Podcast: I Respectfully Disagree

Such encounters have seemingly become far too frequent, if you ask Steve Franconeri, a professor of management and organizations by courtesy at Kellogg

“I think we’ve gotten into a habit of assuming that disagreements should be carried by anger and hatred, and that the person we’re disagreeing with is either lying or crazy. And we need to learn how to have better disagreements,” Franconeri says.

In this episode of The Insightful Leader, we play a game Franconeri designed to improve how we argue. The key to success? Don’t try to change someone’s mind.

Laura PAVIN: Hey—Laura Pavin here. In Chicago, we like to take our food pretty seriously—in particular, our hot dogs. And there’s a big point of contention regarding one particular condiment: ketchup.

Aiden KYLE: I think it’s a terrible condiment.

Tim CHAMBERLAIN: It’s not a bad condiment. It’s just not the best condiment.

PAVIN: The other day, I recorded this conversation with a few of my colleagues here at Kellogg about ketchup, which is a pretty divisive issue here in Chicago.

KYLE: It’s just tomatoes and vinegar, and it’s mostly sugar also. And I think there are so many better things than ketchup that you can put on anything.

PAVIN: That’s when another coworker who just happened to be wandering by entered the conversation.

Desmond FENTY: He’s never been more incorrect about anything in his life. Because ketchup goes with almost every food. Literally, when I first started here at Kellogg, I bought a Sam’s Club–size ketchup bottle, and someone took it within two days. So I bought a $60 safe to hold my $3 bottle of ketchup in the fridge so that I would not lose that ketchup again.

PAVIN: Wait, you bought a safe to put the ketchup in?

FENTY: Yes. It has a combination lock and everything. It has my name on it so people know not to take it.

PAVIN: Just in this one little corner of Kellogg, there are people calling ketchup a terrible condiment—and at least one person who has a safe containing their own personal bottle.

PAVIN: Are you guys rivals now?

FENTY: I mean, we’ve always been rivals, but I’ve never been more disappointed in him in my entire life.

PAVIN: We love to tether our identity to a side of an argument—assign value based on where we fall. Debating whether ketchup is inherently good or bad is a fun one, because everyone has an opinion on it, and the stakes are about as low as you can get.

But of course, we also have opinions on topics that aren’t low-stakes—abortion, student-loan forgiveness, transgender issues. Having constructive debates about those topics has become increasingly difficult because we can’t imagine finding too much common ground with someone whose worldview feels like it’s become an existential threat to ours.

That’s no way to live. And it’s certainly no way to work.

In late 2024, a global leadership company reported almost half of all candidates for managerial jobs lacked effective conflict-resolution skills. And one California-based researcher has even claimed workplace conflict costs U.S. organizations over $350 billion every year in lost productivity.

Steve FRANCONERI: I think we’ve gotten into a habit of assuming that disagreements should be carried by anger and hatred, and that the person we’re disagreeing with is either lying or crazy. And we need to learn how to have better disagreements.

PAVIN: Today, we hear from a Northwestern professor who’s devised a way for us to have better disagreements—even the really tough ones.

FRANCONERI: Hi, I’m Steve Franconeri. I’m a professor of psychology and a professor of marketing at Kellogg.

PAVIN: Do you have faith that we as a country can have civil disagreements?

FRANCONERI: I do have faith that we can do it, but I think we need to learn how.

PAVIN: Franconeri has a tool that he says can teach us how. It’s a board game.

But the game itself isn’t the main character here. It’s the rules of the game we’re most interested in. They’re real, research-backed strategies for finding common ground that anyone can use in their own disagreements.

We’ll sit down with Franconeri as he plays the game with a colleague and explains the lessons you can take away from it to improve the way you handle your own disagreements.

And if you’re a leader? Consider these good rules of engagement for your teams to practice inside and outside of your organization. Rules that won’t get everyone agreeing—let’s be clear—but they’ll get us closer to seeing each other as human again.

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PAVIN: Northwestern Professor Steve Franconeri came to the Insight team’s office one afternoon to demo his game for us. It’s called Point Taken. We wanted to see how the game worked and, more importantly, how it was going to teach us to disagree—respectfully, of course.

Now, I for one didn’t necessarily think arguing about a hot-button issue sounded like a fun game, but Franconeri says there are takeaways here: well-researched methods for getting to the bottom of a disagreement without a complete fallout.

FRANCONERI: The backstory is, maybe a decade ago I saw a lot of rising irrationality in the world, from my perspective. I saw it in the media, in the public, but I also saw it among my friends and family. I have close relatives that I just do not live on the same planet with, and that’s painful. It’s painful to feel like you can’t connect with them intellectually but also emotionally.

I wanted to change the work we did in our lab to actually create a real intervention, a real product, that would help.

PAVIN: Franconeri runs the Visual Thinking Lab here at Northwestern. He teaches and researches visual reasoning, but he says that’s only half the battle in a disagreement.

FRANCONERI: What I learned maybe five years ago is that the first half of the battle is the emotional part. People have to approach disagreements with humility. They have to want to change their mind. They have to be open to listening to other perspectives. They have to understand that they could be wrong in the first place.

PAVIN: With that in mind, we wanted to see if it could be done.

So we found a desk, cleared the table, and I hit record while my colleague, business and art editor Fred Schmalz, waited for Franconeri to play the game with him.

PAVIN: I don’t even know if the goal is winning, but do you feel like you’re gonna win?

Fred SCHMALZ: It’s not about winning.

PAVIN: Okay. Do you think you’ll be convinced? Do you think you’re right?

SCHMALZ: Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m right.

PAVIN: He’s talking about the classic ketchup debate here. He hates it.

SCHMALZ: I don’t touch the stuff.

PAVIN: At this point, we were thinking this would be the topic of debate for the game, but when Franconeri arrives, he says, “Ehh, let’s do a meatier topic.”

FRANCONERI: What I’d suggest is that you aim for a policy-relevant debate that could start with the word “should.” So: Should people be able to do X? Or: Should X happen when people do Y?

PAVIN: “How about: Should we forgive student debt?” he asks.

Franconeri says he could take the “con” side of this—that we should not forgive student debt—because he somewhat agrees with that stance.

Fred says, “great. I think we should forgive student loans, earnestly. So I’ll be on the pro side.”

But before they get into it, Franconeri says that first, an agreement must be made.

FRANCONERI: We have some rules in this game. You have to be here to think with someone else, not to troll or persuade them or mock them. We also have people agree to be clear and calm. You have to argue with reasons, not just assertions or yelling. And we also have to agree that facts matter. And if a fact winds up being a critical part of our disagreement, then we’ll pause, head over to, I don’t know, Wikipedia, at least it has sources, look it up, and, in an unbiased way, try to figure out the fact before going back to the game.

PAVIN: And before the game can start, you have to literally sign off on these rules.

FRANCONERI: We’re gonna get your initials on that—not in a legally binding sense, but as an informal agreement, because five minutes from now those rules may go out the window, and we want to be able to point back to your agreement on them.

PAVIN: Both players sign their initials on the dotted line, and we’re ready to begin.

The game uses these octagonal tiles. The first one is the center tile, where you write down the central question: Should we forgive student loan debt?

FRANCONERI: The way we’re gonna start is: you will write your two best pro reasons, and I will write my two best con reasons, and we’ll throw them down and see what the other person’s argument is. Then we’ll silently write reasons and keep putting new rebuttals on the board to each other’s arguments.

PAVIN: Once Franconeri and Fred have written their two reason tiles, they attach them to the center tile. The rebuttals attach to those, and the game grows outward from there.

SCHMALZ: My two reasons for advocating for student loan debt forgiveness are: First, the stress of student-loan debt can determine priorities or dissuade some valuable vocations. And second, education, or an educated populace, is an economic positive.

FRANCONERI: My two were: because it’s unfair to people who already paid that debt off. There’s an arbitrary line where people who paid after a certain date get it paid off, and the folks who worked hard to pay off that loan beforehand don’t get that advantage. And second, it sets a terrible precedent where people will wait for the government to pay off their loans instead of paying them off in a timely way.

PAVIN: These two reason tiles are attached to the central question, and the argument is set.

FRANCONERI: Now, even if it’s a tiny bit awkward, we silently write more reasons on our tiles as rebuttals to the other person’s argument. As we play, the tiles we’re putting down form discussion threads—like a typical online discussion board with topics and subtopics—but instead of an outline on a screen, it’s more like an octopus laid out on the table.

PAVIN: The reason they’re writing rather than speaking aloud is actually a very important part of the game.

FRANCONERI: The big issue with verbal discussions—aside from the emotionality—is your memory for the other person’s argument. Verbal memory is terrible, and it’s biased toward your own argument. You remember things you said that were good points, and you instantly forget—if you even listened in the first place—other people’s points. This format forces you to read other people’s reasons carefully enough that you can respond to each one.

PAVIN: So the game continues for a few minutes, with Franconeri and Fred writing their responses and building their reasoning octopus across the table.

For my sake, they verbalized some of this. For example, to Franconeri’s point about student-loan forgiveness being unfair to people who already paid off their loans, Fred offers his counterpoint—that when it comes to higher education, the cost varies so widely from person to person that it’s hard to really say what’s “fair.”

SCHMALZ: Like, college was a lot cheaper in 1990 when I went to college than in 2010, than it is in 2025. So my student loan-debt was different—materially—than someone who went to college 20 years after me. From the beginning, the debt is sort of fruit of a poison tree.

PAVIN: This discussion continues for a bit. They talk about the fairness of for-profit versus not-for-profit college debt too. And then:

FRANCONERI: I feel like looking at the board and seeing everything holistically is allowing me to see that we both think it’s interesting to fund education more generally. It’s more the unfairness angle for me—some people have paid it off, some haven’t—so that thread seems to be the crux of the disagreement. But I would say: let’s just pay for the school in the first place. Let’s not have people take out a loan and then forgive it.

SCHMALZ: Right. That’s where I’m going. “Student loans should be forgiven” is really a question of, should students have to take on debt to even get an education?

FRANCONERI: So now we’re getting into a much more complex and nuanced argument. I think if we go that route, we’re aligned on the complexities of what the government should pay for and what it shouldn’t. But it feels a lot more nuanced than where we started.

PAVIN: Franconeri thinks of the game as good practice, a good simulation, for how to engage in a real heated conversation outside of a board game.

FRANCONERI: And this game, which is based on a critical-thinking technique called argument mapping that has decades of research behind it—it’s one of the best ways of teaching and engaging in critical thinking that exists in the world.

PAVIN: Argument mapping traces its roots back to the early 19th century. It’s a tried-and-true logic exercise for uncovering the structure and roots of disagreements.

FRANCONERI: It ends when people isolate where they disagree, which is usually just a couple of the reason tiles. And along the way, they realize that actually 80–90 percent of the argument they do agree on. And the other person is a rational, reasonable human who does live on the same planet—they just come in with slightly different information.

PAVIN: Based on that explanation, it sounds like he and Fred were successful: they isolated the specific thread where they disagreed and actually learned that they agreed on a lot more than they thought.

FRANCONERI: The dream, of course, is that we go all the way back to the center tile and find a statement that, if rewritten a bit, we could both agree on.

PAVIN: You might find a way to agree; you might not. But Franconeri says the important thing is that you’ve come to an understanding. You not only understand why you disagree, but you understand the other person a little better. That’s the goal. That’s what Franconeri says is imperative to fixing the way we disagree—that mutual respect and understanding. He says the key rules of the game are lessons we can implement in our daily lives.

FRANCONERI: If you don’t have the game in front of you, I think there are three big lessons to take away from it. First, the reason why it’s a game is because we want to change the goal of conversations. You’re not there to persuade each other. That’s not going to go well. It’s just going to lead to anger and not listening.

PAVIN: Number one: change the goal of your conversations. Don’t set out to influence, persuade, or win. You win by earning a better understanding of and connection with your counterpart.

FRANCONERI: Set your 100 percent explicit goal as understanding why they think what they think and how it is that you could think differently. Try to find it interesting, instead of getting emotionally invested in it. Number two: try to take the rule card of “don’t use the word ‘you,’” and keep the discussion about the situation—the topic—instead of about the person.

PAVIN: Don’t get personal and attack the person. Focus on the arguments and the rationale. And then last: slow it down and take your time.

FRANCONERI: Isolating the crux of the disagreement is one of the hardest tasks to complete outside of the game because verbal memory is so limited. If you’re trying to make your own argument and listen to someone else’s, you’re going to be all over the place. It’s cognitively tough. It’s possible, if you set your goal as listening and understanding and not persuading. But it’s still pretty tough to do.

PAVIN: He says slowing down the conversation and seeking a better understanding is all about listening. Focus on what the other person is saying. That’s a mark of leadership.

FRANCONERI: Repeat back what you’ve heard from the other person. That’s going to make them feel great and feel listened to. It also gives you time to let that new information sink in. Another technique is to play devil’s advocate. Try switching sides and arguing from their side. That’s a great way to get your brain to better remember and understand their position. Both techniques slow things down and make the other person grateful that you listened and showed their opinion matters. And, hopefully, they return the favor.

PAVIN: What Franconeri hopes to teach is mutual respect and understanding. That it’s okay if some coworkers like ketchup on their hot dogs and some don’t.

KYLE: I have no problem with people liking ketchup. You can like ketchup. I just don’t like ketchup.

CHAMBERLAIN: I guess I’m a little softer on it than Aiden is. I didn’t realize he was so militant.

KYLE: No. Enjoy your ketchup. I will not enjoy mine. You can have mine, Desmond. You don’t have to lock it up.

FENTY: Just a moat between us now that will never be crossed.

PAVIN: Wow.

PAVIN: Hopefully, with Franconeri’s lessons and a little practice, you can make disagreements molehills instead of mountains—and certainly not moats that will never be crossed.

You can find more about Franconeri’s board game at pointtaken.social.

CREDITS

PAVIN: This episode of The Insightful Leader was produced and mixed by Dalton Main. It was produced and edited by Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, Fred Schmalz, Abraham Kim, Maja Kos, and Blake Goble. Special thanks to Steve Franconeri.

Want more The Insightful Leader episodes? You can find us on iTunes, Spotify, or our website: insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu.

We’ll be back in a couple weeks with another episode of The Insightful Leader podcast.