In Being Wrong, Kathryn Shulz addresses the commonly held myth that we should purge our language of hedge words:

These kinds of disarming, self-deprecating comments, (“this could be wrong, but…” “maybe I’m off the mark here…”) are generally considered more typical of the speech patterns of women than men. Not coincidentally, they are often criticized as overly timid and self-sabotaging. But I’m not sure that’s the whole story. Awareness of one’s own qualms, attention to contradiction, acceptance of the possibility of error: these strike me as signs of sophisticated thinking, far preferable in many contexts to the confident bulldozer of unmodified assertions. Philip Tetlock, too, defends these and similar speech patterns (or, rather, the mental habits they reflect), describing them, admiringly, as “self-subversive thinking.” That is, they let us function as our own intellectual sparring partner, thereby honing—or puncturing—our beliefs. They also help us do greater justice to complex topics and make it possible to have riskier thoughts. At the same time, by moving away from decree and toward inquiry, they set the stage for more open and interesting conversations.

Schulz, Being Wrong, page 309

I want to reinforce that phrasing—moving away from decree and toward inquiry. It reminds me of Chris Xu’s classic and brilliant post about blowhard syndrome—that is, the tendency for our culture to reward hubris and perfectionism and to pathologize humility and self-awareness. By contrast, the move toward inquiry values the opportunity to learn over the desire to validate one’s existing—and necessarily incomplete—knowledge. That is, inquiry is a dynamic, active movement, unlike the stuckness and stagnancy that a decree evokes. Inquiry is an open door; decree, a closed one.

Moreover, I don’t think it’s an accident that we associate those hedge words with femininity. Oppression always demands absolutes: unable to stand up to inquiry, it marks inquiry as proscribed. But like a king living in a glass house declaring a ban on bricks, the decree is itself impossible to maintain. Sooner or later, everyone picks up a stone.

One of the principles I come back to over and over is adrienne maree brown’s invitation to move at the speed of trust. That is, whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow.

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz gets at another angle of this principle: that often when we argue over how to engage with one another, our expressed desire to be right—to “win” the argument—is really a thinly veiled need to be cared for:

Our attachment to our own sense of rightness runs deep, and our capacity to protect it from assault is cunning and fierce. It is hard, excruciatingly hard, to let go of the conviction that our own ideas, attitudes, and ways of living are the best ones. And yet, ironically, it’s mainly relinquishing this attachment that is difficult and uncomfortable—not, generally speaking, what happens afterward. This provides a crucial clue about the origins of our desire to be right. It isn’t that we care so fiercely about the substance of our claims. It is that we care about feeling affirmed, respected, and loved.

The conflation of these things—wanting to be right with wanting to be valued—helps explain why disagreements within intimate relationships can feel not just like betrayal, but like rejection. That’s one reason why silly squabbles over the dishes sometimes blow up into epic battles about whether our partner listens to us, understands us, and cares for us. The moral here is obvious: we can learn to live with disagreement and error as long as we feel esteemed and loved.

Schulz, Being Wrong, page 271

I’d expand on that last bit, and argue it also helps explain why small work squabbles—whether over project management tools, or desk assignments, or the taxonomy of Slack channels—have a similar tendency to bloom into battles over whether we have sufficient autonomy, respect, and power. This is not to say that our experience of intimacy at work is anything like our experience of intimacy at home. (Although, as I’ve argued in the past, I can and do think love can show up at work.) It is to say that our relationships at work are not somehow diminished simply by arising from work. We demand trust and respect at home, in the streets, and in our workplaces—and rightly so.

To flip this around, if we want to build cultures where productive disagreement can happen—whether it’s about the dishes, or the ideal code architecture, or which lines of business to invest in—we have to first establish and nurture that trust and respect. Otherwise we’ll be too busy being right to get around to learning something new.