Wedding Business Solutions

Do you seek contrarian views?

• Alan Berg, CSP, FPSA, Global Speaking Fellow

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Are you open to hearing opinions that challenge your own, or do you find yourself surrounded by people who always agree with you? What could you gain by inviting critical feedback before sharing your own perspective? In this episode, I share why the best leaders actively look for dissenting voices and how doing so leads to better decisions, using examples from both business and science (like Darwin!). Learn how questioning your assumptions can reveal blind spots, prevent costly mistakes, and ultimately help you grow—if you’re willing to listen.

Listen to this new 6-minute episode for practical ways to welcome different viewpoints, and see how asking tough questions can lead to stronger results.

If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com 

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View the full transcript on Alan’s site: https://alanberg.com/blog/


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I'm Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you'd like to suggest other topics for "The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast" please let me know. My email is Alan@WeddingBusinessSolutions.com. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks. 

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Do you seek out contrarian views? Listen to this episode, see where I'm going. Hey, it's Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I'm listening to a book, it's actually courses on Audible, the Art of Critical Decision Making. And I love listening to things about decision making because so much of it applies to so much of our business. I actually just did another episode where I mentioned something about sunk cost bias. Well, in this case, they were talking about contrarian views. And the best leaders want to hear the contrarian view or the, or the, just the different view.

And that's why it's so important to get diversity into your business, because you're hearing different views from people who've come from different backgrounds. And, you know, whether it's religious background or whether it's race background or whether it's geographic background or, you know, country or whatever, people just see the world differently than we do. And when you want to hear that contrarian view or just a different view, right. It lets you see things in a way that you can't because we all have this lens on, you know, our own lens there. And one of the things they said is one of the best things for a leader to do is to ask other people's opinions before saying what they think, because then people think the leader just wants them to say, yeah, you're right. This is what you're doing. And that gets us into trouble. It gets us into trouble in business, it gets us in trouble in personal life and certainly gets us into.

Into trouble politically when all you have is, is yes men, right? If all you have yes men in your company, you're not hearing, you're not hearing the dissenting views. I just did something with, with my new book. So AI for the real world is after I wrote it and after I read it and after I made my changes, I actually put it into ChatGPT and I asked it to use its critical, cynical voice and just tear it apart. Tell me what's wrong with this. Tell me what's missing. Tell me, tell me, you know, where this is wrong or why this won't work. And I want to hear that. And the reason I want to hear that is I, I obviously think it's good.

I've read it, I wrote it, I read it, I think it's good. But I want to hear that dissenting view there. And it was an interesting thing in this book, in this course, I should say I call it an audiobook because I got it on audible, but it's actually a. One of. It's one of the courses they have. And it said that Darwin, you know, the Origin of the Species, Darwin kept two different journals and one of them was full of the contrarian views. One of them was things that did not support his theories and did not support his research. And then he had another one that did, and he kept that because in order to be sure that what you're doing is right, knowing that someone else says it's wrong, and then you can dispel that, you can confirm that and find out that maybe you're wrong, right.

Being open to that, that's a really, really powerful thing. And that's the sign of a, I think, of a good leader and a smart. The people that don't want to hear the contrarian views are just going to run down the path their way and they could have found out that maybe it wasn't a good idea. I've had this when I worked in corporate America and I had been moved into different positions and, you know, I no longer had a seat at the table when certain decisions were being made. But when they went to pot, they called me to help fix it. And I said, you know, I could have told you up front that was a problem, but now did they not want to hear it? I don't know. Did they think that they knew better? I don't know. All I know is they came to me after it went south and wanted me to help fix it.

So sometimes you want to have that person that'll tell you the truth. Actually, most of the time. Not all the time. Right. But most of the time somebody will tell you the truth and hearing that dissenting view. But I thought it was interesting that Darwin, you know, very famous again, the book and the research and all of this, that he was open to the contrarian views and actually kept them and saved them and looked for them. So now when he's even more clear and more sure about his hypotheses and more sure about what he does, and again, I'm not making a judgment about that. This is not a thing about religion, universe's evolution or whatever.

No, this is simply about being open to the contrarian views, being open to things, looking for things, possibly even that go against what you're thinking to try to find the holes in it. It's kind like I've spoken about on another episode about looking at what's the worst that could happen. You want to know what's the worst that could happen? Because most of the time it isn't that bad. There are times it's really bad, but most of the time it's not that bad. So seeing it and understanding that and saying, okay, I'm going to go forward anyway, because if this doesn't work, what's the worst that can happen? So when I tried something last year that cost me thousands of dollars, that didn't work. The worst that could happen is it cost me money. Maybe lost a little bit of time, but, you know, all in all, you know, people came to my booth anyway and they bought books anyway, so we didn't lose there, but we realized that that just wasn't a good idea. So we're moving on from it.

That was the last episode on Sunk Cost Bias.

So are you open to contrarian views? And more importantly, are you asking for them? Are you listening for them? Right. And whether it's real people or whether it's AI, you know, I do it with real people, too. Take a look at this. And people go, oh, what about that? What about that? Oh, I didn't see it that way. That's right, because I have that curse of knowledge. I know what I meant to do and how I meant to do it and what it's supposed to be. And if somebody else says, I don't understand, instead of saying, you're wrong, I say, I'm wrong.

Because I thought everybody would understand, but clearly they don't, because this person or these people don't. So listen to the contrarian views again. You don't have to follow them, but you also don't have to follow yourself. If you find out, maybe there is a better way. Thanks for listening.


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Alan Berg, CSP, Global Speaking Fellow

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