That’s when your team needs to have a counternarrative. The bullshit-asymmetry theory, Brandolini’s law, will be at play here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to produce it.”

So you need to craft a great story and walk into meetings ready to support each other. Agree ahead of time—make sure everyone knows the script. Gather data to back you up so it’s not just your word against theirs. Then when the asshole pipes up, your crew will have the ammunition and manpower to call them out.

The more you actively farm for dissent, and the more you encourage a culture of expressing disagreement openly, the better the decisions that will be made in your company. This is true for any company of any size in any industry.

For smaller initiatives, you don’t need to farm for dissent, but you’d still be wise to let everyone know what you’re doing and to take the temperature of your initiative. Let’s go back to your employee, Sheila, the woman who came to you with an idea you’re against. After explaining why you don’t agree, you can suggest that she socialize the idea with her peers and other leaders in the company. This means that she sets up multiple meetings, where she outlines her proposal and enters into discussions in order to stress-test her thinking and collect numerous opinions and data points before making her decision. Socializing is a type of farming for dissent with less emphasis on the dissent and more on the farming.

The kind of dialogue we wanted to foster is called assertive inquiry. Built on the work of organizational learning theorist Chris Argyris at Harvard Business School, this approach blends the explicit expression of your own thinking (advocacy) with a sincere exploration of the thinking of others (inquiry). In other words, it means clearly articulating your own ideas and sharing the data and reasoning behind them, while genuinely inquiring into the thoughts and reasoning of your peers. To do this effectively, individuals need to embrace a particular stance about their role in a discussion. The stance we tried to instill at P&G was a reasonably straightforward but traditionally underused one: “I have a view worth hearing, but I may be missing something.” It sounds simple, but this stance has a dramatic effect on group behavior if everyone in the room holds it. Individuals try to explain their own thinking—because they do have a view worth hearing.

We all ultimately want to find the strategy that is best for our business. Rather than asking individuals to find that answer for themselves and then fight it out, this approach enables the team to uncover the strongest option together. A standard process is characterized by arguments about what is true. By turning instead to exploring what would have to be true, teams go from battling one another to working together to explore ideas. Rather than attempting to bury real disagreements, this approach surfaces differences and resolves them, resulting in more-robust strategies and stronger commitment to them.