Chords and Collaboration: The Value of Dissonance

Collaboration is often associated with harmony. We say that people are “in accord” when they agree. In Dutch, the connection is even stronger: akkoord means both a musical chord and an agreement. The language itself suggests a powerful metaphor: collaboration is like making music together.

In music, harmony is pleasant. Notes fit together according to recognisable relationships. There is stability, consonance and a sense that things are as they should be. But music made only of consonance quickly becomes predictable. Great music needs something else: dissonance.

Dissonance creates tension. Certain notes rub against one another. Something feels unfinished or unstable. And precisely because of that instability, we start anticipating what comes next. We want the tension to go somewhere. We want resolution.

That is what makes dissonance so interesting. It is not simply an unpleasant sound that needs to be eliminated. It can create movement, expectation and meaning. Without tension, much of music would lose its direction.

A striking example is the fully diminished seventh chord C♯–E–G–B♭ on top of the D in the pedals in Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor . It is an extraordinarily unstable chord. Its notes create tension and seem to demand movement. Yet that tension does not prescribe only one possible future. Depending on the musical context, a diminished seventh chord can lead in different directions. In this case, Bach brings us back towards D.

That provides a powerful image for disagreement. Dissonance tells us that something needs to happen, but it does not necessarily tell us what the solution must be.

And there is another possibility. A piece in a minor key can sometimes resolve unexpectedly onto the major tonic. Instead of ending in darkness, it ends with a major third — the effect traditionally called the Picardy third. The destination remains recognisable, but something has changed. Resolution does not always mean returning to where we started. Sometimes tension leads us somewhere more surprising. That is what Bach did with his unstable chord. But that is an unusual solution. 

There is an even more concrete way to demonstrate this idea.

Imagine one person playing an F-major chord — F, A, C — while another insists on playing G major — G, B, D. Play both triads simultaneously and you have F–G–A–B–C–D: a dense cluster of neighbouring notes. Each person can insist:

“I am playing F.”
“And I am playing G.”

Neither is necessarily wrong. But simply insisting on both positions produces noise.

Now take exactly the same musical material and reorganise it.

Instead of sounding all six notes simultaneously, give them space and arrange them, for example, as G–B–D–F–A–C. Suddenly we hear something quite different: an extended G harmony, spread out as an arpeggio. Nothing had to be thrown away. The musical assets were already present in the apparent chaos. What changed was their relationship and structure.

And that is where the metaphor becomes relevant to collaboration.

People enter a debate with different experiences, ideas, expertise, interests and perspectives. The objective of collaboration should not be to eliminate those differences as quickly as possible. Nor should everyone simply continue playing their own chord louder.

Good collaboration requires us to listen to the dissonance.

What exactly is creating the tension? What is valuable in the other person's position? What am I hearing that I could not hear from my own perspective? Can we separate the elements, examine them and reorganise them? Can we create enough space for different voices to become audible?

Integration does not necessarily mean compromise. A compromise can mean that both sides give something up. Integration can mean something more ambitious: using the essential elements of different positions to create a solution that neither side could have produced alone.

That is why disagreement can be an asset.

A team without dissent may sound harmonious, but harmony alone does not guarantee progress. Constructive dissent introduces tension. Tension creates attention. Attention can provoke exploration. And exploration can lead to a new resolution.

The danger comes when we stop listening. When I simply keep playing F and you keep playing G, dissonance becomes noise. Positions harden. The purpose shifts from creating something together to defending what each person brought into the room.

The challenge of collaboration is therefore not to avoid dissonance, but to work with it.

• Listen to it.
• Understand what creates it.
• Take it apart.
• Create space between the voices.
• Reorganise what is already there.
• And search for a resolution that makes the whole richer than the individual parts.

In music, some of the most beautiful moments exist because the composer first allowed us to experience tension.

Perhaps collaboration works in much the same way.