Building Cohesion: The Power of Agreeing to Disagree

A decade ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Jonathan Powell. Today Powell is Kier Starmer’s National Security Adviser, but at the time he was running a conflict resolution organisation called Inter Mediate. Powell is something of a legend when it comes to conflict resolution having acted as the UK Government’s chief negotiator ahead of the Good Friday Agreement which finally brought peace to Northern Ireland.

At the time of the conversation, I wanted to understand trust building as part of a pitch and was bored of the small-minded approach to trust building that seemed commonplace in marketing. I knew that to engage in the peace process in Northern Ireland, Powell had to find a way to trust and be trusted by the IRA. Understanding what that took seemed far more promising than the Edelman trust barometer.

Powell was endlessly fascinating but what stuck with me most was when he said the Good Friday Agreement wasn’t really an agreement at all – it was an agreement to disagree. Neither side, Nationalists nor Loyalists gave up on their aim of realising the Northern Ireland they had fought for. Whether it was a United Ireland or a fully paid up part of the United Kingdom, they simply agreed to disagree about the subject. A conflict that had cost so many lives and caused so much damage and pain ended with two enemies accepting they could share power with people of diametrically opposite views, without having to accept those views. Like so much of the Northern Ireland Peace Process it’s a masterclass in conflict resolution and reminds us we don’t have to accept the views of others to live alongside them. Yet this whole idea seems to escape us right now. We have lost the simple human quality of agreeing to disagree and this is a significant problem since it is the essence of cohesion.

Cohesion is the concept of non-material union, it’s what bonds people together beyond the ‘material’ facts like citizenship or geography. Cohesion is essential to a functioning society where people feel they have enough in common to act together and in each other’s interests. If we lose cohesion we lose society, and if we lose society, we lose the whole concept of collective endeavour and mutual interest – living itself becomes atomised and isolated, which is hardly a life at all.

Cohesion is unquestionably facilitated by people agreeing about a set of core values and attitudes – values which no member of the group may transgress. Some are reasonably fixed like a belief in the rule of law, the prohibition of murder or the concept of property rights. Others change over time like the role and rights of women or the funding of public services for everyone through taxation. These are the universal values of a society, and they are vital to meaningful cohesion.

However, if cohesive societies are defined by what their members can all agree on the resulting groups will be too small for a functioning state or even city. This is where we go wrong in our understanding of cohesion.

Cohesive societies have another quality beyond the universal values and experiences that bond them, and these are what we might call permissive values – the things about which we can agree to disagree upon. This is the true measure of a cohesive society – the great hinterland of values and issues about which we fundamentally disagree but about which we tolerate dissent in the interests of the cohesion we so desperately desire.

Religious freedom is a good example of this, where people are free to practice their religion if they do not impose their chosen doctrine on others. In many societies entire populations agree to disagree on who is God and whether there is one at all, largely in peace and understanding. This is also true of fanatical football fans and most forms of patriotism. Conviction around a faith, team cause or place need not descend into hatred and violence. While in most functioning democracies there is a clear agreement that the party that wins the election should be allowed to form a government and that the handover of power should be orderly and respectful, whoever one voted for and however much one might disagree with their politics and policies.

You may have bristled at these examples, thinking that when supporters of a political party that has lost an election storm the seat of government or religious fanatics and political zealots terrorise other members of society you can hardly say that people are happy agreeing to disagree. And I think that is the problem we face right now when it comes to building cohesive communities, that people are less prepared to tolerate dissent from their values or views even if the subject is a permissive value for society at large.

Intolerance and hatred are increasingly perverting the normal discourse between people with opposing points of view. We see this with issues like the value of immigration, the balance of trans people’s rights and women’s rights, the crisis in Gaza, reproductive rights, Britain’s relationship with Europe and so on. These are issues people feel passionately about but for the sake of our co-existence we must reach a state of constructive disagreement with each other – rather than violence in word or deed.

It is tempting to blame the social media platforms for all society’s ills, built as they are on business models that profit from up hatred and fear. It is now undeniable that the purpose of social media platforms is to feed people ever more extreme content to deepen users’ addiction. Even when they do not achieve this effect, they succeed in stifling debate and discussion between people of different persuasions. There is no place for the social media platforms to hide when it comes to undermining social cohesion.

However, social media is not the sole problem we face in creating a more cohesive society, it simply feeds and feeds off tension that exists for other reasons. In the Great Experiment, Yascha Mounk points out that diversity and democracy have never been close bedfellows, and that historically diversity has only thrived in autocratic societies like the Hapsburg Empire or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In contrast successful democracies have tended to have more homogenous populations. Indeed, according to Mounk, the idea of a diverse democracy is a ‘great experiment’ in which creating diverse and inclusive democracies was always going to be a challenge and we shouldn’t be surprised that it is hard, if no less worthwhile for it.

We should also look at who benefits from communities who are in conflict with each other. In Minority Rule, the classical Marxist Ash Sakar suggests the fragmentation of society into identity groups all vying for the status bestowed by victimhood, has been deliberated manipulated by the ruling minority to prevent collective action by the majority. Identity politics which emerged to recognise and unite progressive forces in society has been subverted to keep those forces in constant antagonism with each other and therefore unable to attack the real sources of oppression. We see this in the way the populist right in the UK have set white working-class people against the non-white working class in order they blame their situation on others like themselves and not on the rich and powerful.

These readings are only two theories amongst many credible explanations. Yet they remind us that building a more cohesive society will take more than simply regulating the baser instincts of the ‘careless people’ of Meta.

There are many organisations actively engaged in bringing people together to find consensus, particularly in the wake of atrocities like the murder of the British Member of Parliament Jo Cox. However, I believe the job of work is also in creating the freedom and space for people to disagree with each other without resorting to the language of violence, or as we saw last summer after the Southport stabbings, out and out violence. People must be encouraged to disagree with each other without censure or silencing, but also without hatred or violence.

One reason the disagreement about women’s rights and the rights of trans people has become so toxic is because debate about these issues was deliberately stopped by vested interests. Similarly, it must be permissible for people to express their concerns about immigration without fear of being silenced for being ‘racist’. Their views may or may not be racist but the code of silence about immigration has undoubtedly driven people into the hands of right-wing extremists who are more than willing to fan legitimate concerns into conspiracy, then hatred and eventually violence. It is now imperative that we create space for disagreement, and to help people in agreeing to disagree.

In the context of social cohesion, the brand world seems a trivial place, but if brands and the businesses they serve are to have a meaningful role in our lives we need to understand how and whether they engage with this issue. If only because collapsing social cohesion is a clear threat to business performance. The World Economic Forum regards Societal Polarisation as the fourth most severe risk to the global economy over the next two years. The impact on businesses is not simply being caught up in endless culture wars but the effect on the public’s trust for any organisation vulnerable to the spread of misinformation and disinformation, resulting in a direct effect on customer engagement and sales. As social polarisation races up every organisation’s risk register, cohesion is an issue we must engage with.

If cohesion is enhanced by common values, it can also be enhanced by common experiences. This is one of the reasons the NHS is a powerful force for cohesion in the UK, as the universal health service everyone uses, depends on, and so cares about. We also see this in periodic events like the performance of a national team in international competition, or the atmosphere in a city hosting the Olympics.

Some businesses also represent collective experiences because they hold roles and positions that transcend purely transactional relationships. This is clearly the case with shared non-commercial institutions like the NHS, but it is also true of those organisations that span the institutional and commercial worlds like the BBC and the National Trust and charities like the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research UK. But even in the purely commercial realm there are businesses at such scale that they too have an important role in forging social cohesion through shared experience such as The John Lewis partnership, ITV, BT or the big retail banks. All these organisations have significant numbers of employees, investors and customers and have the power to bring people together.

However, this is not just about common values or the universals of the business.

Any large organisation represents a diverse community of employees, customers and stakeholders – a coalition if you like. Coalition is a more common term in politics sphere, but it is a useful concept. By coalition I don’t mean creating a government from different parties I mean the coalition that brings any party or group of parties to power. For any political party to form a government they must knit together a coalition of different and diverse groups that come together to vote for it, even if the party does not represent their views on everything. It is enough for the party to align with the ‘coalition’s’ position on the most important issues of the moment – even if it is simply that the other lot must go. Brands work in the same way, as coalitions drawn from different groups but unified by a specific set of needs the brand is seen as best place to serve. Waitrose is a supermarket coalition that draws together people that value high quality food and animal welfare. Aldi is a coalition that draws together people that value cheaper food without an obvious sacrifice in quality. While the National Trust is a coalition of people who value nature, heritage and beauty. In each case nothing more is asked of its people or customers than agreement on their universal values.

Like a winning political party, the task for any organisation is to build and hold your coalition by reinforcing the value customers and employees receive from the brand and leaving space for disagreement on issues that may be important to some customers but not to the prosperity of the coalition.

In that context backing a ‘side’ amongst your brand coalition whether amongst customers employee groups, seems naïve and self-defeating. Any brand must be passionate and outspoken about the universal values of that business, but beyond this employees and customers should not be expected to agree on permissive values.

This is a difficult position for me to take. I have long believed that brands need to be opinionated not fence sitters, so to say that brands should be neutral on issues that are very important to a group of people is counter intuitive. Yet if those issues are in the permissive camp this is exactly what the organisation should do, facilitate discussion if that is possible but don’t ‘call it’ for one group over another.

It might help that when businesses are working on their mission and values, which should both be universal, they also create a list of permissive values that are important but over which the organisation takes no position, instead maintaining a moderate view and allows dissent. To return to a political comparison, there should be a three line whip on the universal values (where individual members of parliament must vote with their leadership) and a free vote on the rest (where they can vote with their conscience).

This approach might introduce the concept of agreeing to disagree into our workplaces, which would be a modest start in bringing the idea back into broader society. Because our only hope for a more cohesive society is to recognise it’s not just what we agree on that holds us together, the space to disagree on other things is absolutely vital.

A decade ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Jonathan
Powell. Today Powell is Kier Starmer’s National Security Adviser, but at the
time he was running a conflict resolution organisation called Inter Mediate.
Powell is something of a legend when it comes to conflict resolution having
acted as the UK Government’s chief negotiator ahead of the Good Friday
Agreement which finally brought peace to Northern Ireland.At the time of the conversation, I wanted to understand
trust building as part of a pitch and was bored of the small-minded approach to
trust building that seemed commonplace in marketing. I knew that to engage in
the peace process in Northern Ireland, Powell had to find a way to trust and be
trusted by the IRA. Understanding what that took seemed far more promising than
the Edelman trust barometer. Powell was endlessly fascinating but what stuck with me most
was when he said the Good Friday Agreement wasn’t really an agreement at all –
it was an agreement to disagree. Neither side, Nationalists nor Loyalists gave
up on their aim of realising the Northern Ireland they had fought for. Whether
it was a United Ireland or a fully paid up part of the United Kingdom, they
simply agreed to disagree about the subject. A conflict that had cost so many
lives and caused so much damage and pain ended with two enemies accepting they
could share power with people of diametrically opposite views, without having
to accept those views. Like so much of the Northern Ireland Peace Process it’s
a masterclass in conflict resolution and reminds us we don’t have to accept the
views of others to live alongside them. Yet this whole idea seems to escape us
right now. We have lost the simple human quality of agreeing to disagree and this
is a significant problem since it is the essence of cohesion.Cohesion is the concept of non-material union, it’s what
bonds people together beyond the ‘material’ facts like citizenship or geography.
Cohesion is essential to a functioning society where people feel they have
enough in common to act together and in each other’s interests. If we lose
cohesion we lose society, and if we lose society, we lose the whole concept of
collective endeavour and mutual interest – living itself becomes atomised and
isolated, which is hardly a life at all. Cohesion is unquestionably facilitated by people agreeing about
a set of core values and attitudes – values which no member of the group may
transgress. Some are reasonably fixed like a belief in the rule of law, the
prohibition of murder or the concept of property rights. Others change over
time like the role and rights of women or the funding of public services for
everyone through taxation. These are the universal values of a society, and
they are vital to meaningful cohesion. However, if cohesive societies are defined by what their
members can all agree on the resulting groups will be too small for a
functioning state or even city. This is where we go wrong in our understanding
of cohesion.Cohesive societies have another quality beyond the universal
values and experiences that bond them, and these are what we might call permissive
values – the things about which we can agree to disagree upon. This is the true
measure of a cohesive society – the great hinterland of values and issues about
which we fundamentally disagree but about which we tolerate dissent in the
interests of the cohesion we so desperately desire.Religious freedom is a good example of this, where people are
free to practice their religion if they do not impose their chosen doctrine on
others. In many societies entire populations agree to disagree on who is God
and whether there is one at all, largely in peace and understanding. This is
also true of fanatical football fans and most forms of patriotism. Conviction
around a faith, team cause or place need not descend into hatred and violence.
While in most functioning democracies there is a clear agreement that the party
that wins the election should be allowed to form a government and that the
handover of power should be orderly and respectful, whoever one voted for and
however much one might disagree with their politics and policies.You may have bristled at these examples, thinking that when
supporters of a political party that has lost an election storm the seat of
government or religious fanatics and political zealots terrorise other members
of society you can hardly say that people are happy agreeing to disagree. And I
think that is the problem we face right now when it comes to building cohesive
communities, that people are less prepared to tolerate dissent from their
values or views even if the subject is a permissive value for society at large.
Intolerance and hatred are increasingly perverting the
normal discourse between people with opposing points of view. We see this with
issues like the value of immigration, the balance of trans people’s rights and
women’s rights, the crisis in Gaza, reproductive rights, Britain’s relationship
with Europe and so on. These are issues people feel passionately about but for
the sake of our co-existence we must reach a state of constructive disagreement
with each other – rather than violence in word or deed.It is tempting to blame the social media platforms for all
society’s ills, built as they are on business models that profit from up hatred
and fear. It is now undeniable that the purpose of social media platforms is to
feed people ever more extreme content to deepen users’ addiction. Even when
they do not achieve this effect, they succeed in stifling debate and discussion
between people of different persuasions. There is no place for the social media
platforms to hide when it comes to undermining social cohesion.However, social media is not the sole problem we face in
creating a more cohesive society, it simply feeds and feeds off tension that
exists for other reasons. In the Great Experiment, Yascha Mounk points out that
diversity and democracy have never been close bedfellows, and that historically
diversity has only thrived in autocratic societies like the Hapsburg Empire or
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In contrast successful democracies
have tended to have more homogenous populations. Indeed, according to Mounk,
the idea of a diverse democracy is a ‘great experiment’ in which creating
diverse and inclusive democracies was always going to be a challenge and we
shouldn’t be surprised that it is hard, if no less worthwhile for it.We should also look at who benefits from communities who are
in conflict with each other. In Minority Rule, the classical Marxist Ash Sakar
suggests the fragmentation of society into identity groups all vying for the
status bestowed by victimhood, has been deliberated manipulated by the ruling minority
to prevent collective action by the majority. Identity politics which emerged to
recognise and unite progressive forces in society has been subverted to keep those
forces in constant antagonism with each other and therefore unable to attack
the real sources of oppression. We see this in the way the populist right in
the UK have set white working-class people against the non-white working class in
order they blame their situation on others like themselves and not on the rich
and powerful.These readings are only two theories amongst many credible
explanations. Yet they remind us that building a more cohesive society will take
more than simply regulating the baser instincts of the ‘careless people’ of
Meta.There are many organisations actively engaged in bringing
people together to find consensus, particularly in the wake of atrocities like
the murder of the British Member of Parliament Jo Cox. However, I believe the
job of work is also in creating the freedom and space for people to disagree
with each other without resorting to the language of violence, or as we saw
last summer after the Southport stabbings, out and out violence. People must be
encouraged to disagree with each other without censure or silencing, but also
without hatred or violence.One reason the disagreement about women’s rights and the
rights of trans people has become so toxic is because debate about these issues
was deliberately stopped by vested interests. Similarly, it must be permissible
for people to express their concerns about immigration without fear of being
silenced for being ‘racist’. Their views may or may not be racist but the code
of silence about immigration has undoubtedly driven people into the hands of right-wing
extremists who are more than willing to fan legitimate concerns into
conspiracy, then hatred and eventually violence. It is now imperative that we
create space for disagreement, and to help people in agreeing to disagree.In the context of social cohesion, the brand world seems a
trivial place, but if brands and the businesses they serve are to have a
meaningful role in our lives we need to understand how and whether they engage
with this issue. If only because collapsing social cohesion is a clear threat
to business performance. The World Economic Forum regards Societal Polarisation
as the fourth most severe risk to the global economy over the next two years.
The impact on businesses is not simply being caught up in endless culture wars
but the effect on the public’s trust for any organisation vulnerable to the
spread of misinformation and disinformation, resulting in a direct effect on
customer engagement and sales. As social polarisation races up every organisation’s
risk register, cohesion is an issue we must engage with.If cohesion is enhanced by common values, it can also be
enhanced by common experiences. This is one of the reasons the NHS is a
powerful force for cohesion in the UK, as the universal health service everyone
uses, depends on, and so cares about. We also see this in periodic events like
the performance of a national team in international competition, or the
atmosphere in a city hosting the Olympics.Some businesses also represent collective experiences
because they hold roles and positions that transcend purely transactional
relationships. This is clearly the case with shared non-commercial institutions
like the NHS, but it is also true of those organisations that span the
institutional and commercial worlds like the BBC and the National Trust and
charities like the British Heart Foundation or Cancer Research UK. But even in
the purely commercial realm there are businesses at such scale that they too have
an important role in forging social cohesion through shared experience such as The
John Lewis partnership, ITV, BT or the big retail banks. All these
organisations have significant numbers of employees, investors and customers
and have the power to bring people together. However, this is not just about common values or the
universals of the business. Any large organisation represents a diverse community of employees,
customers and stakeholders – a coalition if you like. Coalition is a more
common term in politics sphere, but it is a useful concept. By coalition I
don’t mean creating a government from different parties I mean the coalition
that brings any party or group of parties to power. For any political party to form
a government they must knit together a coalition of different and diverse
groups that come together to vote for it, even if the party does not represent
their views on everything. It is enough for the party to align with the
‘coalition’s’ position on the most important issues of the moment – even if it
is simply that the other lot must go. Brands work in the same way, as
coalitions drawn from different groups but unified by a specific set of needs
the brand is seen as best place to serve. Waitrose is a supermarket coalition
that draws together people that value high quality food and animal welfare.
Aldi is a coalition that draws together people that value cheaper food without
an obvious sacrifice in quality. While the National Trust is a coalition of
people who value nature, heritage and beauty. In each case nothing more is
asked of its people or customers than agreement on their universal values. Like a winning political party, the task for any
organisation is to build and hold your coalition by reinforcing the value
customers and employees receive from the brand and leaving space for
disagreement on issues that may be important to some customers but not to the
prosperity of the coalition. In that context backing a ‘side’ amongst your brand
coalition whether amongst customers employee groups, seems naïve and self-defeating.
Any brand must be passionate and outspoken about the universal values of that
business, but beyond this employees and customers should not be expected to
agree on permissive values. This is a difficult position for me to take. I have long
believed that brands need to be opinionated not fence sitters, so to say that
brands should be neutral on issues that are very important to a group of people
is counter intuitive. Yet if those issues are in the permissive camp this is exactly
what the organisation should do, facilitate discussion if that is possible but
don’t ‘call it’ for one group over another. It might help that when businesses are working on their
mission and values, which should both be universal, they also create a list of
permissive values that are important but over which the organisation takes no
position, instead maintaining a moderate view and allows dissent. To return to
a political comparison, there should be a three line whip on the universal
values (where individual members of parliament must vote with their leadership)
and a free vote on the rest (where they can vote with their conscience).This approach might introduce the concept of agreeing to
disagree into our workplaces, which would be a modest start in bringing the
idea back into broader society. Because our only hope for a more cohesive
society is to recognise it’s not just what we agree on that holds us together,
the space to disagree on other things is absolutely vital.