The Dissonance Dividend
Image: Gina Rosas Moncada
Practical ways to harness the power of doubt
Some time ago I found myself in an enjoyably intense conversation with a senior executive from a global corporation. Having encountered each other in the course of our work we assumed we’d disagree on central questions of energy, economy, and ecology. But we were both curious to explore whether our hunches were right. That day we were talking online from cities thousands of miles apart, both of which were baking in exceptional heat. Given the subject matter, the uncomfortable irony of this backdrop was not lost on me. As we talked, we were surprised to discover we had more in common than we had expected. Then came the gut punch.
Given what I thought I knew of his cultural outlook, politics, and professional role I aired a belief I held that I expected him to reject out of hand: that our fossil-energy dependent civilisation is soon heading for a painful, possibly existential collision with the physical limits of the planet.
He didn’t defend or deflect. He paused for a moment and then calmly said:
“I agree. It’s going to happen. But no one is willing to pay the price to avert it.”
My mind suddenly scrambled, and as with all such moments I can picture it rather vividly in my mind’s eye. The screen. His calm, impassive face. The sunshine streaming in through his window. My stereotypes about his worldview had been upended. How could he think this? Here was someone operating successfully and energetically to accelerate a system who also perceived it to be fatally flawed. So the first note of dissonance was my surprise not at the message, but at the messenger.
He went on to explain his belief, rooted in direct experience with customers and others. People talked a good game but acted differently when it came to the crunch. As I listened I remember feeling a rather shapeless sense of discomfort and awkward self-consciousness. But in retrospect I can recognise the second source of dissonance. His statement challenged my own sense of integrity. It was easy for me to state my claim, but was I myself truly prepared to pay the price? I thought of all the aspects of my behaviour that contradict my beliefs and was forced to confront my own complicity.
In hindsight I can see that this encounter made me a little wiser in a number of ways: by tuning my antennae more sensitively to notice say-do gaps; by helping me hold my assumptions about people more lightly; by recognising the power of systems to incentivise people to act against their long-term interests; and by prompting me to keep working to address my own personal shortcomings. I have since added his to the choir of other dissonant voices that ring in my ears when I am sitting too comfortably on my perch. Because although it’s a cliché it may be true that a single conversation or encounter – even a single phrase in this case - can ultimately change lives.
That, in essence, is the Dissonance Dividend: the reward we get for planting and nurturing the seeds of doubt that can ultimately bear fruit in the form of richer worldviews and wiser decisions. It is the value of leaning into certain kinds of psychological discomfort rather than smoothing or suppressing them. 1
As our previous Bramble Quarterlies have illustrated – whether dreaming of a better future, leaving one phase of working life for another, or learning from alternative intelligences – paying attention to awkward, dissonant signals is often essential for personal and organisational evolution.
The danger is that in seeking organisational ‘alignment’ we reduce our exposure to this vital source of adaptive potential.
A tendency towards homogenisation in organisational life is mirrored in our society, politics and the economy. Social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and Sarah Stein Lubrano warn that selective exposure – the way we curate our own informational bubbles and social worlds – prevents us meeting and being positively altered by others. Tech platforms amplify echo chambers and stoke outrage within or between social groups.
They highlight how, as a result, we are becoming more fragile, defensive and even antagonistic when encountering dissonance in daily life – just when we need it to make us stronger and better able to solve our collective action problems.
In a previous article, I explored some helpful background conditions – Place, Voice and Time – for enabling positive dissonance. But in this final Quarterly of 2025, I want to share some practical learning for designing, hosting and sustaining encounters in ways that build our dissonance tolerance – and help us reap the Dissonance Dividend.
This is particularly relevant for anyone working in learning and development, organisational development, leadership, culture or any environment where humans must collaborate and spark friction in order to move forward. So pretty much everywhere…
Understanding dissonance
Before getting into the how, it’s worth briefly clarifying what I mean when we talk about this phenomenon.
Ever since Leon Festinger’s famous 1957 research on an alien doomsday cult (listen to this podcast to hear the story) we’ve labelled as ‘cognitive dissonance’ what we experience when two or more of our beliefs contradict each other, or when new information challenges our worldview.
When the contradiction is trivial, we cope fine. We resolve minor and non-threatening dissonances all the time. In my case, it’s reluctantly coming to accept that my favourite ‘healthy’ granola bar is actually a solid brick of sugar, or painfully conceding that one of my all-time favourite musical heroes may actually be a pretty awful human being.
But when the new information or beliefs threaten something core – our identity (“I’m a good person”) or our sense of agency (“I’m in control of my choices”) – the implied challenge to our sense of self is too much for us to accept readily. So we invent justifications that let us avoid changing.
Here’s one I often experienced many years ago:
“I know I shouldn’t smoke this cigarette, but I’m having a tough day.”
You can hear the mental gears grinding between me believing a) I am a healthy person with self-control and b) I need cigarettes to function.
Here’s a (heavily paraphrased) example I sometimes hear from innovators, experts, service providers and their organisations, as they try to hold the tension between today’s needs and those of tomorrow:
“This could bite us all in the long term, but if we don’t play the game to win our competitors will, and they don’t play as responsibly as us.”
This pits two beliefs against one another – “we must act responsibly” and “we must survive”. As is so often the case, the tension is resolved by justifying the easiest course of action. That’s textbook dissonance reduction and it’s the move that my conversation partner was highlighting in our call that hot day.
Left to our own devices, we humans will avoid experiencing deep dissonance. We prefer the flattering and familiar. We want to feel consistent with ourselves, even when the world is telling us we aren’t.
This matters for Learning and Development (L&D) because almost everything an organisation needs to evolve well – innovate, collaborate, surface risks early, learn from mistakes, welcome diverse viewpoints, make wiser decisions – relies on people willingly tuning into dissonance, not turning it off.
Without that willingness, learning interventions become empty vessels.
So the question becomes: If dissonance is a learning signal we mostly avoid, how do we create appetite for it, and benefit from it?
Lessons from the field
This autumn we approached this question through several pilot interventions with clients and partners. Some were builds on things we’ve done before, and others entirely new. All of them are in various stages of early development so we share them in the spirit of open inquiry.
These experiments (listed in the table) varied by scale, purpose and context, but all aimed to make dissonance more fruitful.
These ongoing experiments are teaching us that positive dissonance doesn’t just happen by accident. It happens by design.
To help you think about how you can design positive dissonance into your own interventions I have distilled our learning into three easy-to-remember design principles:
Disarm, Defuse, Digest
We’ll explain how they showed up in our experiments, and also give some examples from the many inspiring practices already widely in use.
DISARM
Creating the welcome before the work
Before people can explore differences, they need to feel the encounter is safe enough that they won’t be shamed, ambushed or judged. As I’ve already highlighted, if identity or agency feel threatened, the mind does what it has evolved to do: defend, rationalise, shut down.
Disarm is the design principle that prevents participants entering the discussion curled up like hedgehogs.
In the Japanese tea ceremony, the principle of Ichigo Ichie – ‘one time, one meeting’ – reflects the idea that every encounter is unique and deserves careful preparation. Guests walk a quiet garden path, bow through a low doorway, enter an uncluttered room. Samurai would leave their swords outside. Everything is designed to soften the nervous system and invite openness.
This is Disarm in organisational life: the invitations, tone, framing and early touches that lower the ego-threat level just enough for discomfort to be tolerable and for curiosity to rise.
One of our experiments taught us the importance of this the hard way. At the start of the year, our initial ‘Meet Them’ prototype failed to attract a balanced mix of participants. Everyone who volunteered held what we could crudely characterise as left of centre, progressive and/or ‘insurgent’ views. Those with conservative perspectives or strong commitments to ‘incumbent’ institutions stayed away despite our efforts to attract them and disarm any anxiety or threat.
Conflict researchers call this ‘asymmetric participation’: engagement in depolarisation efforts can vary a lot between social groups depending on the circumstances.
We had expected this, but not to the extent that we subsequently encountered. And we eventually realised that despite our efforts we had still implicitly framed the exercise as a kind of confrontation, and that the upside of experiencing dissonance wasn’t clear enough for them to say yes.
So we reframed and redesigned it as a collaborative game. Rather than place complete strangers together, as some fantastic organisations have managed to do, we pivoted towards intact teams, expert peer groups or co-workers where a critical level of trust and assumptions of good faith already existed. Serious collaborative games can create positive-sum dynamics that lower threat and increase engagement.
This became Standpoint: a playful yet rigorous deliberative exercise where participants generate statements, map their positions, and explore the emotional and cognitive layers beneath their views. I trialled it last month with L&D practitioners and frontline government workers and the results were encouraging.
“[Standpoint] deepened my perspectives and ways of thinking, helping me take more time to pause and question my ideals, and consider how I apply them in everyday life.”
“It felt safe, it was totally engaging, it was fun, it brought surprising results/things out of my team which I did not expect. I know them well, but I learned new things about them.”
“I realised how differently people can interpret the same issue depending on their roles, experiences and priorities.”
One reason Standpoint worked was how we applied the Disarm principle: we asked participants to submit bold statements in response to a core question before the meeting. This allowed them to consider calmly what was truly most important to discuss, prepare mentally and know that their ideas would be aired and explored equally alongside those of others.
“Preparing the statements helped me to think differently and explore ideas I wouldn’t usually bring up in a normal meeting.”
In another of our pilots, a psychometric assessment and coaching debrief called the Compass, an opening question asks participants to select and explore a visual metaphor to represent their working context. Using this oblique but still powerful medium lowered defensiveness and evoked deeper reflection.
“Compass was a great opportunity to reflect on the context I work in, and to try and think about the bigger picture. The initial metaphor image task was really useful for that. It made me realise how difficult things are – but that there is potential for change.”
In the pilots of Voices and Encounters, we spent prior time with external stakeholders to ensure they felt relaxed enough to bring honest perspectives into the room. We coached the participating leaders of our organisational client in advance to know and manage their triggers. When it came to the meeting itself this preparation usually paid dividends:
“I really appreciated the openness and curiosity, which made me more hopeful about a large organisation's capacity to evolve.”
“I had concerns around the company not challenging sufficiently its assumptions and culture not allowing divergence of views. This meeting helped reduce that perception.”
Disarm seems peripheral but it actually provides the foundation. It prepares people not to defend, but to explore.
But Disarm alone isn’t a panacea. Our evaluation data show that while individuals often seem more open under these circumstances it is harder to prevent groups from lapsing into defensive routines or familiar and comforting narratives in the face of curious but challenging outsider perspectives. That’s where we turn next.
DEFUSE
Keeping the pot simmering (not boiling over)
If Disarm is preparing the moment, Defuse is staying in the moment without letting tension tip into overwhelm.
While on holiday in Venice last year I watched a glassblower on the island of Murano work molten glass. Too cool and it cracks. Too hot and it collapses. The artisan constantly turns, rotates and shapes it to keep the heat balanced.
Dissonance encounters are similar. The aim is not to cool things down into flat neutrality. It’s to maintain enough heat for alteration without letting it explode.
The Defuse principle draws on both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ mechanisms that help people stay with discomfort without becoming overwhelmed:
Co-regulation: our nervous systems attune to others, so a steady facilitator or interlocutor helps participants stay in balance.
Interaction pacing and movement: shifting partners, topics, roles or formats prevents people from getting stuck in one emotionally loaded dynamic.
Varied exposure: increasing contact with a variety of perspectives, from avowed critics on one end of the spectrum through ‘critical friends’ to allies, outsiders and system co-creators.
Identity-protective framing: depersonalising disagreement so participants don’t feel their core self is under attack.
These and other conditions keep the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex from ringing the alarm bell and allow the prefrontal cortex to stay online. We saw this principle at work in our pilot interventions.
In Standpoint for example, the online game board visually shows the shifting degrees of disagreement at different stages of the discussion. Seeing the landscape of views changing made differences an interesting, shared phenomenon rather than a competitive battle.
At the start of the active deliberation phase, we would ask participants to turn their cameras off. This depersonalised context setting made it easier to focus on ideas rather than interpreting facial tension, confusion or indifference as hostility. We made sure they went back on at the end during the reflection round to end with human connection.
In Voices and Compass, we encouraged participants to notice shifts in posture, breath or tension – simple somatic cues that help people regulate emotional heat.
Movement was also powerful: carousel rotations in Voices and egg timers in Standpoint kept discussion from getting stuck. Standpoint participants said they liked how it prevented wallowing in familiar ‘stuck-ness’.
“I also appreciated the pace. In many meetings we can spend 20 minutes deliberating on a single point without making progress, but this structure kept the momentum going and encouraged us to move forward.”
“I thought the shorter time per topic yielded enough new insights without starting to feel like a stodgy conversation.”
Defuse is not about smoothing conflict away. It is the glassblower’s art: keeping enough heat for transformation, but not so much that the piece shatters. But once you have this newly formed creation, you need some way to use it. That’s where digestion comes in.
DIGEST
Turning dissonance into direction
If Disarm prepares people to enter, and Defuse helps them stay with the tension, then Digest is about making meaning afterwards – the phase where the emotional heat has dropped and the mind is deciding what to do with what it has lived through.
A friend completed the Camino de Santiago last year. She described long stretches of solitary reflection on her epic walk: the kind that strips away noise until only the essential questions remain. But she also noticed how random and absurd her thoughts became when she was freed from the normal pressures of life. Knowing my susceptibility to ear-worms, I wondered how, in addition, I would mentally cope with having some random ‘80s pop tune stuck in my head for weeks.
For centuries, Camino pilgrims have paused at Monte do Gozo – the Hill of Joy – just before reaching Santiago and the end of their journey. It’s the first point where the cathedral comes into view and pilgrims traditionally stop to rest, reflect and absorb what they’ve experienced before their final descent. Sometimes they leave messages for those who follow or exchange traditional greetings.
Digest represents this process of reflection and assimilation, where contradiction, confusion and discovery are integrated into new understanding. Without digestion, insight evaporates. With it, the Dissonance Dividend compounds. But this phase is fragile. Psychologically, it is when the mind most wants to smooth discomfort away and revert to a comforting and familiar conclusion. Designing interventions for digestion enables participants to suspend this reflex. So much of our own and others’ experience tells us that Digest is where the real shifts can occur, but also where the biggest risks lie if it is ignored. However, it’s also the hardest thing to protect in typical Learning and Development interventions where the pressure is always to move onto the next thing.
In the Compass, a key digestion moment happens a week or two after the assessment itself: the coaching debrief. That’s when tensions can start to crystallise into clarity and agency.
“I found the coaching conversation really useful for opening up avenues of discussion and exploration that I hadn’t considered. It’s so easy to get stuck in ways of thinking, or doing, without stepping back to think about how they serve you, your team or the work you’re trying to do and this follow up provides space to do just that.”
After deliberating in Standpoint, we guided players through a quick reflection round, capturing their thoughts on the board:
What surprised you?
What challenged you?
What do you now understand differently?
What becomes possible now?
Immediately after the session the transcription of the conversation is analysed and the findings played back to the participants, often revealing patterns invisible in real time.
Participants found this simple process liberating, but indicated how rare such opportunities are:
“I realised how important having and growing our personal theory of change is to the L/OD work we do and to the energy I have for this. I learnt how much I get from such conversations and wish I had more of them.”
“I look forward to seeing how my colleagues are influenced by this session. But I see that team creativity and pushing boundaries will come from this session. Very excited for this!”
“It did challenge my thinking and led me to adjust my thinking and I think will change my approach a little back in the day job.”
“For me personally, the exercise has helped me feel more confident about challenging old ways of working.”
These intra and interpersonal discoveries, and the potential they have to unlock latent potential in the organisation, are the result of good digestion and account for much of the Dissonance Dividend.
A deep human tradition
Necessary though these design principles and ingredients are to reap the benefits of positive dissonance, they will only be superficial and transient unless the right enabling conditions are in place and sustained efforts are made to keep letting the dissonance in.
If this feels too unlikely and too hard, we can take heart from the fact that humans have been doing this for millennia. I’ve touched on a few already but we only have to look at the anthropological, historical and inter-disciplinary record to find countless examples of human practices designed to help us handle the tensions and conflicts inherent in human flourishing:
The Ethiopan Coffee Ceremony is a ritual act of mutual hospitality that uses the process of making coffee together to help people slow down, connect and make themselves open to rich conversation.
The Inuit use song duels to express grievances and disagreements in funny and creative ways that release tension and avert an escalation to physical conflict.
Aboriginal Australians use the yarning circle as a way to navigate difficult decisions collectively and equally.
So we have a rich inheritance to draw on, much of which has found its way into contemporary mediation and facilitation practice. But while these ‘outer’ practices can take us a long way, we also need to pay attention to what’s going on in our ‘inner’ worlds.
Recognising our own dissonance
Hosting dissonance isn’t just a craft or a set of techniques. It’s a posture – a way of showing up – that asks something from us as practitioners. It asks us to stay open, curious, and steady enough for others can do the same. And that means learning to recognise the places where we experience dissonance, because our own patterns inevitably shape the spaces we are able to hold.
Everyone working in complex organisational settings encounters these moments. They go with the territory. As I say goodbye to 2025, I recognise that mine showed up in familiar ways:
Navigating the tension between organisational rhetoric and organisational reality.
Balancing short-term organisational performance orientation with long-term systems stewardship and contribution.
Holding a facilitative stance when at times part of me wants to advocate.
So, just as we invite participants to work with dissonance, we have to practise the same three principles ourselves:
Disarm – loosening our grip on our own familiar lenses, certainties and outcomes.
Defuse – noticing and regulating our emotional responses so we stay in service of the group.
Digest – reflecting afterwards on where our reactions helped, where they hindered the process, and what they suggest about our own learning edge.
This ongoing inner work is therefore also a necessary investment for the Dissonance Dividend.
What’s next?
As we move into the new year, we’ll be iterating these pilot interventions – Compass, Standpoint, Voices, Encounters.
If you’re curious to try one of these experiences – individually or with your team – we’d love to hear from you. Likewise, if you’re experimenting with your own ways of hosting dissonant dialogues, we’d love to celebrate and learn from your work.
We’ll also be experimenting in ways we haven’t yet conceived to help people stay open in the face of disagreement, and help organisations turn openness into better decisions, relationships and outcomes.
This work only really grows through shared practice, and we’re supremely grateful for all the wonderful thought and practice leaders in this field who have informed and guided our thinking. Dissonance and doubt will always feel awkward, but awkwardness is so often the catalyst for insight. And heaven knows this world needs more collective wisdom right now.
So here’s to a 2026 of braver conversations, wiser systems and many small dividends along the way.
[1] with a grateful hat tip to Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio who coined the term Diversity Dividend