The benefits of disagreeing: A powerful speech Margaret Heffernan

Entrepreneur, writer and former CEO, Margaret Heffernan enraptures the audience in this fascinating TEDx Talk titled ‘Dare to Disagree’. Revolving around the theme of standing up for what you believe in or what you to believe to be right, Heffernan makes a revolutionary talk fit for all ages.

The keynote speaker of the talk begins narrating the example of researcher Alice Stewart who was interested in conducting a study on childhood cancer in the 1950s but was unfortunately on a shoestring budget. Hence, through her small-scale experiment she aimed to find correlations which could then be investigated further. Her findings were overwhelming with results pointing to X-ray machines that increased the likelihood of childhood cancer.
Her findings provoked doctors of the time and the controversial research took nearly 25 years before they could be adopted UK and USA. Alice had hired a statician named George Neil to verify her findings and not just mindlessly assume results. Hence, Heffernan attempts to point out through this example, the benefit of viewing conflict as a form of thinking and how working with people who are different from us is inherently positive for us.

Heffernan begins to state some numbers next, narrating how 85 per cent of executives admittedly restricted themselves from raising concerns at their workplace because they were afraid of conflict and hence unlike George and Alice, failed to challenge themselves. Heffernan further talks about how it is a skill to use conflict to solve a problem and how it all boils down to leaders taking the responsibility of raising this issue since others may be too afraid of doing the same.

She goes on to talk about how some PhD students are made to submit five statements that they are willing to defend in order to prove that they can deal with a challenge. According to Heffernan, this practice ought to be extended to school kids as well in order to prepare them for conflict at a younger age. Heffernan concludes her talk reiterating how most conflicts are caused breaking silence that has been out in the open for long but people are unwilling to challenge it. It is only when we dare to break that silence, do we allow others to do their best thinking.
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