What do you do when you encounter a person who holds a fundamentally different perspective than you? Think climate-change denier aunt eating Thanksgiving dinner next to her climate activist niece. With so many polarizing issues, encountering disagreement in our homes and workplaces is not hard to imagine.
Julia Minson, Ph.D., an expert in the psychology of disagreement, says our first instinct may be to try to fix that person. This often leads to unproductive conservations that irritate and ultimately erode trust. At this point, we may completely dismiss the other person, saying, “I don’t get it. How can they be so wrong?”
Gina Fong, a consumer anthropologist and professor at the Kellogg School of Business encourages us to be curious about the people we don’t understand. “People may not make sense to you, but they always make sense to themselves,” says Fong. She believes it’s important to learn how they’ve arrived at their perspective by practicing curiosity, which she defines as “wonder without judgment.”
Editor, author, and self-described “expert in not knowing,” Ann Morgan believes we can take joy in this kind of curiosity and even train ourselves to sit with the discomfort of incomprehension. When we are aware of what we don’t understand, we can become motivated learners. It’s being unaware of one’s limited perspective that gets us into trouble in our interpersonal and leadership communications. When we are unaware, we may assume everyone holds the same opinion as us (the false consensus effect) or find ourselves in an echo chamber with people who hold similar worldviews.
During her project A Year of Reading The World, Ann Morgan read one book from every country in the world — 197 to be exact. In her metaphorical global journey, she encountered many texts that she didn’t understand and didn’t have the tools to interpret them. At first she was afraid and embarrassed to admit she didn’t understand what she was reading. Thousands of people had signed up to read her year-long blog about this adventure in reading, putting her failure to understand the texts on very public display.
However, by learning to sit with her incomprehension, Morgan uncovered incredible skills that we all need if we want to lead teams effectively and authentically — how to navigate different and conflicting perspectives.
“By doing this quest I discovered the richness of a variety of stories,” shares Morgan, “and to dignify all perspectives according them all equal weight while trying to see what I could encounter from each nation.” During her tour of the world, she read texts that were never meant to be understood by an English-language reader. She had no access to the context or worldview of the authors and some of the texts had to be translated just for her because there were no stories translated into English from that country.
Though she had thought of herself as cosmopolitan prior to her quest, she realized her worldview was actually quite narrow. The publishing industry and her education privileged had English-language stories causing her to ignore a multitude of perspectives.
“Engaging with a wide range of perspectives through stories, through other forms of looking at the world, enables us to have a greater mental agility — a mental algorithm that’s much more flexible, subtle and nuanced,” says Morgan. “It’s actually a hugely enriching and exciting place to be, if you can embrace it.”
Morgan is no longer worried about admitting what she doesn’t understand. “I worry about someone who stays within the bubble of the familiar and what feels safe to them,” says Morgan. According to Morgan, exposing ourselves to different viewpoints helps us engage with complexity and other people’s humanity.
Morgan now leads Incomprehension Workshops, where people read an unknown text without context to experience how they react to facing unfamiliar perspectives and scenarios. Her fourth book, Relearning To Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, delves into this challenge and can be pre-ordered now for a 2025 publication.
“Very often in my Incomprehension Workshops, I find people get irritated with certain things in the text. I often, even now, feel flashes of irritation or annoyance when I come up against something that doesn’t feel right or sit instinctively with me.”
It’s in the moments of irritation that she encourages herself and the participants in the workshop to challenge themselves and ask why they are reacting negatively. Morgan explores how getting comfortable with discomfort and owning our limitations can take us further and deepen our appreciation of the world’s complexity and richness.
“Embracing not knowing opened up huge insights into who I was,” says Morgan, “how I’ve been conditioned, the voices I’d been trained to listen to, assumptions I had made. Being open to exploring the gaps and discovering possibilities opens up a whole new world.”
Dr. Julia Minson adds that curiosity is an internal process, so that when we want to learn more about someone’s point of view, you have to verbalize your curiosity — respectfully. “I have to use words to show you that I want to learn about your perspective,” explains Minson.
Dr. Minson encourages people in disagreement to ask questions that prompt your counterpart to explain why the topic is important and where their perspective or passion comes from. In other words, questions that show you’re interested in learning their subjective interpretation.
With the upcoming holidays, we are likely to be sharing space and conversations with people who have different perspectives on us. Take it as an opportunity to practice sitting with your incomprehension and curiosity. After all, as Gina Fong says, when you are seeking to understand someone, it’s no longer about agreeing or disagreeing. If you are feeling apprehensive about these conversations, here are some tips to cultivate curiosity while navigating disagreement.