagreement
panel interview#silence #risk #disagreement
Signs of groupthink and how to design against it
panel interview#groupthink #team-design #collaboration
The EMBRACE framework for productive disagreement
panel interview#framework #productive-disagreement #embrace
First conversation a manager should have with two people who profoundly disagree
panel interview#management #conflict #conversation
When is disagreement beyond repair? Point of no return
panel interview#disagreement #repair #point-of-no-return
Top 3 lessons for leaders and final reflections
panel interview#leadership-lessons #reflection #silence

Show notes

Why Silence Is More Dangerous Than a Row — with Rt Hon Steve Baker and Paul Dolan

Guests: Rt Hon Steve Baker — former Conservative minister, Brexit negotiator, and aerospace/software engineer; and Paul Dolan — Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and author of Beliefism.

Two people who disagree on almost everything. One company. A mission to stop workplaces from collapsing into groupthink.

Steve Baker and Paul Dolan met during the Brexit negotiations on opposite sides of the argument. During COVID lockdowns, they teamed up to found The Provocation People — a consultancy that helps organisations break out of echo chambers and build cultures where disagreement is safe, structured, and productive.

Al and Leanne sit down with both of them to explore why a quiet room where everyone nods along is actually a red flag, the one question every leader should close their meetings with, and what happens to your physiology when conflict erupts — plus the EMBRACE framework for designing tolerance into your workplace culture.

Top 3 Takeaways

Your bigger risk is silence, not a disagreement. Companies like Kodak, Blockbuster, and HBOS fell victim to groupthink because nobody spoke up. A quiet room where everyone nods along is a red flag, not a sign of harmony.
End your next meeting with Steve's question: "Has anything not been said because it would be inconvenient to me?" It signals that the leader is genuinely open to challenge — and it forces people to pause and consider what they've held back.
Build disagreement into a structure — don't rely on good intentions. Paul's EMBRACE framework is a checklist that makes tolerance by design possible. And when it does blow up, take a breath first. Your blood pressure is the first thing to manage before you can manage the conversation.

Connect With Us

Get in touch, book a call, or find Al and Leanne on LinkedIn — all in one place: truthliesandwork.com/connect

Mental health support: findahelpline.com — UK: Samaritans 116 123 · Mind 0300 123 3393 — US: 988 — Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14

Truth, Lies & Work is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network.

Full transcript

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Al ElliottAbout 18 months ago, a software company told its staff there should be no more political talk on the company chat. A third of the workforce left, and the bosses called it a success. Now, you've got to bear in mind, this particular software company have actually written books on creating amazing cultures at work.

Leanne ElliottOur guests today say that story is a textbook case of how not to handle disagreement, and they're two people who should know. One is a former Conservative minister and Brexit negotiator. The other is a left-leaning behavioral scientist from the London School of Economics.

Al ElliottSteve Baker, the MP, and Paul Dolan, the professor, disagree on almost everything. But now they run a company together that teaches businesses how to disagree properly.

Leanne ElliottWe'll find out why the loudest rows at work are the lesser problem. The bigger one is a room where everyone nods along. Plus, the one question Steve asks at the end of every meeting.

Al ElliottAnd yes, there's a moment where we put our own Brexit disagreement with Steve directly on the table.

Leanne ElliottHello and welcome to Truth, Lies and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Leanne, I'm a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

Al ElliottMy name is Al, I'm a business owner.

Leanne ElliottAnd we are here to help you simplify the science of work.

Al ElliottNow, Paul Dolan is a Professor of Behavioural Science at the LSE.

Leanne ElliottHe spent 2 decades studying happiness and decision-making, and his latest book is Beliefism: Steve Baker spent 14 years as an MP, including a spell as Minister of State for Northern Ireland, and he was a lead figure in the UK's Brexit negotiations.

Al ElliottThey disagreed on Brexit. They disagree on plenty more, if the truth be told. But they became close allies over COVID lockdowns. And in 2024, they founded the Provocation People. This is a consultancy that helps companies build and maintain break positive relationships with their out of groupthink.

Leanne ElliottBecause here's what most leaders get wrong. They either fear the blowup so much that they stop people disagreeing at all, or they say they want dissent and then punish it.

Al ElliottSo today is a workshop on how to build a team that can disagree before it blows up, what to do the day it does blow up, and how to pick up the pieces afterwards.

Leanne ElliottAfter this short break, we start with what has to be true in a team before disagreement is safe.

Al ElliottIf you have support tickets in your business, then this is going to sound frighteningly familiar. You open the queue on Monday morning, 200 tickets before even a first sip of coffee, and you already know what's in there. Password reset requests, order updates, the same questions over and over again. Hey, what if that part of the job just handled itself?

Leanne ElliottHubSpot Customer Agent resolves those repeat tickets using your actual CRM data and knowledge base so your team can focus on the conversations that actually need them. And your customers get answers faster.

Al ElliottCheck out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

C — REVIEWMy name's Steve Baker. I was previously an aerospace and software engineer, but I'm actually reasonably well known for having been a politician, a minister, and an MP. And my superpower is leadership of teams. That's what I've done throughout my whole career.

D — REVIEWMy name's Paul Dolan. I have a chair in behavioural science at the London School of Economics. I've been an academic for what feels like forever, and I have absolutely no superpowers. I'd like to think of myself as very much like everybody else.

Leanne ElliottHumility. Humility, perhaps.

C — REVIEWHe's too humble to tell you, but his superpower is knowing how to design for happiness in your life and indeed for tolerance.

Al ElliottWe will come on to that. We definitely will come on to that. We want to talk today a little bit about how you disagree at work and without Essentially taking a chair to someone's head. So we've sort of split this up into sort of the before it happens, and then when it happens, and then after it happens. The first thing I'm really curious to find out is what has to be true in a team before disagreement can happen?

D — REVIEWSo it's all in the behaviors, right? So, I mean, we can have all the mission statements and all the intent in the world, It has to manifest in how people behave. So good teams behave respectfully towards one another in an environment where they can disagree, they can make mistakes, because most of us are muddling our way through life generally. So you can get things wrong, and you can start with the assumption that most of the time people in your team are well-intentioned.

Al ElliottSteve, anything you'd want to add to that?

C — REVIEWYeah, it's just really important that people know that There's trust between leaders and the team. So something I saw which worked really well, which I adopted later, was a manager who would close meetings by saying, has anything not been said because it would be inconvenient to me? Has anything not been said because it would be inconvenient? And people quickly learned that actually it was okay to pipe up and say, well, actually I wish I'd said this. And you only have to do it a few times and actually be heard when you say it before generally the culture starts to shift and people go to a meeting with that leader knowing that actually they are welcome to dissent. So some of this is very personal. And as Paul says about behaviors, if a manager chooses to make people welcome to come up with that contrary opinion, and they see that that is free of adverse consequences, well, then they can start changing, and they can start participating as they would wish.

Al ElliottSo that example you were just talking about there, where the manager said at the end, anything I should have— anything's not been said that is of consequence. What's different about that team compared with a team that wouldn't have Wouldn't be able to say that kind of thing.

C — REVIEWWell, I'll give you another example, if I may, where I applied the same technique. So when I was a minister chairing committees of other ministers, you always have the officials around the outside, and they're of course the experts in the field. They've briefed the ministers and they're hoping the minister will say the thing that they've all agreed. And so what happened in teams like that, typically when I wasn't in the chair, is the officials wouldn't get to contribute at all. They'll sit there silently watching on as the ministers say whatever the ministers wish and then leave. And if there's been a mistake made, of course it's a problem. Because by that stage, a government committee has resolved amongst ministers and it's now policy and on we go. So what I would do, and this was a clear difference, I would say at the beginning of a meeting, I recognize that the experts in this field are around the outside of the room amongst officials, and I do want officials to indicate to me if they need to come in with a contrary view. And it would sometimes happen. And that was a really clear difference, which meant that meetings—

Leanne ElliottYeah.

C — REVIEWNot only were more effective and came to the right conclusions, but it meant that decisions didn't have to be undone subsequently when somebody piped up after the meeting. And that was a very difficult thing to do because of the difference of status between ministers and officials. So really, I'm making the point it can be done if somebody chooses, when they're in the chair in particular, to make it possible to include those with a wide range of opinions.

Al ElliottPaul, is it a similar situation in academia, or is it very different?

D — REVIEWI mean, of course, we're Paying attention to the meetings, but most of life in work isn't lived in— well, unless you have meetings all the time, most of life in work isn't lived in meetings, it's lived outside of the meeting. So it's then what the consequences of that disagreement are for how you are then subsequently treated in the rest of your work life. So sometimes people can, and I'm not suggesting this is true of politicians or academics, of course, but in workplaces sometimes people can sort of play the game.

Al ElliottYeah.

D — REVIEWof saying, we want to listen to your views and we want to hear you speak up. And of course, people quickly realize that then how they're subsequently treated can be impacted upon by speaking up. So I kind of want to make that point broader about it has to manifest in how you are treated if you are somebody who disagrees, because we all believe in diversity of thought until someone has a thought that we don't agree with. Everyone's in favor of free speech as long as you agree with what I'm free to say. And so I think we have to recognize and accept That we have almost this kind of inbuilt desire to reach agreement, for people to agree with what we're saying, for no one to really stand out. So, it has to manifest in the actions that are taken outside of the meeting context and not just the words that are used within them.

Leanne ElliottI feel then, Paul, that some of the responsibility comes down to the leader in the room to allow for those opinions to come back, those disagreements to come back. I'm curious, what percentage of leaders do you think actually have this quite naturally where they're open to this type of disagreement? How many, what percentage maybe roughly don't? And how do you bridge that gap? What kind of self-development can you do to be more comfortable with somebody disagreeing with you?

D — REVIEWOh, wow. Why don't you ask an easy question? So, that is a really— so, let me see if I can give a succinct answer to that. I mean, you mentioned humility at the beginning. I think you can't— we can use behavioral science tools and tricks and techniques to nudge and shove people in particular directions. We can't fundamentally change who they are. And so you have to have some sort of first-order conditions in place, which are humility, curiosity. That's a very important component. And sometimes those things can be crowded out by the successes that people may achieve in the workplace, in universities. I mean, think about the higher education system. We kind of do a lot as kids go through school to, I wouldn't say crush, but to redirect their curiosity in directions that are useful for the system and less so for understanding the kind of complexities of the world. So that humility is important. Curiosity is important. And I think being able to signal that in very clear and obvious ways, you can be very organized and very structured and very successful at the same time as having a curious mind. And I think if you are able to show that, and I say that at every single level of an organization and institution, in the junior staff as well as in the senior ones. And it is, again, it's kind of creating those spaces. Leading from the front actually is where some of that will often help is giving examples very openly and honestly about occasions where you've kind of got things wrong and the sort of curious minds have led in directions that may not always lead to good outcomes. But on balance, I come back to a point I really wanted to make at the start, which is that well-functioning societies and families and workplaces celebrate difference. We are only going to muddle through the radical uncertainties that we face in the workplace and elsewhere if we listen to dissenting voices.

C — REVIEWLeanne, I would absolutely love to see survey evidence to directly answer your question. We might have to secure some additional academic funding for Paul. But may I give you a good and a bad example of where people feel free to disagree? So a good example, one which is in a sense paradigmatic, which almost all of us have relied on, is the aircraft cockpit in a multi-crew aircraft. In other words, every airliner. Flight safety absolutely relies on what's called crew resource management. It has to be possible for the copilot, or these days there aren't— there's usually only a copilot, but if there were additional crew, any of the crew to disagree with the captain, because in the past aircraft have been lost because people didn't, they just followed along. So the aircraft cockpit is a great example. of where you are free to disagree. And it's a matter of culture, well-established. There's an imperative for flight safety, so culture has been entrenched to make that possible. And that culture of disagreement extends elsewhere in aerospace, which I saw during my career. A very bad example, I'm afraid, is politics and political staff offices. It is a matter of public record that in Parliament in particular, bullying was terrible, and there had to be training given to members of Parliament. In particular, and this one is one lesson which I'd encourage all leaders to think about, We all underestimate the power of our voice, what we say, and the status we have over those around us because many of us tend to suffer from imposter syndrome. But actually, when we're in a position of authority and we get to determine pay or promotion or whatever, just day-by-day work, the voice that we have and the way that we are heard is really important. And it's much, much easier to crush people's willingness to disagree than people generally, I think, realize when they're leaders.

Al ElliottSteve, can I ask you something? So I read a book a little while ago called The Checklist Manifesto, which I think it used the example exactly of aerospace. And I think it said something like there was a, maybe a Chinese aircraft that crashed because the copilot didn't dare, didn't dare disagree with the pilot. So let's take that into like a more of a company. As a senior leader, do we have any way of kind of changing that sail, that culture, so that they can disagree and get better outcomes?

C — REVIEWWe have to be honest that it's a choice to change culture and to reconsider Consider what's happening. And ideally, people would make those choices before there was a disaster. I mean, very often change, of course, comes after a disaster, but these things are choices. And that's why Paul's written his book Beliefism, and Paul is Mr. Checklist. I'm sure he'll come onto it in a moment. But I think really that's what we are about, is encouraging people to make a positive choice to think about culture and what would work for them to make things more possible to disagree. So the Embrace Checklist, which is Paul's property, intellectual property, is a great checklist for managers to think, How am I behaving? How could I shift the culture? How could I make this organisation tolerant by design?

Leanne ElliottPaul, I want to talk to you about hiring for culture fit. I see it come from often a good place from leaders, but we have a lot of bias, and typically we prefer people and like people more who are more like us, who think like us. So, as much as we might think we want to celebrate our differences and diversity, often we end up in environments where It is very homogenous. I'm curious, have you seen a real case of hiring for culture fit where it actually became hiring for agreement? And I'm wondering what impact that had.

D — REVIEWWe will often ask questions, won't we, in workplaces? Yeah, is this person gonna fit our culture? A much better question would be, is this person gonna challenge our culture? And Also, we can often have very narrow definitions of diversity. It reminds me of Life of Brian when you've got the People's Judean Front and the Judean Front of whatever. There's a hair's breadth between them, but it looks as if there's a real magnified difference. And I think sometimes hiring decisions can fall into that trap as well. Wouldn't it be lovely if in our organizations, and let's say our academic institutions, if we could if we could really hire genuine diversity of thought. So people who vote for reform, people who support the NRA, genuinely, not because I agree with those views, but because they're important to listen to in a well-functioning society. And often our hiring decisions, we think they're diverse. There's a great scene in The Blues Brothers, which is a fantastic film, where they go into the country and western bar and the bartender says, we've got both kinds of music in here, country and western. And that feels like it's a really diverse music, you know, taste, but actually it's relatively narrow. And I think that's what we often do in our hiring decisions.

Al ElliottWhen you've got that happening, I can imagine there being, or the day that it blows up in the office. So whether it's like trans rights or whether it's Brexit or whether it's Gaza or something like that, there's gonna be a point, I think, where it blows up. As a leader, what am I supposed to do at that point?

C — REVIEWThe first thing I would say is it'd be a great idea for leaders to understand the psychology of what's going on. So can I very quickly point to 5 things? I'll do it as quick as I can. The first thing is something called the fundamental attribution error. When people disagree, they don't tend to think, I wonder if I'm wrong. I wonder if there's information I don't have. They don't tend to do that. They tend to think, I'm right. He's wrong.

Leanne ElliottI'm good.

C — REVIEWHe's bad. Once they've thought that, it then kind of takes the gloves off. So it's important for people to understand that first of all, that's the psychology of disagreement, to be fundamentally attuned in groups. The second one is to know this problem of effect. The amygdala kicks in, our blood comes up. Sometimes for me, because of Brexit, people just see me and I can see their blood has risen because I've reminded them of everything about Brexit. And you just have to give people chance, take a breath.

Leanne ElliottYeah.

C — REVIEWGive them a chance before you start communicating to just allow their own temperature to come down a little. We need to think about evidence and reason and whether or not it's effective. We need to think about the context in which we have conversations, how things are framed. And of course, we need to know that we actually are exposed to people who disagree, that we kind of have got through that issue whereby we've reached the conclusion we know the other one's okay. Paul and I disagree on a wide field, but I regard him with great warmth because I know that in the end, he's a good guy and we've got common aims. So, that's kind of the key to understanding the psychology. But the first thing then, if you face something really blowing up, don't let your own effect, your own blood rising, cause you to make a big mistake. So, the absolutely crucial thing for leaders to do is to understand the psychology, not only of their teams, but of themselves, understand how they're likely to react and to know what's going on. Not just psychologically, but physiologically in their teams. They're going to get upset. They'll need to take a pause. So, don't do anything precipitate. Take time to take stock before you do anything.

Al ElliottSteve, you've worked with a lot of leaders. You've been a leader. You've worked in a lot of organizations. When leaders are trying to bring down this disagreement, what do you see them doing wrong that they think they're doing right?

C — REVIEWWell, one thing is to double down into a change of culture, which you find is being rejected. So, a great example of this was what happened at 37signals. It's a software company in the US. They decided to have a cultural reset. There'd been rows on their own software systems about matters related to identity, and they decided, I think the text was that there were to be no more societal and political discussions on our company Basecamp account. The effect of saying that was about a third of the staff decided to leave. Now subsequently, they said this was a success because they had the reset that they wanted in the company. But I think that for most leaders, seeing that there's political identity-based discussion emerging in the company and then really trying to shut it down and then double down on shutting it down, you have to accept that will have consequences of people leaving. And I think for most of us, we wouldn't want a third of our staff to walk out the door because they felt that, for example, that their identity was being challenged and that managers weren't making sure that civilized conduct prevailed.

Al ElliottRight.

C — REVIEWAnd that people had the opportunity to be treated with equal dignity and respect and just get on with their work. So that's one example is, you know, really doubling down into failure. It's a very definite choice to do that.

Al ElliottWhat's so interesting about that, Steve, is because I've been a follower of 37signals for a long time and they wrote books, they literally wrote books on culture, and then they made that decision. Is that because they maybe got— they thought they were so good at culture that everything they did was—

C — REVIEWWell, that's it. It would be really interesting to explore into groupthink. And see how, maybe go and ask the executive team if they're listening to this, please get us in. We'd love to know how the executive team reached the decision that doubling down into that was a good idea. Because like you, I'd been following them for a long time. I used their software. I read what they wrote about culture and how to operate. And I was absolutely astonished that they did it. But we could talk about Kodak and Blockbuster, even Lego. Kodak had a guy who invented the first digital camera in 1975, if you can believe it. But groupthink meant that Kodak didn't embrace it. They shut him down. And you just wonder whether actually groupthink overtook 37signals and they told one another at a senior level, this is a great idea, lost a third of their staff. And again, Paul is very good on this. People don't often change their minds once they're settled on something. Subsequently, having lost a third of their staff, they're telling one another that it was a success. So I think that probably would turn out on inspection to be a great example of groupthink. That people do like to agree with one another in groups, and then they're very reluctant to change their minds. I think it's fundamental in behavioural science.

D — REVIEWDo you know, so much of behavioural science is learning to get over ourselves. I feel like most of my life has been trying to tell people to get over themselves, and for me to get over myself, of course. And one thing that we need to really properly appreciate is that we really want to be like people like us. We fit in. We take our cues for action. from people that we identify with. And I know many people will be familiar with Asch's famous experiments in the '60s where people were asked to judge the length of lines on a board. And they came in the room, but there were 7 Stooges sitting in front of them all saying that one of the shorter lines was longer. Now, you are then faced with a really difficult challenge. Do I say what I think I know to be true unless my eyes are really that bad, or do I—

C — REVIEWAgree.

D — REVIEWDo I fit in with what everyone else is saying? And significantly large numbers of people, even in environments where it's really obvious what the answer is, choose to fit in. So you can imagine how easy it is and how much we want to fit in when it's difficult problems and difficult questions. And so I think that anybody who says, I don't care what people think, is probably someone who really does a lot because we all do. And so being able— we're not going to We're not going to will ourselves into disagreement.

C — REVIEWYou—

D — REVIEWwe, we have to do it by designing environments that make it easier for people to disagree because of our strong human desire to be like people like us.

Al ElliottQuick announcement for all listeners. Yeah, I've got a, I've got a new toy on my, on my little deck thing so I can make my voice change. Anyway, sorry, Leanne.

Leanne ElliottI love it. Do it again.

Al ElliottHello, Leanne.

Leanne ElliottDo another one.

Al ElliottHello!

Leanne ElliottBut we didn't interrupt your podcast listening for, uh, for this. We actually interrupted it to tell you about one of our new favorite podcasts. It's called Success Story. It is hosted by Scott D. Clary, and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features question and answer sessions And conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship.

Al ElliottOh, and if you like this podcast, then I think you'll love Scott's episode back in December where the infamous Seth Godin talks about empowering employees. So go listen to Success Stories wherever you get your podcasts.

Leanne ElliottI have so many thoughts, and I'm going to try and put them into it, into a question. Steve, I wanna, I wanna, I think like there's an elephant in the room in terms of what we're talking about here, in terms of having dignity and respect and allowing for disagreement in a way that is productive and effective. Yet, and I'm, I'm not a hugely political person, but if I watch, you know, the House of Commons, it sounds like to me it's just back and forth, who can out-insult the other, and nothing really gets done, to the point where now, you know, new Prime Minister Andy Burnham is saying this is something that, that needs to change. So I guess my question is, one, is that performative and things actually do get done? Or is it a case that if you were doing what you do now, looking at the House of Commons, what would you change to make it work better?

C — REVIEWLeanne, there's so much to unpack there. So first thing is, the good news is you're right, a lot of it is performative. So if you look at the register of all party parliamentary groups, which is public, you'll see that across a wide range of subjects, MPs come together and work on issues across party and they produce reports and there is a great deal of consensus about an issue. And you could agree or disagree with it, but similarly on formal select committees. So I was on the Treasury Select Committee for many years and typically reports are issued by consensus on a serious issue like, I know, the regulation of the insurance industry. And people will come together and do a serious piece of work. Actually, the main thing is it'll bore you to death reading the report. But it is serious, it is necessary, and there is consensus. If you judge the House of Commons and Parliament and our processes by PMQs, you will come up with the judgment that you've said. And I remember particularly when George Osborne and Ed Balls were debating one another, the first 2, 3 speeches, their speeches would be hugely pugnacious and combative. What they wanted was to be at the top of the news as having won. But if it's a debate on the economy, by the time you get an hour in and the chamber's a bit thinned out, Actually, people are having quite sensible conversations and engaging with one another. So in a sense, the worst thing for public debate and politics is the attention of the cameras and the contest for votes, because attention is such a scarce resource. And that means that politics can look very, very bad when people are paying attention, which is exactly the wrong time. I think in business that has lessons, is that it matters how you behave whether people are watching or not. And, you know, don't try and— rather, try not to rise to the bait of, you know, trying to look like something perhaps that you wouldn't want to look like just because the glare of attention is on you. You might not believe it, Leanne, but there are actually rules to constrain what people say. You can't call each other liar, you can't use rude words, you know, and yet somehow people do manage to put the boot quite effectively into one another, but it's a very unusual workplace. Yeah, yeah, it is.

Leanne ElliottIt really is. Paul, I want to go back to, to groupthink, and I loved what you said about, you know, a lot of it is just learning to get over, get over yourself. Easier said than done though, isn't it? And particularly, I think, when you're in a leadership position where things are easy because your team are telling you what you want to hear.

D — REVIEWYeah.

Leanne ElliottWhat are the signs that, that a leader might be able to look out for that this is now becoming a problem, that actually it's counterproductive of me to allow this to continue?

D — REVIEWI don't think it's necessarily for the leader to kind of realise that or recognise it. I think it's for the environment within which the decisions are made to be designed in ways that make it easier for them to notice. Because I don't think we're the best one in the world. We know to live with— if people are all nodding along with us, that's good for our ego. It makes us feel better about ourselves. We think we're smart and everyone Yeah. So I don't think we're going to be stopping and saying, whoa, whoa, hold on a minute, there's too much agreement. I don't like this. It's just not going to happen. So there needs to be maybe checks and balances. Steve and I and others have spoken about red team challenges in public policymaking, or you could set up particular parts of an organization that are deliberately charged with being provocative so that they don't get chastised for doing so because it's literally their job to do that. So I think it's more in the architecture rather than it would be in the leaders themselves noticing it.

Al ElliottAny thoughts, Steve?

C — REVIEWYeah. So the thing that Paul really reminded me there is if you look at the lead-up to the global financial crisis, it is replete with examples of people being put in place to offer challenge and then not being listened to, not being successful. So for example, HBOS had a senior risk officer whose job was to challenge management. But when he warned the bank was growing too fast, its sales culture had outrun its controls and so He was dismissed by his own account to Parliament. And this is really, it's the big difference between saying challenge is welcome and then actually allowing yourself to be challenged. And risk officers are a particularly good example running into the global financial crisis because they were there for the purpose of resisting and provoking and so on. Lehman Brothers, just the same. They had risk limits, they had risk management processes, but the bankruptcy report found that they'd been breaking them. And that's an absolute classic where people say one thing and do another. And again, consistency in your culture is really important, even when you've specifically set somebody up as a, as it were, as a provocateur to make sure that you have had challenge.

Leanne ElliottIt seems like such a fine balancing act to be able to get a team environment, a team working together where disagreement, you know, continues to be respectful whilst allowing for challenge to avoid really significant and serious situations from happening, like the examples you gave there, Steve. Paul, you were saying that there's actually rules in— or was it Steve, you were saying there's actually rules in Parliament that you can't call people a liar, and there's certain kind of etiquette, I guess, for lack of a better word. Is that something that's needed as well in teams? Because my worry would be it can become— disagreeing very strongly with somebody can quickly become personal. And quite angry. Whereas, as you said, kind of that fear of being able to speak up, you kind of stagnate. So, where's the balance, and what rules or tactics can you put in place to try and facilitate that?

C — REVIEWI think, Leanne, to just first answer that question, it's important to think about context, because we've been talking about when things go terribly badly wrong and politics has bled into the workplace. But that's really only one very serious use case where, in a sense, the The situation's blown up. Something that's not immediately work-related and the purpose of the company is now really prejudicial to the interests of the firm. And that's in a sense rebuilders. They need to come back from a disaster and avoid it. But there are 2 other places where fighting against groupthink and enabling disagreement is really important. One is where you've got, as it were, a frontier company. Everybody faces radical uncertainty now, right? But I mean, suppose you're an Apple. And you're not actually the leader in AI. What will you do next? How will you escape this problem that Apple's AI is not in fact world-leading? So you're a leader, how do you maintain your leadership? And the other one is a sense the guardrail. You're doing great, you're innovating, but things could go wrong. How do you make sure that you've put in place measures to ensure that disagreement is possible and you maintain your leadership? So as it were, frontiers, guardrails, and rebuilders. And each of them will have a slightly different context.

D — REVIEWFirst of all, you're absolutely right. We quickly go from seeing a disagreement on a belief or an underlying value or something to the person. And then the person becomes categorized as being wholly one of us or one of them. And that is, I think, the first thing to recognize that we do that. One of the things we can do to address that, drawing on the EMBRACE framework that Steve Yeah. Kindly mentioned earlier, the B of EMBRACE is bonding, is to remind ourselves of the similarities, the things that make us like one another rather than different. And some of those can be very unexpected and interesting ones. Once I was amazed to find out that Steve likes the Chemical Brothers. That gives me an enormous bonding with him. I'm being serious, by the way, that once you bond over something that is both unexpected and wholly irrelevant In many ways to other areas that you might disagree with one another. You recognize that that is a person just like you and in many ways similar to you. And we shouldn't laugh because in war zones and conflict zones, they use music, they use sport, they use art, they use humor, well-placed humor, you have to be a bit careful with that sometimes, to disarm and engage people. So if it can work in conflict zones, then it should be able to work in workplaces. There are clearly the need for rules and guardrails, and Steve was very explicit about some of those in Parliament. I think it's important that they are explicit because there's— I can't help at some point mention social class, because if you're from a working-class background and you go into ostensibly middle-class professions, there are implicit rules of how you behave and how you speak and how you act. that you are wholly unaware of and that you don't know those rules. And it's one of the reasons, one of the many reasons why really to be successful in those purportedly elite occupations, you have to quickly learn how to fit in, especially if you are from a working-class background. And many people don't know how to do that, so they simply leave. And so I think it's important that those gold rails are very clear and explicit and everybody understands them rather than being implicit codes of conduct. That you can join our club if you learn how to play the rules, but we're not gonna tell you what those rules are.

Al ElliottI love this. And I think that we, we've had a, a previous guest, um, Ruth Hancock, um, who was CEO of Octopus Money, I think. And she talked about social mobility and exactly that. Um, so it was definitely, that's really interesting. I wanna talk about a specific example and maybe touch on your EMBRACE, um, framework here. So when you first met Steve, I believe that you were at loggerheads on Brexit. So did you use your own embrace sort of framework to then turn that into something positive that you got today?

D — REVIEWOh, I'm really not that clever. Thank you for assuming that I might be. So I actually, on Brexit, had the worst possible view, which was that I didn't care. And there's only so much attention or resources that we have. There's only so much things that we can care about. I just thought that we would I could see reasons for staying, reasons for leaving, and we muddled our way through if we got on with it. And it never became an existential threat to me. Well, of course, actually that's really interesting because they say about the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And I think to my LSE Remainer colleagues for whom it became existential, if I was a Brexiteer, they would've understood that more because at least I cared about something they cared about, even though we disagreed. The fact that I didn't have a view on it was worse. And this is really interesting. It's not just that we don't like disagreement. We need people to care about the things we care about in the same proportion. And so that was a really interesting insight for me, particularly around my LSE faculty colleagues. But when Steve and I met, yes, I mean, it was as much the fact that he, in my mind, was a libertarian wing of the Tory Party. I'm a broadly social justice left-leaning LSE academic. But we very much agreed about the collateral harms that were likely to be inflicted on the population from the restrictions during COVID And there weren't very many people speaking out at that time against them. At that time, there's been people subsequently who have said it was a bad idea. But I went on public record very early on to say that I was pretty sure the harms would outweigh the benefits and that we should be accounting more for these. And the libertarian wing of the Tory Party were the only people at that point that were actually speaking out.

Al ElliottSo Paul, you've got this EMBRACE framework. Talk us through how it actually helps people. Give us a real-life example.

D — REVIEWYeah. So the first thing is to say that that's a checklist. And I know we talked earlier about the power of checklists. It draws us away from a well-established psychological phenomenon called situational blindness. And so you use the example of planes taking off without copilots because pilots weren't paying attention to the presence of a copilot. They were paying attention to what was in front of them, the engines running, the lights that are on that should be on, the ones that are off should be off, and being situationally blind to something that really substantively matters, the presence of a copilot. So checklists draw our attention away from what's in front of us to what substantively matters. And so what I tried to do in the 7 letters of EMBRACE is to set out a checklist about how you can design into your workplaces, into your organizations, those elements that make it easier to listen to disagreement. So we've touched on a couple of those. We talked about bonding, reminding ourselves of what makes us similar rather than different. Steve mentioned the A, which is affect, feelings, taking the heat out of a situation, allowing ourselves to calm down before we Engage in an emotional way. And so I think it would be suitable for any environment where you really do genuinely want to listen to and respect and account for disagreement and difference. So anytime an organization has a meeting or an environment within which they want different perspectives and different viewpoints, Maybe it's about how to deal with uncertainty. Maybe it's about creativity, to be more innovative and creative and coming up with ideas in an ideation kind of way. Any of those elements, any or all or many of those elements can be embedded in the environment in ways that make it easier for us to listen to those we disagree with. Oh, and also at the top of the show, I mentioned mistakes, the fact that we are muddling our way through. So being able to build in psychological safety genuinely in ways that allow people to come up with silly ideas that sometimes might not turn out to be so silly after all. I wrote a book about a decade ago or more now called Happiness by Design, which was really about how you're not going to be happier by thinking yourself so. You're going to do it by making it easier, frankly, to be happier by designing it into your daily life and your experiences, to use behavioral science to be happier without having to think too hard about it. And in a way, this is kind of tolerance by design or disagreement by design, to embed it in the architecture of our environment. Because we're the best one in the world for all the reasons that we've discussed so far, we're not really wanting to listen to people that disagree with us because it's so much easier if they just agreed and fitted in.

Leanne ElliottJust so we're really clear for our listeners, do you mind just going through those letter by letter for me?

D — REVIEWOf course I can, yes. And I was conscious of I'm not boring people. Because I should say, of course, because I'm a very, very serious and learned scholar, I came up with the letters of EMBRACE and then made the evidence fit them. And actually remarkably, remarkably the evidence fits incredibly well. It's a 7-letter checklist, which is a nice number of items.

C — REVIEWYeah.

D — REVIEWEMBRACE is a good word because that's what we want people to do. I could have otherwise used humility. That actually would've been a good word. And the word that you've mentioned a few times, Leanne, which is curiosity, you've sort of unintentionally almost said, I'm curious about you, because that's a curious mind that's going into an environment. So all of those words would've worked equally well, but it's embrace. And so the first E is environment, that is literally understanding that we're driven more by context than by cognition. The M is mistakes. The B is bonding. The R, which we haven't discussed is reason. There's always, even if we think people are stupid and silly, there's always a reason for why they think the way they do. That could be driven by evidence, it could be driven by narrative, often powerful stories. Actually, much of the time, actually, powerful stories are the main determinant of what we think and feel. So that's to recognize reason. A is affect, feelings. C is collection. It's the closest synonym I could find to diversity. So it's a collection of people in the decision environment. We've touched on that. And then the final one actually is one that we haven't explicitly discussed so much is exposure. If you look at the political science literature, political scientists, I mean, there's no such thing as a silver bullet, but it's as close as to a silver bullet for political scientists. Once you are around people of difference, you realize that they're not that different after all. That takes us back into the B of bonding. There's lots of good data showing that exposure to different perspectives, different people in particular, changes not necessarily our minds about an issue. And actually, that's a very important point to remind myself to say is I'm not interested in changing your mind or anyone's mind about anything. You can hold whatever beliefs you hold for whatever reasons you hold them. What I want you to do is to recognize and accept that well-functioning societies will also listen to different beliefs to yours and will incorporate those in the ultimate decision-making process. That's why— that's what I'm trying to do. Because when people say— it's a really interesting one— when maybe people say, oh yeah, I, I, you know, there should be more tolerance in the world, what they actually really mean is that people should agree with me more. Um, um, and that's not what— that's not what I mean by tolerance.

Al ElliottWhat's the first conversation that a manager should be having with 2 people who profoundly disagree at work?

D — REVIEWIt's a good question. I mean, I do think that often managers will be better placed to answer that question. It's really hard to answer any question in the abstract without understanding the nuances of the context. So that's my get-out-of-jail-free card for not answering your question. No, but I will try and answer it in the sense that I would probably not go directly towards the source of the disagreement. That would be the worst place to start. I would probably get them not to talk about that at all.

C — REVIEWYeah.

D — REVIEWFor a very long time and maybe get them to be reminded of what they bond over, like the Chemical Brothers. There's no point me and Steve getting into a discussion about Brexit, right? I mean, or you getting into it. Let's find something that we can agree on or points of similarity that remind us that this is another human being and not the enemy would probably be quite a good place to start, I think.

C — REVIEWI think the first thing to do is to ask each of them, to express clearly and concisely the extent of the problem that they have so that it can be properly understood. Because otherwise, you can end up with a complete lack of understanding where they're truly coming from. And trying to understand the motive, what they're trying to achieve, trying to find the common ground is the first thing. Goodness knows I've seen terrible rows at work. And in one case, it was ego.

Leanne ElliottYeah.

C — REVIEWBut yeah, the first thing is get them to clearly state the clearest articulation of their problem and why it has arisen, but don't do it while their amygdala has kicked in and they're still affected by it. In other words, their blood is up and they're angry. Give them time, talk about it later, and don't make it a disciplinary matter.

Al ElliottSo I want to ask you both the same question. So we'll start off with you, Paul. Is there ever a point of no return? And it'd be great if you had an example of something either in in your work life or even in the world where there is a point of no return?

C — REVIEWI can give you a very clear example. I remember a founder causing an investor to buy a debt instrument and then to foreclose on it in order to force a company into insolvency so that he could see to it that company was purchased and under his own control. And obviously, if somebody does something like that, it's beyond the pale and there is no going back from it. And that is a very clear one. Another one is if, again, we're talking about the rebuilders here where something political perhaps has come into the workplace. If you can't reestablish a willingness to communicate and go forward on shared interests, then it's possible people will have to be moved and so on. But I think it is worth saying, this is what I think not what most companies face. Most companies probably face a problem of being trapped in groupthink. And because they fear the explosion of these issues, they don't make it possible to disagree because they're afraid of where it could—

Al ElliottLead.

C — REVIEWAnd that's really what can ruin companies. Kodak, Blockbuster are really preeminent examples. It must be possible in an age of radical uncertainty to disagree gracefully and say, well, actually, what are we going to do about AI? What will happen when quantum computing can break our algorithms or rather our cryptography? What are we going to do? We better prepare now. And so in an age of radical uncertainty, breaking out of groupthink without these severe downside risks is I think the preeminent challenge. But yes, sure, sometimes things go terribly badly wrong and it's not possible to recover them.

Al ElliottBefore you go, could you tell us a bit more about the Provocation People? What do you do? Who do you help? How does it work?

C — REVIEWYeah, well, we set the company up in order to advance Paul's intellectual capital supported by my experience, because obviously I've seen a great deal of disagreement over the years and tended, I think, to have a reputation for navigating it with civility. I did get a Politician of the Year Award for civility in public life. So we're bringing those 2 perspectives together. To help companies who maybe are rebuilding back from profound problems through disagreement, to help firms who are needing guardrails to make sure they continue to succeed, and to help those frontier firms who need to make sure that they don't fall into groupthink. So, we're available to come and work with boards and with teams to fit into their methods of changing culture, to help make sure that the best of Paul's behavioral science and my experience is used to enable them to embed tolerance by design.

D — REVIEWI would just add to Steve, to go back to the 2 H's at the beginning, humility and happiness. That's what we're bringing as well. So I have a book called Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With. That is available everywhere in paperback now. And so I would strongly recommend that people at least buy it, if not read it, and ideally read it.

Leanne ElliottI just wondered, the next time you guys have a dinner party, can I come please? Because I'd imagine the conversation would be—

C — REVIEWWell, it'd be absolutely wonderful if you were here, and I'm honoured indeed you should say that. We can talk about Brexit, which we haven't done. You can beat me up. And I can say I'm sorry you suffered.

D — REVIEWAnd Steve's paying. And Steve's paying.

Leanne ElliottDo you know what? My thing with Brexit, which is why I'm such a big fan of the work and the work you'll continue to do, my issue with Brexit was once it was done, let's just try and figure it out together to make the best of this situation for the UK. Yeah. So I think that was my kind of beef with it. But from what I hear, it all worked out fine, right?

C — REVIEWWell, there's lots to discuss, but I mean, the main thing I would say is that people definitely genuinely suffered. And whenever I meet somebody who has suffered and whose life has been changed, possibly permanently, I always say, I'm sorry that happened to you. It's not what I intended. It's not what I meant. And what I'm doing there is first speaking authentically. I am sorry. I didn't mean for people to suffer. And second, of course, these days, when I'm doing it, I'm aware that what I'm doing is coping with affect and bonding and exposure and trying to get to the point that we can collaborate, even though we might otherwise be adversaries on that issue. And Really, that's the thing. I agree with you, Leanne. We need to move on. But as we move on, people like me who supported it need to say to those of you who didn't, I am sorry you were so affected by it. It's not what I intended. Can we please find a way to move forward despite that?

Al ElliottYou've just been listening to Steve Baker and Paul Dolan, and here are our top 3 lessons for leaders.

Leanne ElliottLesson 1, your bigger risk is silence, not a disagreement. Steve's point was that most companies fear an explosion so much that they never allow disagreement. That's how Kodak, Blockbuster, and the bankers before the financial crisis got into trouble. If nobody's challenging you, that's the warning sign.

Al ElliottYeah. And lesson 2, end your next meeting with Steve's question, has anything not been said because it would be inconvenient to me? Then make sure nobody pays for answering it honestly. Paul's warning is that people watch how you treat dissenters outside the meeting.

Leanne ElliottAnd lesson 3, build disagreement into a structure. Don't rely on good intentions. Paul said leaders won't notice too much agreement because it feels nice. So hire for people who will challenge your culture, not just fit it, and give someone the job of being provocative so they can't be punished for it.

Al ElliottAnd when it does blow up, take a breath first. Both of our guests were clear that your blood pressure is the first thing to manage.

Leanne ElliottPaul's book, Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With, is out now in paperback. You can find the Provocation People and Steve's newsletter, Fighting for a Free Future, in the show notes.

Al ElliottRegular listeners will know that we don't live in the UK, we live in Europe, and Brexit was a massive, massive problem for us personally. But also, we were heartbroken when it happened because we genuinely believed that the UK should have stayed in Yeah, and I'm not gonna lie, it was kind of nice when Steve apologised to people who suffered after Brexit, um, even though it wasn't what he intended.

Leanne ElliottIt's a small thing, and it shows disagreement doesn't have to be a fight.

Al ElliottAnd it also underlines that this was our personal opinion, and it affected us personally. There are people on the other end of the argument where it probably affected them just as much.

Leanne ElliottDo check out the show notes for all the resources we have mentioned. That is Truth, Lies and Work. That's all for today. We'll be back on Tuesday with another This Week in Work, but for now, this is Truth, Lies and Work. Put the chair down and we'll see you next week.

Al ElliottBye-bye.

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EP 32123 Jul 2026