Dissonance

I love coming up with my #WednesdayWithWeppel words. Typically it is something that came up in conversation, or a challenge that I overcome that week which drives my focus. This week I was in a conversation and we were talking about a presentation with a focus on how to make it more simplified for the receiver to comprehend. In the conversation my colleague Preetam developed some strategies to overcome the "cognitive dissonance" the customer may feel in the presentation. It really took me back to my college days and in the back of my head I was reliving all those days spent in Educational Psychology classes.

Dissonance /ˈdisənəns/

a tension or clash resulting from the combination of two disharmonious or unsuitable elements.

When people typically talk about cognitive dissonance they speak to it being in someone's own head. Where I find dissonance most interesting is actually in relationships. The dissonance between two organizations or people can actually be a motivator to process improvement.

My husband and I have dissonance in relation to the word "Clean." For me, when something is clean it means that it is tidy, everything is put away and out of sight. There might be an avalanche when you open a cabinet door and there might be dust on the top shelf but on a surface level everything is clean. For my husband, when something is clean it is devoid of dirt. There might be a pile of things on the counter, but the counter has in fact been sanitized in the last 24 hours. This created a lot of dissonance in our household. We had a few options. We could agree on a definition of clean either merging our two definitions or one of us yielding, or we could play to each of our strength. We opted for the second. He keeps things physically very clean (but is very careful not to create piles of stuff in the process); I try to keep the house devoid of piles so that when he cleans it's truly clean by both definitions. In that regard we each play to our strengths - and the house is clean by BOTH definitions in the end.

At work we find this dissonance often. I had a manager once who LOVED the details. He knew where every penny was allocated, where every project was at, and what was ahead in the future. If it was in Excel it was in his head. I on the other hand HATED the details. I loved the softer side of things, working with the customers, working with the team members, and imagining solutions. As part of my role was to one day be a successor for him - this dissonance in priorities was a challenge. He kept trying to teach me Excel (I learned it but still hate it) so that I could be a carbon copy. Quickly he realized that wasn't the best solution. Actually if I was taking care of the customer and the people, he had more time to focus on the details. The Yin/Yang or Felix/Oscar approach was the key to our success. We took that dissonance and created a positive where we both spent time focusing on the areas where we had the most strength, appreciated the inputs the other brought to the situations and continued to grow our team in the same way.

To this day I always like to have partners who are Excel wizards...and I am SO lucky to have a few Excel Wizards to partner with. Hopefully I bring them value of understand the abstractness of a situation and the different solutions we can provide.

Do you have any current relationships in which you can turn that dissonance into a strength not a challenge?