The Dissonance Dividend
Harnessing the power of doubt
At the heart of this blog are three claims:
We need to cultivate an appetite for cognitive dissonance, and an ability to benefit from it. We call this the Dissonance Dividend.
We can do this by using three design principles to dampen our natural threat responses, stay open, and channel our disorientation into insight and action
We can only get these benefits if we’re willing to confront our own dissonance shadows along the way.
Most of us understandably try to avoid psychological discomfort. Yet some of our most important mindset shifts begin in those awkward moments when our assumptions wobble, our certainties fray, and something in us quietly thinks “hmm, that doesn’t fit”. In this final Bramble Quarterly of 2025, I explore why those moments matter for our professional growth and the health of our organisations, and how we can learn to harness them rather than smooth them away. I call the benefits of this approach the Dissonance Dividend.
The idea is illustrated by a conversation I had with a senior executive - a moment that cracked my assumptions and left me both uneasy and strangely energised. He unexpectedly agreed with a belief I had assumed he would reject out of hand. This forced me to confront two kinds of dissonance, including an unwelcome truth that I had been suppressing in order to uphold my own integrity. These sorts of experience make us wiser, as true dissonance is often the first nudge towards better insight.
Despite knowing intuitively and empirically that exposure to certain kinds of dissonance can make us stronger, it is too often crowded out of organisational life. Our pursuit of alignment and efficiency, paired with social pressures to curate our informational bubbles, means we often lose access to the very tensions that help us adapt. As we are increasingly discovering, this leaves us more fragile and defensive, just when we need to be more open.
So, building on our previous Quarterlies, in this edition we set out to explore a practical question: How can we design interventions for positive dissonance to flourish?
Through a set of pilot interventions this Quarter - called Compass, Standpoint, Voices and Encounters- we tested ways of helping individuals and groups stay open while navigating difference. These weren’t abstract exercises. They were practical deliberative exercises on contentious topics with senior leaders, peer practice groups, frontline workers and diverse interest groups, each offering insight into what actually works.
From these pilots, we distilled three simple design principles that create the conditions for dissonance to drive change: Disarm, Defuse, Digest.
Disarm is about creating the welcome before the work – lowering threat, softening defensiveness, and enabling curiosity to take root. Facilitated interventions like metaphor exercises, and deliberative priming consistently made people more willing to explore tension.
Defuse helps people stay in the discomfort without tipping into overwhelm. Like a glassblower balancing heat, our experiments used variation, movement and depersonalised formats to keep conversations alive, constructive and humane.
Digest is where the real dividend compounds. Structured and measured reflection, whether through debriefs, rapid playback or guided questions, turns dissonance into direction, helping participants crystallise a new perspective rather than rush back to the familiar.
Ultimately, hosting dissonance is more than a set of techniques; it’s also a posture we practise ourselves. And when we do, we help our organisations become wiser, braver and better able to face up to their toughest challenges.