September 2025 Member Spotlight – Justin Jones-Fosu, Founder/CEO, Work. Meaningful.
-This is part 1 of 2 conversations with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
Justin Jones-Fosu is the founder and CEO of Work. Meaningful. where he speaks 50-60 times per year to companies, organizations, and associations around the globe on meaningful work and inclusion.
He is passionate about helping organizations and individuals take ownership of their mindset, purpose, and performance to achieve amazing results. He is the author of Your WHY Matters NOW, and The Inclusive Mindset. Recently, I met with Justin to talk about his latest book: I Respectfully Disagree: How to Have Difficult Conversations in a Divided World, which challenges readers to spend more time building bridges than erecting barriers.
This is Part 1 of a two-part spotlight on this conversation.
SM: Tell me a bit about your company, Justin. What’s your 30-second elevator pitch?
JJF: Work.Meaningful. is a workplace learning and development company focused on enhancing employee experience through meaningful work and inclusion. And we do that through consulting, speaking, and learning experiences—including online courses.
SM: Your most recent book takes on a big topic: the challenge of respectful disagreement. As you put it in your introduction, “The truth is that we’re not just divided but also growing more and more disrespectful toward each other, and it doesn’t have to be that way.” Maybe you’ve heard of Scott Shigeoka? He wrote a book on curiosity called Seek. Shigeoka works on research-based strategies to strengthen relationships, in particular across difference. He says that we’re in what he calls an “Era of incuriosity” in which we’ve deprioritized engaging in tough conversations and real understanding, and so we dehumanize people and we call them out and we cancel them.
I was recently re-reading Neil Postman, whose 80s take on the way media erodes society and democracy is still scarily relevant today. He said in Amusing Ourselves to Death that “the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.”
JJF: Oh, wow.
SM: Yeah, it’s good, right? So I was reading that and I was thinking about Scott’s work, and then reading your book, and thinking: is this the kind of cultural problem you see, that you’re addressing—like one in which we communicate on Twitter in short form, we don’t see anybody, and so we’re not just divided, but more disrespectful than ever. Basically, was that the sort of culture you had in mind when you were writing your book and thinking about the cultural context?
JJF: We think about this from the micro and macro sense: how are we processing things such as gun rights, abortion … but also the micro things: disagreements in the household, among friends.
We call this the ideological continuum: things we have a low versus high commitment to. It’s easy to disagree on the low continuum, but it becomes more challenging as we move up the continuum. And we don’t have the tools and habits to do that. Habit formation and intentionality are not in tension with one another – something that was initially intentional can become habit. You still have to choose to get on the bike, but you know how to ride once you get on.
Research we did showed that almost no one looks at what you do before you disagree (in terms of strategies for dealing with disagreement); they just look at what to do WHEN you disagree, or what you do after. Now you’re in it: what will you do? But you need to be intentional ahead of a disagreement.
That’s a lot more challenging because we haven’t been prepped with the habits, the tools, and the way of life to lean into this. And so it’s about: how do we start building and have a formation as part of our process.
We looked at over 100 articles from January 1st, 2024 to January 15th, 2025, articles focused on disagreement, civil conversations, all these things. And literally none of them directly addressed what do you do before disagreements occur? Most of them dealt with when you’re in the conflict, how do you handle the conflict?
Some of them address post conflict, but less than 5% address what do you do when the disagreement goes awry? Most of the literature and information, whether that’s Fast Company, Harvard, all the other places—they all dealt with: all right, you’re in it, now what do you do? And at that point, it’s too late.
And one of the things that’s differentiated us is that Pillar 1 in my book and process is to Challenge Your Perspective. And it’s one of the things that, you know, I learned from my mom and that’s a big piece of the habit formation for us, that it requires intentionality for me to challenge my perspective consistently.
And I’ll always have to be intentional, but the more I’ve done that, the more it becomes habit-forming and just part of how I live my life.
SM: That’s such a powerful distinction. So not like, okay, I’m gonna go into this meeting and I have a sense, I’m probably going to disagree with what Justin says, but I’m going to be actively aware that my perspective is just mine and try to be intentional about that. And maybe this gets into the humanization part, which is a big part of your argument. Because it seems to me that really you’re talking about being in the habit of seeing other people’s humanity. And you write that “The work of respectful disagreement is one strategy of many to deflate the attacks against our dehumanization and the dehumanization of others. We have lost touch (if we ever had it) with the humanity in each other.”
What is it about disrespectful disagreement that’s particularly dehumanizing, do you think?
JJF: One thing that we really wholeheartedly believe is that proximity breeds empathy and it’s actually been validated in a lot of research. Look at social isolation theory: the more we’re isolated from others, the easier it is to dehumanize and “other” people, easier to not see the value in others.
We just looked at a research article about fifth graders during the pandemic and it showed that they exhibited “strong” disagreement versus what they called “soft disagreement” with those who were invisible to the fifth grader. So if a classmate wasn’t visible to them, it was much easier for them to strongly disagree with them, and that “strong” disagreement sometimes bordered on this place of what could be considered dehumanization.
On the other hand, when they saw the person or engaged with that person directly and visible, they tended to use things such as soft disagreement, which are some of the principles that have been studied and researched about how to have more constructive disagreements.
So stronger disagreement with those who were invisible versus soft disagreement. The pandemic has given rise to this …
SM: The prior historical moment is really internet chat rooms, though, no?
JJF: Yeah, and social media. It’s become a habit that I can just share whatever I want to share without the thought process of how this impacts someone else, when I didn’t have that kind of option pre-internet. The pandemic exacerbated it because people had much more time to seek out these venues, and they were seeking community.
This is why Pillar 1 is so important.
SM: Okay so tell us a bit more about what’s in this Pillar.
JJF: Right, so Pillar 1 is what you do. It’s about building into the rhythm of your life these ways to intentionally put yourself in spaces where you don’t know if you’re aligned, or you KNOW you will disagree. You can’t do this all the time, it’s draining on our brains. We call this the Circles of Grace Challenge, and it’s about seeking out disagreement and difference in order to build the muscle to hear perspectives I disagree with and be able to better listen to people I disagree with in the moment. And it’s not about taking on their view or even wanting to be persuaded by them, but it’s about having the capacity to confront differences respectfully.
SM: Oh, wow – this reminds me so much of something I read by Charles Taylor (the Canadian philosopher) in grad school that has just always stuck with me. Writing about living with diversity of belief in a secular age, Taylor says it’s essential that we take the time to understand what is real for other people. Critically, this doesn’t mean that understanding has to mean agreement with—that is, we don’t have to take on those views—but we do have to put in the work of trying to see the other side, and doing so as part of taking seriously the power of those views for other people in terms of how they order their sense of meaning and reality.
And Taylor really emphasizes this point that you can’t just dismiss other views—he says “it is valuable to try to grasp a position you find unfamiliar and even baffling through trying to bring into focus the understanding of fullness it involves. This is particularly the case if you want to really understand, to be able to feel the power it has for its protagonists, as against simply dismissing it”—and it strikes me that it’s in this dismissal that the really dehumanizing act takes place, and that’s what you’re trying to prevent with your work, Justin.
That is, your work seems to present a way to make this an ongoing practice.
JJF: That’s right. The Circles of Grace Challenge is this: every six to 12 months, I go to events, experiences or places where I engage with people who I don’t know a lot about and or I know I disagree with., and I go asking two questions: what did I learn about these people and what did I learn about myself?
And those have been transformative for me and there’s been times I’ve gotten stuff wrong and sometimes I’m like oh, okay – I can validate it got that right … but I got a human perspective rather than second or third hand information.
SM: It would change so much if people had the capacity to do this. To make it a practice of exposing yourself to ideas and people you know you disagree with to build a muscle. Because I know: the challenge – both in our culture, in the public sphere, but also in our workplaces – is real. We partnered with the Harris Poll last year to survey leaders and knowledge workers on the challenges they face in their organizations, and what we got was a picture of organizations fractured by fear, miscommunication, and lack of relationality.
In fact, to put it bluntly, one of the major themes that emerged is that people are struggling with each other. There’s disagreement, there’s discord, people feel disconnected. It’s complicated, but the complexity of this challenge could basically be summarized in one pretty jarring statistic, which is that 70% of business leaders said that people don’t understand the value in listening to people they disagree with.
And to take it back to the workplace specifically, another finding was that the ability to effectively manage diverse opinions and foster mutual respect among team members is becoming a critical leadership competency that leaders are not fully prepared for.
What would you say to this? Is it what you’re seeing? What makes it so hard?
JJF: Well partly again what I’m saying is that it’s hard because people don’t build this muscle ahead of time.
And it’s that intentionality of consistently challenging your perspective, every six to 12 months, as a deliberate practice. And why is that important? It’s because the more those muscles consistently hear perspectives that are different than mine, the better I can manage when I find myself in a disagreement: I’m more able to exercise the muscles of hearing people – or really listening – because I’ve already built up the habit of doing it.
SM: This is why people don’t see the value in listening to people they disagree with. They haven’t spent the time building the capacity, the habit, of really engaging alternative perspectives. They listen to find fault, they listen to validate that they’re right in their own view … or they just don’t listen at all.
JJF: That’s right. That’s been a differentiator for us, versus we give people a whole bunch of tools for when they find themselves in the moment. Because when our amygdala is hijacked and all these things are happening, people don’t know how to properly utilize the tools anyway, or they just throw the tools away because it’s not a part of their construct.
And so the key is this habitual exposure to different views, and the question is this: what if we listen like we’re actually wrong?
Part 2 of this conversation will continue in an upcoming month. Stay tuned.