Disagreeable people tend to be more critical, skeptical, and challenging—and they’re more likely than their peers to become engineers and lawyers. They’re not just comfortable with conflict; it energizes them. If you’re highly disagreeable, you might be happier in an argument than in a friendly conversation. That quality often comes with a bad rap: disagreeable people get stereotyped as curmudgeons who complain about every idea, or Dementors who suck the joy out of every meeting. When I studied Pixar, though, I came away with a dramatically different view.
In 2000, Pixar was on fire. Their teams had used computers to rethink animation in their first blockbuster, Toy Story, and they were fresh off two more smash hits. Yet the company’s founders weren’t content to rest on their laurels. They recruited an outside director named Brad Bird to shake things up. Brad had just released his debut film, which was well reviewed but flopped at the box office, so he was itching to do something big and bold. When he pitched his vision, the technical leadership at Pixar said it was impossible: they would need a decade and $500 million to make it.
Brad wasn’t ready to give up. He sought out the biggest misfits at Pixar for his project—people who were disagreeable, disgruntled, and dissatisfied. Some called them black sheep. Others called them
pirates. When Brad rounded them up, he warned them that no one believed they could pull off the project. Just four years later, his team didn’t only succeed in releasing Pixar’s most complex film ever; they actually managed to lower the cost of production per minute. The Incredibles went on to gross upwards of $631 million worldwide and won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Notice what Brad didn’t do. He didn’t stock his team with agreeable people. Agreeable people make for a great support network: they’re excited to encourage us and cheerlead for us.
Rethinking depends on a different kind of network: a challenge network, a group of people we trust to point out our blind spots and help us overcome our weaknesses. Their role is to activate rethinking cycles by pushing us to be humble about our expertise, doubt our knowledge, and be curious about new perspectives.
The ideal members of a challenge network are disagreeable, because they’re fearless about questioning the way things have always been done and holding us accountable for thinking again.
There’s evidence that disagreeable people speak up more frequently
—especially when leaders aren’t receptive—and foster more task conflict. They’re like the doctor in the show House or the boss in the film The Devil Wears Prada. They give the critical feedback we might not want to hear, but need to hear.
Harnessing disagreeable people isn’t always easy. It helps if certain conditions are in place. Studies in oil drilling and tech
companies suggest that dissatisfaction promotes creativity only when people feel committed and supported—and that cultural misfits are most likely to add value when they have strong bonds with their colleagues.*
Before Brad Bird arrived, Pixar already had a track record of encouraging talented people to push boundaries. But the studio’s previous films had starred toys, bugs, and monsters, which were relatively simple to animate. Since making a whole film with lifelike human superheroes was beyond the capabilities of computer
animation at the time, the technical teams balked at Brad’s vision for The Incredibles. That’s when he created his challenge network. He enlisted his band of pirates to foster task conflict and rethink the process.
Brad gathered the pirates in Pixar’s theater and told them that although a bunch of bean counters and corporate suits might not believe in them, he did. After rallying them he went out of his way to seek out their ideas. “I want people who are disgruntled because they have a better way of doing things and they are having trouble finding an avenue,” Brad told me. “Racing cars that are just spinning their wheels in a garage rather than racing. You open that garage door, and man, those people will take you somewhere.” The pirates rose to the occasion, finding economical alternatives to expensive
techniques and easy workarounds for hard problems. When it came time to animate the superhero family, they didn’t toil over the
intricate contours of interlocking muscles. Instead they figured out that sliding simple oval shapes against one another could become the building blocks of complex muscles.
When I asked Brad how he recognized the value of pirates, he told me it was because he is one. Growing up, when he went to
dinner at friends’ houses, he was taken aback by the polite questions their parents asked about their day at school. Bird family dinners were more like a food fight, where they all vented, debated, and spoke their minds. Brad found the exchanges contentious but fun,
and he brought that mentality into his first dream job at Disney.
From an early age, he had been mentored and trained by a group of old Disney masters to put quality first, and he was frustrated that their replacements—who now supervised the new generation at the studio—weren’t upholding the same standards. Within a few months of launching his animation career at Disney, Brad was criticizing senior leaders for taking on conventional projects and producing substandard work. They told him to be quiet and do his job. When he refused, they fired him.
I’ve watched too many leaders shield themselves from task
conflict. As they gain power, they tune out boat-rockers and listen to bootlickers. They become politicians, surrounding themselves with agreeable yes-men and becoming more susceptible to seduction by sycophants. Research reveals that when their firms perform poorly, CEOs who indulge flattery and conformity become overconfident.
They stick to their existing strategic plans instead of changing course
—which sets them on a collision course with failure.
We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to
people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.
In one experiment, when people were criticized rather than
praised by a partner, they were over four times more likely to request a new partner. Across a range of workplaces, when employees
received tough feedback from colleagues, their default response was to avoid those coworkers or drop them from their networks
altogether—and their performance suffered over the following year.
Some organizations and occupations counter those tendencies by building challenge networks into their cultures. From time to time the Pentagon and the White House have used aptly named “murder boards” to stir up task conflict, enlisting tough-minded committees to shoot down plans and candidates. At X, Google’s “moonshot factory,” there’s a rapid evaluation team that’s charged with
rethinking proposals: members conduct independent assessments and only advance the ones that emerge as both audacious and
achievable. In science, a challenge network is often a cornerstone of the peer-review process. We submit articles anonymously, and
they’re reviewed blindly by independent experts. I’ll never forget the rejection letter I once received in which one of the reviewers
encouraged me to go back and read the work of Adam Grant. Dude, I am Adam Grant.
When I write a book, I like to enlist my own challenge network. I recruit a group of my most thoughtful critics and ask them to tear each chapter apart. I’ve learned that it’s important to consider their values along with their personalities—I’m looking for disagreeable people who are givers, not takers. Disagreeable givers often make the best critics: their intent is to elevate the work, not feed their own egos. They don’t criticize because they’re insecure; they challenge because they care. They dish out tough love.*
Ernest Hemingway once said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof sh*t detector.” My challenge network is my sh*t detector. I think of it as a good fight club. The first rule:
avoiding an argument is bad manners. Silence disrespects the value of your views and our ability to have a civil disagreement.
Brad Bird lives by that rule. He has legendary arguments with his long-standing producer, John Walker. When making The
Incredibles, they fought about every character detail, right down to their hair—from how receding the hairline should be on the
superhero dad to whether the teenage daughter’s hair should be long and flowing. At one point, Brad wanted the baby to morph into goo, taking on a jellylike shape, but John put his foot down. It would be too difficult to animate, and they were too far behind schedule. “I’m just trying to herd you toward the finish,” John said, laughing. “I’m just trying to get us across the line, man.” Pounding his fist, Brad shot back: “I’m trying to get us across the line in first place.”
Eventually John talked Brad out of it, and the goo was gone. “I love working with John, because he’ll give me the bad news straight to my face,” Brad says. “It’s good that we disagree. It’s good that we fight it out. It makes the stuff stronger.”
Those fights have helped Brad win two Oscars—and made him a better learner and a better leader. For John’s part, he didn’t flat-out refuse to animate a gooey baby. He just told Brad he would have to wait a little bit. Sure enough, when they got around to releasing a sequel to The Incredibles fourteen years later, the baby got into a fight with a raccoon and transformed into goo. That scene might be the hardest I’ve ever seen my kids laugh.