Dare to Disagree

Dare to Disgaree

The TedTalk by Margaret Heffernan focusses upon the necessity of thought provoking conflicts within an organization. While sharing her views on the prime subject, she has stated some notable examples of the real life instances which strengthen her argument. Margaret emphasized the devoted efforts and credibility of a fantastic doctor 'Alice Stewart'. While illustrating Alice's example, Margaret capitalized the concept of 'conflict' between the co-workers and how it marked as a substantial growing factor for alice's career as a researcher. Indeed, without any doubt, Dr. Stewart has made notable achievements in the field of epidemiology and her grit to succeed breaking all odds is beyond inspirational.

The fact that astonishes me is that she was the youngest member to be an active part of the royal college of Physicians in 1950. Even after not getting anticipated sponsorship to work upon her research and still managed to get a breakthrough in the Xray field itself justifies the brilliance of Dr. Stewart. But it's not only the knowledge, determination, hardwork and persistance that made Dr. Stewart a proficient researcher. It's the constructive conflict with her  co-worker that pushed her beyond her capabilities to prove them wrong. Evidently, when you work in a competetive environment where there exists a number of brilliant minds, there will always be several ideas on the table, differences in the opinions and views, multiple solutions to one problem, agreements and disagreements, acceptance and rejection of the ideas that best suits the purpose and last but not the least there will always be 'conflicts'. But how one sees the conflict is what matters the most. Some might take it in an optimistic way and others may take a toll on it in a pessimistic direction. In Dr. Stewart's case, the idea of proving the co-worker wrong guided her to success giving us an example of constructive conflict which didn't involve any abuse, discrimination and emotional imbalance but instead drove her to perform better than before.

Similarly, the theories of managing conflict and managing oorganizational crisis focusses upon how a conflict can play a vital role in either the upliftment of the organization or the degradation of the relationships within an organization. On an important note, conflicts could also because of disagreements resulting in burning egos, verbal and physical abuse, intentional personal remarks, discrimination and unfriendliness. Such scenarios only makes the work environent unstable and creates a sense of disharmony. a mediator such as the manager, team lead or any other employee should take an initiative to take care of the situation before it gets ugly. I thoroughly believe that the diversity of ideas is what keeps the organization running and stabilized. If conflict includes challenging the thought process, pushing each other beyond the limits, motivating each other to perform better, the urge to succeed then such conflicts should happen at workplace more often.

References:

Brewer, E. C., & Westerman, J. (2018). Organizational Communication: Today's Professional Life in Context. Oxford University Press

 https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree.