Book Review: Why Are We Yelling?
Why Are We Yelling? by Buster Benson. Buster has build product at an impressive suite of successful tech companies from Amazon to Twitter to Slack and is the CEO of 750words.com, my favorite daily writing platform. As a student of cognitive biases myself and a huge fan of 750words, I read Buster's first book with excitement. What better and more relevant topic than disagreement?
Buster posits that disagreements are good and with a few mindset tweaks we can make them productive. Most critically, they wave a flag that something is important.
He describes productive disagreement as 'the most important meta-skill anyone can acquire'. I might put self-awareness as my most important but, sure, productive disagreement is surely up there. There are three truths one has to accept:
Arguments aren't bad. They're signposts to issues that need our attention.
Arguments aren't about changing minds. They are about bringing minds together.
Arguments don't end.
Buster puts all the frameworks in context with a plethora of examples.
At first, I held a healthy skepticism that this would be a series of martial misunderstandings, but then he took a strong veer to tackle racism. Respect.
He uses this framework to go through how we can try to become unbiased and uses points from Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility. It was ambitious and impressive. We'll talk more about that next week.
Head: what is true?
Heart: what is meaningful?
Hands: what is useful?
There are so many frameworks. All useful and clarifying - Can you tell this guy was a top product builder?! My favorite part was his personal reflection in the Afterword.
"The biggest change I've noticed in myself, is the gentle lifting of the burden to fight every battle - not because you are dissociating from the world's problems or avoiding them, but because of the slow dawning of the idea that there's more to disagreement than who is right."
"Instead of leaping into battle, we have to assume that others are as complicated as we are, and then we can start from a position of curiosity instead of a position of self-righteousness."
"We need to look no further than the realms of the head, heart, and hands, which map to what is true, what is meaningful, and what is useful."
"Conflicts about what is meaningful have been forced into narrow conflicts over what is true for a long time because the voices of power and reason have found them easier to manage. "You can't manage what you can't measure" is a common saying in the tech world (and management world!), and has been used countless times to turn a question about preferences and values is not a question about data and evidence. This practice dehumanized us a little bit each time."
An excellent read, and wonderful reference material. Buster delivers value way beyond the book. It's a gift.