I’m a conflict-averse kind of gal, so I’m always trying to see the other side of an issue—if only to avoid an argument. It’s a losing game, especially when my head-nodding is confused for agreement, and suddenly I’m on a side of the fight I was trying to avoid in the first place.

We could all improve how we disagree with others, both in our personal and professional lives. We just have to change what we want out of the conversation to begin with, says professor Steve Franconeri.

This week, we’ll look at how we can find common ground even when we’re far apart. Plus, we’ll hear a lesson from the Louvre heist on authenticity and AI.

Keeping hot debates cool

Workplace scuffles can be deleterious to productivity. And yet, we’re not so great at managing them. This goes up the chain of command: an assessment of more than 70,000 managers by global consulting firm DDI last year found that almost half lacked effective conflict-management skills.

To keep temperatures cool, we need to entirely reexamine our goals for these conversations.

At The Insightful Leader Live last week, Franconeri, a professor of management and organizations by courtesy at Kellogg, said that disagreements are unlikely to end on a high note if you set out to change the other person’s mind, prove them wrong, or embarrass them.

“Just framing the question as ‘Which one of us wins?’ sets it up as a competition where there’s a winner and there’s a loser, and your armor goes up, and your swords come out,” Franconeri says.

Instead, think of the conversation as a collaboration where you’re working together to understand where you agree and disagree. Franconeri acknowledges this is hard to do in verbal conversations; he actually developed a game called Point Taken where players make their cases in writing instead. But it can also help to pause and rephrase what the other person has said to commit it to memory.

To do that, you have to listen. It can be tempting to think about what you’re going to say next, but making the effort to understand someone else first can make them more willing to understand you, too.

“To inhibit your  own perspective and then even ask, ‘Did I get that right?’ the other person feels really respected and valued when you do that. And once you do that, they’re in a great place to say, ‘How about you?’ and then you get that full exchange of perspective,” Franconeri says.

Hear more from Franconeri’s talk here, and read his tips in Kellogg Insight.

The Louvre heist takes an AI turn

AI-generated images have, seemingly overnight, gone from “pretty good … oh wait, does that dog have human hands?” to “I actually don’t know what’s real anymore.” But spotting what’s real and what’s fake on the internet remains an important skill for leaders to have.

Enter: a photo of the scene outside the post-heist Louvre. In the picture, distributed by the Associated Press, three policemen are leaning against a silver car parked outside of the famous Parisian museum. But it was the dapper man standing jauntily off to the side, in his fedora and trench coat, who drew the internet’s attention.

The online discourse started out tongue-in-cheek, with social-media users gleefully dreaming up who he could be (a detective taking too many style cues from fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes?). But it took a more cynical turn when some speculated he wasn’t real, at all.

Speaking to The New York Times about the image, Kellogg’s Matt Groh agreed something about the image felt “off.”

Groh, a deepfake expert, said the man looked “too good” to be real, like a star in an old black-and-white Hollywood film. In addition, he attributes part of his suspicion to the fact that one version of the image being shared was low resolution.

“If it’s super-high resolution, then it’s less likely to be AI generated, just because it’s really hard to generate super-high resolution,” Groh said.

The photographer, for the record, confirmed that the man was real. But the fact that people were asking questions about a too-good-to-be-true photo may be a healthy sign.

“People are building AI literacy,” Groh said.

Read more from Groh in The New York Times, and learn his five signs that an image was AI-generated at Kellogg Insight.