Deconstructing Disagreements

If you’ve read Solving Problems Where They Are (Not Where You Are), then hopefully you are attempting to overcome your fear of organizational boundaries when solving complex problems. Leaving your zone of control opens you to potential hostility and/or consequences stemming from disagreement with a peer or more senior leader in whose zone of control the problem lies. Nevertheless, you understand that the problem persists because this disagreement persists and a solution lies in its resolution. All disagreements stem from discordance on any of three dimensions:

1. Incomplete, contradictory, or misunderstood facts of the situation

2. Applying differing, often opaque logic to those differing facts

3. Desiring different outcomes in the situation

To that end, let’s work through a 3-step process to deconstruct said disagreement, allowing you and your counterparty to achieve victory without victors, resolving the dispute with grace and humility.

Step 1: Resolve understanding of the facts

“First, seek to understand.”

-Stephen Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

When all else fails, fall back on this mantra. We live in an age of rapidly increasing complexity, bombarded by ever increasing information (and fallacious propaganda). Like the coastline of Britain, which gets longer depending on how you measure it, there are too many opportunities for well-intentioned, generally aligned colleagues to have different factual understandings of reality. Therefore, the first step in any disagreement is to humbly, empathetically get the facts on the table to build a database.

Imagine each of you sharing a series of (metaphorical or actual) index cards each with a “Fact” on it. Lay each of yours on the table, examine each other’s cards, see where there are gaps, compliments and differences. This can be conducted on a white board, in a shared document, with literal index cards, sharing dashboards, reports, etc. as long as you are examining reality together.

Confirming the facts together keeps you and your counterparty “on the same side of the table” as you will invariably find you have different AND incomplete information, with incorrect conclusions drawn from said data (more on that in Step 2). As such, to improve the chances of success, commit fully and openly to the possibility that you are the one who is wrong. Doing so allows each of you to avoid defensiveness and share fully, while allowing each of you to save face when you inevitably realize some element bolstering your case is incorrect. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know that” is a magic sentence to utter AND to hear. Remember, no one likes losing, most people like learning.

If your disagreement persists beyond the simple information sharing phase (many often resolve right here), you can next co-develop a research approach to resolving incomplete and/or conflicting information. Your research methods should be as formal or informal as the situation requires. Often, a direct observation, reading a report or quick phone call can be sufficient research.

Embarking on this shared path will rapidly lead you closer to a viable resolution. But sometimes facts are not enough. Sometimes the facts are clear, consistent and yet you still do not agree on how to proceed. If so, you are dealing with something a bit more challenging– differences in logic, your conclusions from shared facts, are getting in your way.

Step 2: Understand each other’s underlying logic

Let’s say you and a friend are planning on a hike. Prior to leaving in the morning, you each look out your respective windows to see thick, foreboding clouds. Your friend is concerned that clouds will mean rain, and despite an equivocal weather report wants to call off the hike. By contrast, you are psyched for a cool day with a low chance for sunburn and cannot wait to leave. Same facts, different conclusions. Enter the role of logic in perpetuating disagreements.

Think of the logic of a situation as each person’s understanding of cause and effect and hypothesis of the likelihood of certain outcomes over others. In this case, all clouds = rain vs. some clouds = rain vs. these clouds ≠ rain. The chaos of reality obscures both cause and effect AND drives uncertainty, causing each of us to rely upon (often subconscious) heuristics to guide our decision making. Of note, whether or not “rain is bad” will come up later in step 3.

As you begin to entangle your own logic with others, remember the fundamental attribution error– the tendency to attribute others’ failings to traits while our own is due to circumstances. For example, your counterparty is causing this problem because they are stupid and stubborn, while you cause problems because you were trying to hit your goals and not given all the facts. Whenever you find yourself diagnosing your colleagues as jerks, you are likely falling for this trap (we deal with jerks at the end of Step 3, don’t worry!). And remember, this is considered a FUNDAMENTAL error, so forgive yourself when you do it and move to correct your thinking.

Diving into our own logic is orders of magnitude more difficult than understanding and sharing facts, because we must reveal the inner workings of our own mind, which are often tacitly obscured, even to us. One great mental model for working through logic stems from Chrys Argyris’s Ladder of Inference, which I first encountered at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine under the tutelage of the very wise Dr. Gene Beyt. In brief, there is a whole series of always-on mental processes that will cause you to select and reject certain facts, interpret them differently and draw conclusions with or without your conscious consent. Following the advice of Argyris and just about every good coach and therapist out there, you must “climb down the ladder” to understand where you went wrong.

Your best approach to “climb down the ladder” to reconcile differences in logic is to model your thinking as best as you can. Allow everyone to explain their model of cause and effect, including likely (and less likely) outcomes stemming from the decision to be made to reveal the functioning of their mind. A great question to ask each other is, “and then what would happen” serially until you can draw a nice white board diagram of reality. Trying to discern cause and effect is a huge, often unspoken part of leading a business, especially a novel one.

There are many tools to aid you in modeling– driver diagrams, influence diagrams, fishbone diagrams, refining a product backlog, bubble sorting for prioritization, sizing and scoring algorithms. The goal of all of them is to reveal the relationship between facts, further honing in on the source of where you disagree about what will happen next. Sometimes you can reconcile these differences once identified, but often, you cannot.

When you cannot reconcile your differences in logic, you should test your competing hypothesis with disciplined, iterative experiments. The formality of your experiment should match the magnitude of the problem. A user interview can be an experiment. A prototype is an experiment, with feedback providing useful data to update your working model. When all else fails, go together directly observe someone trying to deliver/experience/use your product or service to figure out what and how to test. In general, simple, quick experiments that allow you to proceed in decision making are all that is required. Bullets before cannonballs.

The relationship between facts becomes your visualized output, and is subject to change with new experiments. Negotiations here are about contingencies – what happens if, as ways of finding resolution. Most arguments end here. The investment in relationship building, learning and experimentation makes great colleagues of us all, and you will invariably emerge together with a far superior understanding of your reality that will cause you to look back and laugh at your earliest thoughts. However, sometimes you still may face resistance despite coming to a shared logic, or at least shared understanding of each other’s logic. This is because you actually want (or don’t want) different outcomes.

Step 3: Reconcile desired outcomes

If you’ve been following the steps of resolving facts and understanding differences in your logic in an empathetic, open way, you’ve probably stopped reading and are on to the next problem. Sometimes, despite all the good faith and built trust, you may realize that you agree on facts and logic, but want (or don’t want) different things. In other words, you can do all the work above and still not resolve the disagreement. So why didn’t we start here? Because people lie.

Maybe not overtly, maybe to themselves, maybe without even realizing it. But fundamentally, before the work of building a shared relationship based in trust (measured as serially kept promises over time), you are unlikely to reveal misunderstanding or deception. Your counterparty may not want to tell you or may not even realize that this problem persists because of poorly designed incentives. Perhaps their bonus is based on this problem NOT being fixed (this is also why I distrust individual bonuses before late Stage 3-approaching-predictable companies, a post for another time). Oftentimes if you have made it this far in good faith, you are in a fantastic position to creatively negotiate a win/win path forward.

But sometimes you can agree on facts, agree on logic, and ostensibly agree on desired outcome, yet not get commitment to next steps. In this case your counterparty is still holding something back. They are not committing to the shared vision of your organization and are unwilling to share. Remember I said you get to diagnose people as being jerks, NOW you can do so with confidence. If your supposed colleague refuses to disclose their true motives with you, they are not your colleague. Proceed with caution but treat them as a hostile witness. Get bosses involved, do what you have to do. Remember, if you are willing to quit, you ought to be willing to get fired. Good luck because if it comes to this point, it is going to get ugly. Preparation helps.

So there you have it, three steps to deconstruct, diagnose and resolve disagreements.

1. Resolve a common set of facts: create your database and add to it through research

2. Understand each other’s underlying logic: model reality and refine via experimentation

3. Reconcile desired outcomes: understanding and negotiating a path forward.

Take your time to reveal each in sequence, with empathy, humility and grace, and watch as problems melt away. When they don’t, you are dealing with a jerk, so no holds barred!