by Evert Smit
or: What a glass of wine at a conference can teach us about the human condition at work and in life in general.
It started, as many good things do, over wine after a long conference day. My conversation partner—a very sharp, worldly acquaintance—summed up decades of human puzzlement in one sentence: “There are basically two kinds of people: those guided by truth, and those guided by agreement.”
That line stayed with me. Because once you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. In science versus politics. In engineering meetings versus boardrooms. In product design versus corporate strategy. Even at dinner tables. We humans are pulled by two invisible forces: the need to know what’s real, and the need to stay together.
The twin engines of human coordination
Truth-seeking is the instinct to test, measure, falsify—to ask, is it so? Agreement-seeking is the instinct to align—to ask, can we live with it? The first drives discovery; the second drives cooperation. But they run on different fuel. Truth-seeking rewards precision, correction, even conflict. Agreement-seeking rewards empathy, diplomacy, harmony. Both are necessary; both can be destructive when they dominate.
Modern psychology and social epistemology have explored this tension for decades. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber’s argumentative theory of reasoning suggests our minds evolved more for persuasion within groups than for solitary accuracy. Habermas argued that agreement only earns legitimacy when it survives tests of truth, rightness, and sincerity. Philip Tetlock showed that people accountable for accuracy search harder and reason better, while those judged on popularity or harmony conform faster. In other words: our cognition is political long before it is logical.
Mapping the invisible battlefield
But this view isn’t one-dimensional. I think we at least need 2 dimensions! Imagine a two-axis plane:
- the horizontal axis for truth (low to high rigor),
- the vertical axis for agreement (low to high alignment).
That gives four familiar habitats:
- Integrators (high truth, high agreement): NASA mission reviews, Toyota’s safety culture—disagree early, align later.
- Iconoclasts (high truth, low agreement): the mavericks who spot reality leaks and pay social rent for it.
- Courtiers (low truth, high agreement): smooth operators who keep the peace while steering off a cliff.
- Noise (low on both): endless debate, no traction.
Most organizations oscillate between Courtiers and Iconoclasts—too much harmony or too much friction. Integrators are rare because they require design, not personality: distinct truth-windows (fact-finding, dissent) followed by alignment-windows (commitment, communication).
When we mix the two phases, we get theater (“we all agree on nonsense”) or paralysis (“we argue forever”).
Then came the third dimension: volume
A week later, that conversation echoed again, this time with an extra glass of perspective. You know how I hate flatlander views of the world, there must always be at least one extra dimension 🙂
I was sure that we’d missed something obvious: loud versus quiet. Because truth and agreement don’t exist in silence—they’re broadcast through voices. And expressiveness distorts both.
Social psychology calls it the fluency effect: people mistake confidence and verbal smoothness for competence. The loud seem right; the quiet seem uncertain. That’s how organizations end up ruled by “loud courtiers” with elegant PowerPoints and little evidence, while “quiet iconoclasts” with the data are dismissed as difficult. Volume is not evidence, yet our brains treat it as such.
How to rebalance the system
The cure isn’t personality training; it’s architecting the conversation. Here’s my view how we can communicate better by deeper understanding of where “the other side” comes from, how “they” tick:
- Start in silence. Distribute a short brief. Let everyone read and write their view or forecast first. Written thinking gives the quiet equal footing and lowers social pressure.
- Brainwriting before brainstorming. Two rounds of silent idea generation prevent loudness bias and groupthink.
3. Round-robin, junior-to-senior. Everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice. Respect is no longer proportional to decibels.
4. Minority report required. Before commitment, one dissent must be written down. It legitimizes truth-seekers without stalling decisions.
5. Score accuracy, not eloquence. Record a few probabilistic forecasts per project and revisit them later. When the scoreboard rewards being right rather than sounding right, cognition re-aligns.
6. Publish talk-time. What gets measured gets civil.
Do this, and suddenly your “difficult” engineers and your “political” managers begin to see each other not as opposites but as complementary organs in the same living system: one sensing reality, the other coordinating response.
Why this matters
Because misunderstanding this split is not just an internal HR problem—it’s civilizational. Everywhere, from corporate strategy to public discourse, truth and agreement are pulling apart. Science shouts data; politics shouts narrative; both grow louder, neither listens. The loud courtiers win airtime, the quiet iconoclasts write post-mortems.
Healthy systems integrate the two: truth tells us where to steer, agreement helps us row. And volume—if left unchecked—decides who’s even allowed to hold the map.
So next time a meeting drifts into déjà vu, remember that old conversation over wine. Ask yourself: are we seeking truth, seeking agreement, or just rewarding whoever speaks most confidently? Then add a little silence to the room. That’s where wisdom starts breathing again.
