Safe to disagree

Every Friday evening, a group of about twenty men in Sharjah play football on the same pitch at the same hour. It has run for years. One founder books the pitch, picks the teams and decides how things are done.

This summer, one of the newer players says something. The pitch they use has become crowded, the floodlights fail every other week, and another pitch ten minutes away is cheaper and free at a better time. He has checked. He has the prices and has spoken to the man who runs it.

What happens next tells you nearly everything about the group.

In one version, the room goes quiet. The founder takes it as a challenge. A couple of the old hands make jokes about newcomers who think they know better. The player understands the lesson, which is that ideas here are measured by loyalty, and he says nothing next time. Nor does anyone who watched.

In the other version, someone says, fair enough, show us. They drive over to look. Perhaps they move, perhaps they do not, but the player who did the homework is thanked for doing it, and the next person with an idea knows it is welcome.

The first group feels more united. It is actually more fragile. A group that cannot hear a disagreement runs on habit and deference, and habit holds only while nothing changes. This is true of a football group, a family business, a neighbourhood committee or a country.

And things always change. The pitch closes, the rent rises, half the players move away. At that point people will disagree whether the group likes it or not.

The groups that last are not the ones that avoid disagreement. They are the ones that have practised it, kindly and often, so that when it matters, nobody is afraid to speak.