Find No Sooner Part 3: Reading the ICE in Real Time

🧊 This article is Part 3 of the series: Find No Sooner, Unfreeze Progress
Strategies for spotting resistance early and understanding what’s stalling your team.

• Part 1: Why No Hides
  The social, cultural, and structural reasons people hide their objections.

• Part 2: Inviting No Into the Conversation
  Asking questions that uncover objections.

• Part 3: Reading the ICE in Real Time ← you are here

• Part 4: Mapping Resistance After the Fact
  Reveal what’s stuck and chart a path through the freeze.

So you’ve made space for feedback, and someone says No. Now what?

In a world that celebrates speed, certainty, and momentum, hearing “No” can feel really weird. It’s just not the done thing!

But not all disagreements are the same. Some are based on missing facts. Some run deeper. Some disagreements have nothing to do with what you’re discussing.

To work with resistance in the moment, you need to understand where it’s coming from. That’s where the ICE Model comes in.

Apply the ICE Model to Cool Heated Disagreements

The ICE Model is inspired by Michael Wilkinson's excellent guidance to facilitators who encounter disagreements in a workshop. Beyond workshops, I've used these ideas to navigate disagreements in conversations ranging from meetings with the executive team to a casual chat over beers.

(My husband read this and thought I must be talking about him, because he’s the person I chat over beers with most often. Sure, I am! Him and everyone else, because keeping this model in mind is a great way to prevent cordial disagreements from escalating into unhappy arguments.)

The ICE Model helps us navigate three sources of disagreement.

Yes, it's an ICEberg—but this one's flipped from what you might expect.

The traditional iceberg metaphor suggests that there are massive hidden challenges below the water, while the visible surface area is small.

That’s not what we see in practice. Information disagreements (the surface ice) are the most widespread conflicts you'll encounter at work. The deeper issues—Convictions and External Factors—affect fewer situations but are much harder to resolve.

This inverted structure reflects the reality of workplace disagreements.

Information: The Surface Ice

Unclear, missing, and misunderstood information causes most of the disagreements you'll encounter at work.

When people lack key details, they fill in the gaps with assumptions that send everyone down different paths.

A Few Examples

I met a local government official who assumed farmers were opposing a new gas tax because they were climate deniers. She didn’t realize that the tax would put farmers practicing carbon sequestration and solar farming out of business. The farmers were actively combating climate change, AND they still need fuel for their tractors. What looked like ideological opposition was really a practical concern about an unintended consequence.

Jack Stack realized information disagreements were at the root of his leadership challenges when he was the CEO of an engine manufacturing firm in the '90s. 

Things were rough, and when he'd push for efficiency measures, workers pushed back. His employees told each other stories about where the money was going, and assumed management was just eager to pocket bigger profits.

So, Jack began sharing financial statements and educating employees about the company’s finances, making sure that workers didn’t need to speculate about how much money was going to the ownership group, "since the numbers were right there.”

Once everyone was looking at the same information, much of the old resentment dissipated. It became much easier to collaborate on improvements. Ensuring everyone had access to information proved so powerful that it gave rise to Open-book management model, which has been successfully adopted by companies around the world.

Mr. Stack found that radical transparency radically reduces Information conflicts.

Duolingo’s CEO is learning this lesson the hard way.

In May 2025, Mr. Von Ahn sent an “AI-first” memo announcing that the company would require AI for all roles and stop using contractors for work AI could handle.

This triggered weeks of anxiety and backlash from employees, concerned about job security and the company’s direction, and massive outcry from the public.

Two weeks later, with users fleeing the platform in droves, Von Ahn posted a second memo internally and on LinkedIn, saying:

The second memo emphasized that no employee's job would be harmed in the coming AI revolution. Instead, AI would be used to accelerate and enhance their work.
Employees remain skeptical.

These are loud, public examples of how missing information can create conflict.
Smaller examples – "Oh, you want it next Friday, not tomorrow? Ok then!" – abound too.

What to Do

Regardless of the scope, the first step in breaking the Ice is to slow down and clearly outline the details.

Get granular. Map assumptions. Michael recommends delineating alternatives, which works great. I’ve found that 5D Mapping works even faster, and I’ll share more on that this summer. (And if you’re curious now, let me know! That’s my favorite tool.)

Regardless of your approach, the key is to move past generalities into the specifics.
As a participant in our workshop on this topic noted:

Convictions: Beliefs Below the Surface

Even when everyone has all the information, people may hold different values and/or experiences, which lead them to a different answer.

Here, disagreement stems from what people prioritize or believe matters most.

Two executives might agree on all the budget numbers yet still clash over whether to invest in customer service or product development. They share the same data, but their past experiences and core beliefs about what drives business success point them toward different choices. The conflict lives in their fundamental approaches to solving the problem.

Classic Example

Sales and engineering teams.
Sales will happily promise the moon because that's what gets the customer in the door. Engineering prefers to under-promise and over-deliver.

Do they both want awesome products and happy customers? Absolutely. But their roles require prioritizing different values, which can bring teams into conflict.

When you've outlined the details behind a conflict and learned that the issue isn't one of missing information, but rather of convictions, it's time to figure out what those experiences or values are.

Sales values satisfied customers, but not as much as they do new revenue.
Engineers value company growth and profits, but often place higher priority on product quality.

What to Do

Resolving disagreements like these requires finding new alternatives that respect both priorities and build on their shared values. Once again, Michael posted a great example of how you might address a disagreement rooted in convictions.

External Factors: The Deep Dark Freeze

Sometimes it isn't about information or competing values.
Some disagreements run much deeper, rooted in bad history, personality conflicts, or factors completely unrelated to the issue at hand.

Down here, you're dealing with purely emotional objections.
The “I just don't like your stinking face,” type.
When two leaders hate each other and object to anything the other proposes.
When the nurses oppose every doctor's initiative because of years of being dismissed.

Example

A workshop participant shared:

What to Do

As Nancy Settle-Murphy observed:

In the short term, you can try mediation or coaching. For disagreements that need to be resolved yesterday, you can escalate to a higher authority. (That’s Michael’s advice, too.)

And sometimes, you can acknowledge the deep disconnect, then design around it.

Caution: This is ICE, not a parfait.

The ICE layers give us a useful way to consider the sources of disagreement and clues about how we can attempt to resolve them. But just like with real icebergs, the boundaries between these layers aren't clean, and sometimes people disagree at multiple levels at the same time.

It’s ICE all the way down.

I saw this when helping run a Braver Angels Common Ground workshop on abortion.

First, the obvious Nos were on the table.
Participants represented opposite sides of this polarized issue, declaring either “I am pro-life” or “I am pro-choice.” The workshop involved several chances for opposite pairs to exchange views as we discussed:

• What are the values and concerns you think that you and the other side might share?

• What are some policies that you and the other side might be able to agree on?

Everyone was asked to speak from their personal experience, and to raise questions about anything they felt was unclear.

When someone asked, “Wait—what do you mean by extended benefits?” we discovered people assumed different policies were already in place.
We uncovered several information-level disagreements like this.

Then, during a breakout, a pro-life and a pro-choice pair were stunned to discover that “we have the exact same policy preferences!” Once they turned from generalities to details, they found a shared preference for policies limiting abortion after “somewhere in that 13-to-16-week window.”

But they framed it differently. One spoke of “protecting the life of the child” and the other of “protecting the autonomy of the woman,” reflecting their differing Convictions.

Finally, External Factors emerged: participants noted influences ranging from where they were raised, who they’re married to, and stories they’d heard. Those outside pressures—family, local norms, extreme examples in the media—drove each person’s activist stance. Those stances often had little to do with real abortion policy details and more to do with group identity and belonging.

A Time and Place to Disagree and Commit

The ICE Model encourages us to get curious about disagreements, then use the most appropriate strategy to attempt resolution.
One workshop participant asked, "How does this balance with the idea of disagreeing, but committing to the collective choice?"

I shared my Braver Angels experience to highlight that:
Some disagreements can't be easily resolved. It doesn't always matter.

That Common Ground workshop revealed a lot of agreement between the pro-life and pro-choice attendees. With this to build on, we could remain aware of disagreements and still commit to moving ahead on those areas where we do agree.

This kind of "disagree and commit"— where groups carve out areas they can agree on and commit to joint action even though they still disagree about other things—is a different beast from the way it’s used in companies.

The corporate call to disagree and commit is a norm where someone voices objections, then agrees to support the final choice anyway.
It's supposed to be invoked when a leader wants to elicit people’s input, but needs to prevent lengthy debate.

When used appropriately, an invitation to disagree and commit can yield:

• Faster decisions: By capping debate, teams avoid paralysis. Once objections are out, the group picks a course and moves.

• Better decisions: By creating an opportunity to share concerns, leaders are more likely to hear information pointing to a better alternative.

• Clarity on ownership: When you commit in front of a group, it encourages accountability.

The Open Practice Library includes a great primer on how to effectively apply the Disagree and Commit approach to decision making.

Unfortunately, too many leaders think,
"I need to be decisive and go, go, go. This is BUSINESS! We don't have time to worry about everyone's feelings. Disagree and commit! Get with the program!"

(Can you tell I spent years working as a woman in tech? Does it show?
Let’s just say there were executive man-boys in my past who liked to beat down objections with their disagree and commit stick whenever they were challenged, and I’m still cheesed.)

When used to shield a decision that's being rammed through, disagree and commit increases groupthink and creates the same problems as not asking at all.

If you invite No and then dismiss it, you’ll soon find that valid concerns are suppressed, resentments hidden, and people quietly resist acting on their supposed "commitments."

So let's say the horse is out of the barn. You missed the chance to find No early, and now the growing ice is slowing your teams down. What can you do?

That depends on the kind of resistance you're facing.

In Part 4, we’ll shift from real-time conversations to after-the-fact analysis.
When momentum stalls and you’re not sure why, it’s time to map the resistance.