The Cost of Being Right

Over the past weeks, I’ve been myself paying closer attention to the moment when disagreement begins.

Partly because it feels like polarization is becoming more frequent, I've been trying to find a way back to enriching discussions.

Photo by Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash

Conversations seem to move too quickly lately—toward certainty, toward positions, and often toward quiet or open division. Whether in leadership settings, on teams, or in more public discourse, there is a growing sense that we are not only disagreeing more but also finding it harder to remain in conversation with those who see the world differently.

And so I began to shift my focus.

Not only to why we disagree, but what happens in the very first seconds when it begins.

It is easy to miss, because on the surface, nothing much changes.

Someone says something we don’t agree with, and almost instantly, something begins to shift internally. Our thinking speeds up, we begin to evaluate what we are hearing, and we start to look—often quite precisely—for what does not quite hold.

We often give the impression that we are still listening, of course. We‘re professional.

But we’re not listening in the same way as before.

What changes is the focus of our attention. Instead of staying with the question “What is being taught here?” Or „What can I learn?“, we begin to move—almost without noticing—toward a different question: “Where does this not work?”

In many ways, this shift is understandable. We have become highly skilled at thinking quickly, structuring ideas, and forming clear positions. These are strengths that serve us well in many contexts. We‘ve been primed for a healthy debate.

And yet, something else happens at the same time.

The moment we begin evaluating, we are no longer fully in contact with the other person’s thinking—we are primarily in contact with our own.

What makes this particularly subtle is that the shift happens so quickly that it still feels like engagement, even though, in a meaningful sense, we have already stepped out of the conversation.

Not visibly, but cognitively. This is not a character flaw. It is, at least in part, how our minds are designed to work.

The moment we feel challenged, the brain moves to protect our sense of coherence and our need to be right. It draws on what it already knows, becoming faster, sharper—and at the same time, less open.

We stop exploring.

And we begin, often quite skillfully, to defend.

And this, inevitably, comes at a cost.

Because when every idea is immediately evaluated, it has very little chance to unfold fully. And when it does not fully unfold, it cannot reveal anything beyond what we already expect to see.

Over time, something begins to narrow.

Our range—our ability to encounter perspectives that do not immediately fit within our existing frames — becomes narrower.

And this is where the broader impact begins to show.

If this pattern repeats—not just individually, but collectively—it becomes harder to stay in conversation across difference. We begin to cluster around what feels familiar, and we lose some of our capacity to remain curious in the presence of views that challenge us.

Polarisation, then, is not only a result of strong opinions. It may also be the accumulation of many small moments in which we stop staying with each other’s thinking.

And this is where disagreement quietly loses much of its potential value.

Not because we fail to agree, but because we no longer allow ourselves to be changed by the encounter. Add to that an algorithm that feeds you your preference, and this all gets harder and harder to correct.

Several of you wrote to me over the past weeks, reflecting on these moments. What stood out was not only how often you recognized it, but also how difficult it is to remain present once it begins.

And perhaps this is precisely where the opportunity lies.

Not in winning the argument, but in staying with the other person’s thinking just a little longer than feels natural.

Sometimes that might mean asking one more question. Sometimes it means resisting the urge to respond immediately. And sometimes it shows up in very simple ways:

“What is it that bothers you (or me) most about this?”

Not as a technique, and not as a conversational trick, but as a genuine attempt to remain in the conversation without immediately reshaping it.

Because something interesting tends to happen in those moments.

When we stop trying to improve the other person’s thinking, they often become more open to refining it themselves. And in that space, we begin to notice things we would otherwise have missed—a nuance, a partial truth, or a perspective that does not replace our own, but quietly expands it.

And perhaps this is also where reconnection begins.

Not by removing disagreement, or by softening our views, but by rebuilding the ability to stay in contact with each other’s thinking—even when it is different from our own.

Perhaps this is where the real value of disagreement lies. Not in arriving at the right answer as quickly as possible, but in allowing our thinking to be shaped through the process itself.

And so the question may begin to shift.

From: Am I right?

To something far more demanding:

Am I willing to stay long enough to discover something I have not yet seen?

Because in the end, the cost of being right is rarely the disagreement itself.

It is the far subtler possibility that we are no longer changed by it.