Sometimes, disagreements—even fights—are unavoidable. As a result, the question isn’t how to avoid disagreements, but how to disagree in a healthy way.
One of my personal favorite techniques does not occur during the disagreement, but afterward. For all disagreements on non-trivial issues, as soon as the disagreement is finished—for example, you decide what to do next—I write up a summary of the disagreement and share it with all relevant people or observers. Sometimes this is the same document as the meeting notes I write up, but sometimes it is a different document.
Before I jump into the advantages of doing so, there is a key warning and qualification: I always frame the other side’s arguments in a way that makes them look smart and good. If the other side reads it and does not think, “yes, that is exactly what I was trying to say,” then you’re the asshole for making them try to look bad. (I’ve fallen into that trap, accidentally, because it is hard to present their arguments from their side; this requires time and practice.) Also note another qualification: this is about business-related decisions, such as, “should we do X or Y?” personal issues are another subject altogether and should broadly be kept out of the work sphere as much as possible.
There are a few reasons why sharing disagreement summaries is important.
First, disagreements with your boss or client are important. If it’s with a report, it matters a lot less—in fact, your report should follow this advice and write up their summary—but with your client, small disagreements often erupt into big disagreements that can kill the relationship. The more important something is, the more documentation-worthy it is.
Second, disagreements always come back to bite you in the tushy. If you won the argument but you were wrong? You need the paper trail to show that you both agreed to the decision together.
The third is that, when you were right—you won the argument and things then turned out the way you expected—you need a paper trail so you can demonstrate that it was your argument that was the correct one. Very importantly, people’s memories are bad and always favor themselves, so the other sides in the argument will remember their own positions as being very moderate and very close to the winning side. (Famously, in the JFK vs Nixon presidential election, even though the election was basically 50/50, a few studies have shown that almost everyone who voted in it remembers having voted for the winner, JFK.) You need the paper trail of documentation that your arguments were the right ones.
Fourth, often, these sorts of issues you disagree on never truly go away. Okay, maybe you or your boss won this time. But people rarely truly become convinced of the other side. So, in 6 weeks, when a similar issue comes back, the issue will be back. The paper trail creates an objective history of the previous decisions, so you can review what happened, and why, more clearly going forward.
Fifth, if the relevant people are watching the debate then when it is finally escalated to them, it is no longer a “he said, she said” disagreement (which always leaves you looking bad, no matter how right you may be, because they have no way to judge what really happened!) but rather they will have more details and nuance so that they come to judge the situation more fairly.
“History is written by the victors,” the old saying goes. We can flip it on its head, if you write the history, you’re more likely to be the victor. Just think about it this way, no one else will be writing these details down. In 6 or 12 months, no one will remember what was debated or what happened. So your summaries will become the history. And don’t you want the history to be told through your eyes?
But let’s be less philosophical and more direct about it: the other side will tell others about it. Every. Single. Time. So you need to get your framing out, or else… you lose.
