Decision Disagreement Framework
matterapp.com
matterapp.com
> Will the decision slow down, harm, or break the business?
That depends on who's view you go with? In my opinion, my choice will not "slow down, hard, or break the business". But the person I was arguing with felt that my choice did, and had an alternative choice he wanted to make. And of course, he felt that his choice did not "slow down, hard, or break the business" and that mine did. We can't even agree on whether to use the framework!
Perhaps one defaults to "just do it". Further, what do you do when you coworker refuses to put forward a rationale for their choice? In my example from today, he had an opinion/action he wanted us as a company to take, but could not provide a decent rationale to it. To paraphrase, it was "we should change X to better support my workflow"; my counter argument was that changing X was counterproductive to and basically eliminated goal Y, which we had just received a (reasonable) mandate from on high to accomplish. Further, his own workflow would be hampered by X, and a simple change to his own workflow would better accomplish his own goals while allowing us to maintain goal Y. He literally refused to respond to that position, but still wants us to do X.
Assuming your coworkers are rational is a terrible idea in my experience. Unfortunately, IDK what else one can do, and IME rational arguments are ignored and bad decisions are made and people start looking for escape hatches.
Perhaps we have bigger problems.
Unless you're talking from that perspective... idk, it doesn't seem that interesting
The sooner a company establishes how to have productive conversations and unlock everyone's potential the better.
Don't get me wrong, I'm intrigued by the concept of formally surfacing disagreement. But the example in the blog post is trivially contrived. What happens when the disagreement is between two different but balanced work paths each with high risk and more unknowns than knowns? How does this disagreement process jive with the scientific process, where competing hypotheses are explored by experiment?
YOU understand their position.
This is a fundamental mistake in this process that happens at the beginning and everything that follows is made worse because of it.
You don’t rephrase a person’s position to make them “feel heard.” What’s important is to get to the meat of why they hold that position, in case you are disagreeing with a misapprehension of their position, or you are disagreeing with a solution because you didn’t really understand the underlying problem a person is trying to address.
Often the real disagreement is a layer or more below the area where conflict is manifesting. It more often is a result of information asymmetry or a difference in priorities or perception of reality by the stakeholders.
This is the single most important part of engaging in productive disagreement, and without it much time is wasted, resentments are formed, non optimal solutions are generated, and disagreements resurface repeatedly but transformed such that they appear as new disagreements.
Your point that people will restate their position if they don't feel like it's understood is valid. That doesn't remove the annoyance when someone SAYS the understand the point but clearly demonstrates that they don't.
Obviously both parts are very helpful: You should actually listen and consider the points being made to you, AND they should be shown that you have done this. Skipping either side is bad, but a lot of advice tells you to focus on the second, and not nearly enough tells you to do the first.
I mean, if we go all the way with this, I would say many times the person expressing an opinion may not actually realize (or be able to express) all the factors going in to their position.
If you seek to deeply understand their stance, they often start to understand it with more clarity as well, and sometimes you can then engage at the inflection point level and create a win-win.
To expand on your point, I was taught that a person is just being ignorant if you cannot argue your "opponent's" position to their satisfaction. You really don't have to believe one word of it but understanding where their reasoning has taken them is vital to understanding your own position. It will help you decide that what you believe is reasonable and has been properly tested.
It will also have the value of telling you if there is a real disagreement or the fog of one human trying to talk to another is obscuring what should be an agreement. Nothing is as stupid and painful as two people arguing past each other.
This seems infantilizing and cult like.
Forced speech in general is a red flag in a company culture or a relationship.
If people don’t respect that a decision has been made, that is a problem, but this ritual is not going to solve that.
Here's the article where Gokul recommends this approach: https://firstround.com/review/square-defangs-difficult-decis...
"After a decision is made, each participant must commit support out loud. Pledging support aloud binds you to the greater good."
To my surprise, this technique is highly effective. Might be worth giving it a try?
Saying this comes from the same kind as AdSense and Facebook ads actually makes it feel worse. :(
So, you want me to count coup in front of the defeated and make them state their surrender for all to hear? I would rather just move on to implementing the decision and rely on their professionalism to not break anything. Their are some folks in the US that do not react well to such public displays of acquiesce.
Search for "Dave Mitchell soapbox consensus" for a much funnier and well thought out look at it.
The whole point of cult-like behaviors is that they are effective tools of manipulation.
The downside is that they undermine the individual’s psyche.
Have fun playing with this stuff!
its not the disagreements you know you have - leadership takes care of those - its the one's people won't acknowledge that take you down .. and to spot those, you need to be quite a selective listener, no?