Learning Defiance When Compliance Is What We Know

In Sanskrit, Sunita means “good.”

“As a child, I was known for being an obedient daughter and student,” said Sunita Sah, a physician, a professor at Cornell’s SC Johnson School of Business, and now, an author. “I did what I was told. I did all my homework as expected. And these were the messages I received, not just from parents, but also from teachers and the community: Be good, obey. Don’t question authority. Don’t make a scene. Be polite.”

Being a good child, Sah was fascinated by defiance, and often wondered why others could do it much more readily than she could. Over time, she came to realize that compliance was equated with good, and defiance with bad. But she questioned whether that was actually true.

At From Day One’s Washington, D.C.conference on a new era of investing in humans, Dr. Sah spoke in a fireside chat about her new book Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes. In it she lays out her decades of research on when people defy, when they comply, and how they decide.

“Is it sometimes bad to be so good?”

Sah took issue with the idea that compliance is good and defiance is bad. Take some of the examples she used in her book. In one study, “nine out of 10 healthcare workers, most of them nurses, did not feel comfortable speaking up when they saw a colleague or a physician making a mistake.” And “in another survey of over 1,700 crew members of commercial airlines, half of them didn’t want to speak up when they saw an error being made.”

These are life and death situations. If we don’t defy then, when can we? “I just started to think, is it sometimes bad to be so good? What do we sacrifice by disregarding our values?”

To defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise. “It is a positive, pro-social force in society, because every act that we do, every act of compliance, consent, dissent, defiance, every single act builds and creates the society that we live in. It affects our lives, our communities, our workplaces,” she said.

Compliance and Defiance

Compliance and defiance are not binary, but rather exist on a spectrum, Sah writes in Defy. On one end is a “True Yes.” Let’s say you’re asked to perform a task at work. You understand it clearly and it aligns with your values, so you do it. That is compliance that we knowingly and positively consent to. On the other end is a “True No.” That is, when you’re asked to do something at work and it doesn’t align with your values, so you don’t. That’s defiance that we positively consent to.

The True Yes and the True No

There are five elements of a True Yes: capacity, knowledge, understanding, freedom, and consent.

Capacity refers to one’s mental capacity to make a decision. “You’re not ill under sickness or under drugs or alcohol, so you have the mental capacity.” Knowledge is the cold, hard facts of the situation. Next is understanding, or “a thorough grasp of the facts, the risks, the benefits and the alternatives. Freedom is the freedom to choose your response. “If you don't have the freedom to say no, you can’t have consent, it’s merely compliance.” Authorization is a conscious choice to say yes (consent) or no (defiance).

In fact, a True No comprises the same five elements. A True Yes and a True No are just two sides of the same coin. “It does not matter whether you say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” Sah writes. “What matters is that your decision helps you live in alignment with your values.”

To be clear, “some people get to defy with far less consequences than others,” she said. The further you are from a dominant status or identity, the greater the consequences for defiance. When that’s the case, many people must make the calculation of whether it’s safe to defy. If it’s not, you can defer your defiance to another day.

Learning to Defy

Sah believes that anyone can learn to be defiant, and it’s not an inborn personality trait. But in order to get there, the way we think about ourselves must change. “If you think of defiance as being loud, bold, aggressive, violent, heroic, or superhuman, and therefore not for me–both of those things are wrong. Defiance can be quiet, value-based, and it can be unique to what’s comfortable for you.”

From our earliest days, we’re wired to comply, so we need to retain those neural pathways, she said. We can learn to defy. Practice role-playing or scripting out moments where you’d like to be defiant. “We need to get our ears used to hearing those words, our mouths used to saying them.”

“We can be compliant one day and we can be defiant the next day,” Sah said. “It’s not about not having the personality or being larger than life. It’s a skill set that we can all learn. So even if compliance is your default, it's not your destiny.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.

(Photos by Justin Feltman for From Day One)