Tips for arguing respectfully and productively

Tips for civil disagreement

It’s unfortunate that it takes a tragedy to get so many people in the United States talking about the kind of language we use in policy and strategy arguments. Here are some tips that can help professionals engage in arguments that are more likely to be both civil and productive.


• Focus on the topic, not the person. Personal attacks rarely get the other person to change their views or behaviors. More often, they get met with other personal attacks or angry silence – neither of which helps.

• Know that the argument may be about more than the thing being argued. In a community that has been abused or ignored by previous developers, a community’s opposition to a proposed land use might be more about anger with developers than with the proposal. If an argument is generating more emotion than would seem reasonable, there’s probably more there that you need to explore.

• Do not assume you know the person’s motivation. When someone makes a personal attack, it is sometimes because that person thinks he or she knows what lies behind the other person’s objections.

• Seek to understand before seeking to be understood. Make sure you’re hearing the other person correctly. (One way is to put the person’s comments in your own language and saying something like “did I get that right?”) If you’re getting it right, but the other person isn’t, ask the person if you could clarify your remarks. (Don’t say anything like “Did you understand what I just said.” That can sound patronizing.)

• Understand the other person's logic and the reasons for their emotions. Too many professionals think that others reject their ideas because they don't understand them.  In other words, if the professional could "teach" opponents about a strategy, the opponents would agree with the planner.  The problem is sometimes the professional's education -- he or she hasn't learned enough about their audience's perspectives and mindsets.  Most reasonable people make rational decisions according to their own views of the world.

• Use a zipper strategy – find the areas of agreement and build up from there. In most communities and organizations, people want many of the same things. Talking about what they agree on can help opponents think of themselves more as collaborators than enemies, and build creative solutions that neither group thought of before.

• Acknowledge your areas of newfound agreement. You can do this formally in contracts, or informally through reminders in future conversations.

• Be confident, courageous and creative. There are times when avoiding an argument might be a good short-term strategy. But avoidance over time usually leads to frustration, and eventually more problems. Have the courage to both present your views and be willing to consider those of the other person. Be creative enough to collaborate with your opponent and see solutions that neither of you initially imagined.

• Give, and request to get, respect for your opponent's views. If you refuse to acknowledge another's views, you can not get to a point where you can understand the person.  (Hearing enough just to beat down an argument doesn't count.)  It's also important that you speak from a position of strength by asking others to understand your views.


All of the above assume that the participants are willing to listen to one another and are, for the most part, honest. Sometimes this isn’t the case. In those circumstances – and you should test your understandings to know if you’re in those circumstances – you might need to take more aggressive (but not violent) approaches. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we celebrate Monday, knew there were times when a loud demonstration worked better than a quiet conversation.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Power vs control

The more you try to control knowledge workers, the less power you have.

That's one of the key challenges facing managers in the knowledge economy - which includes urban planning, as well as community and economic development.  (Any organization whose primary work involves creating and sharing ideas is part of the knowledge economy.)  Knowledge creation workers are those people whose main jobs are creating and distributing ideas or information.  You most likely fit in this category.

The function of management is to achieve results as efficiently as possible.  Traditionally, managers do this through control and coordination.  This makes sense when talking about inanimate resources - funds, equipment, property, etc.  In the late 19th century and early 20th century, promoters of bureaucracy and scientific management extended this idea to people.  Actually, treating people like property or farm animals is as old as slavery.  Authors like Weber and Taylor helped bosses justify this treatment.

In those days, this way of thinking seemed to work (for the companies). Before the advent of unions, most industrial workers had few options.  Large families often depended on single wage-earners, who often had limited education and limited resources.  And the output of industrial workers could be easily measured.  So if a manager treated a scared worker like a pack animal, and the worker produced more, the manager felt justified.

Let's put aside the moral issues of literally dehumanizing people by treating them as capital.  Why is the old industrial model ineffective with today's knowledge workers?

Most industrial age workers produced tangible products, through the combination of physical labor and machines. With the exception of those workers who could carry all their equipment with them, industrial age workers had to be at specific locations at specific times for the organization to run efficiently.  Knowledge workers produce ideas.  They can function anywhere, anytime. In economic terms, knowledge workers "own the means of production."  In industrial organizations, the machinery and the physical health of the worker had to be strong to produce more units.  (The quality of the units depended on the workers' motivation, but quality control wasn't as big a concern for management researchers a century ago.)  The ability of knowledge workers to produce more and better ideas depends on more than their competence and creativity.  Their emotional state is just as important.  A knowledge worker who is angry, distracted, has low morale or feels powerless is going to produce at a lower level of quality and quantity.  You can't measure the amount or worth of knowledge that doesn't happen.   Since you can't get inside a worker's brain and soul, you can't know when or whether a knowledge worker is at peak production.  Most knowledge workers are sophisticated enough to know how to appear productive.  So they can spend hours at the office "doing their job" without producing.

What do knowledge workers want?  The same things everybody does - respect, flexibility, acknowledgment and affirmation.  Workers who are committed to an organization's mission want to be treated as resources, not capital.  (Anyone who thinks that workers are motivated only by money needs to take a basic course in human resources management.)

Thus the power/control conundrum.   The more you try to control knowledge workers, the less productive they will be.  In fact, they might work slower, make more mistakes, or be thinking more about their next jobs than the ones they have.

Here's another thing managers need to know:  Supervisors can not motivate staff.  Everyone has their own distinct set of motivations, and they will pursue what they value most.  Supervisors who want to improve the performance of their staff need to understand what they most want, and do what they are able to help workers meet their own interests.

                                                  --Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

 

Do you have a professional development tip you would like to share?  Have a question that you would like to see answered here?  Please send it to Leo at vazquezl@rutgers.edu

Speaking truth to false dilemmas

"Either build that toll road to lessen congestion or let traffic speeds go down to 10 miles an hour during the rush." "The debate about global warming is about letting the free market take its course or making regulations that will hurt our economy." "Either I take this job that I'm going to hate, or just not have any income coming in for six months." These are examples of false dilemmas, a rhetorical tool that blights productive conversations. False dilemmas make us less creative and more prone to making bad choices.

A false dilemma is a statement that creates the impression that there are only a few real options, when there may in fact be many more. In the first example, there may be other realistic options to reducing congestion besides a toll road -- such as more public transportation, improvements to existing roads, etc.

There are two main causes for false dilemmas: either the speaker is not aware that other realistic options exist, or the speaker is trying to manipulate us into accepting the speaker's preferred alternative. A classic example is the case of residents of a low-density suburb who oppose townhouses or apartment buildings on the grounds that these buildings will turn their community "into a city." Assuming there are no ulterior motives, this is an example of an innocent false dilemma. To these residents, a "suburb" and a "city" are completely different, and there is no way to combine the best of both worlds.

What should you do when confronted with a false dilemma? The best approach is to name it and show that there are a number of reasonable choices. But this is easier said than done.

• If you're in a position of authority, you can simply make the speaker aware that other possibilities exist, and should ask the speaker to investigate other options.
  
  
• If you're in a subordinate or peer relationship (such as with a colleague or client), you have to be more artful.
• First, try to understand why the speaker is making the false dilemma. Does it appear to be a lack of awareness? Or is something more going on there?
• If your relationship with the speaker is already tense, avoid naming the false dilemma. This may aggravate the tension and cause the speaker to dig in on a position.
• Ask non-threatening questions, such as "what would happen if..." "have someone considered..." These may help to expand the thinking of the innocent speaker. The manipulative speaker may still dig in, but other members of the audience might start to think differently.
• Create learning opportunities. To help residents think differently about higher density houses, planners and architects use charrettes and other public forums to show how many communities can add different types of buildings and stores while protecting their character.
  

If you have a professional development tip you'd like to share, please send your tip to Leo Vazquez at vazquezl@rci.rutgers.edu.  Please also give us your full name, title and affiliation, so we can give you proper credit.

The power of handshakes

It's always hard to meet with people who don't like or don't trust you. It's even harder in open, public meetings, where your antagonists can merge into the crowd while you're in a fishbowl up at the front. You can't prevent people from being hostile, but here are tips to manage the conflict.

• Diagnose the hostility the way you would any other problem. Why is the other side angry? Is it because of what you did, or perhaps what you are? (If you're a planner in a neighborhood that has had bad relationships with earlier planners, you may be seen as a proxy for those others.)
• Identify those people who are leading or stoking the hostility. Try to understand their concerns.
• Go to the meeting early and seek out the antagonists. Say hello, shake their hands and make small talk. Do not try to resolve conflict there, or discourage them from speaking up at the meeting. If they want to express their anger there, encourage them to talk with you at another time. If you try to engage in conflict resolution before the meeting, you may lose your focus.
• Under the best of circumstances, your antagonists will find your actions disarming and be willing to think about you in a more charitable way.
• If the antagonists refuse to engage you, or even shake your hand, that's ok too. Remember that others might be watching. If they see you make an effort and be rebuffed, it might make you look better, and your antagonists look worse.

--Leonardo Vazquez, AICP/PP

Do you have a professional development tip you would like to share? Have a question that you would like to see answered here? Please send it to Leo at vazquezl@rutgers.edu

The difference between facts and truths: Why we see the same things differently

Imagine you are watching a juggling act. The performer is juggling three balls. One of them lands on the ground. You probably want to know what happened and why. What happened? There could be at least three explanations: The juggler dropped the ball. The juggler allowed the ball to fall to the floor. Or some force -- wind? ghosts? -- caused a ball to leave its trajectory and escape the juggler's hands.

Ok, that's simple enough -- if we were to leave it there. But it's part of human nature to want to know more, to know why, to construct a story that connects actions and motivations. Even if we were to follow one line of reason -- the juggler dropped the ball -- there could be at least three reasons why he did so. Maybe he was distracted. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe he couldn't move his hands fast enough.

And of course, we wouldn't leave it at that. We want to know more about why any of those three things happened. And as all of us follow different storylines and add layers of meaning, we come up with at least dozens of "truths." (In this case, we could get to 81 different interpretations of the facts by going through 4 levels of inquiry.)

Which truth is the right one? Any of them could be. Facts -- like objects or numbers -- may be objective. But truths about relationships are socially constructed. Consider a romantic relationship you may have been in. It existed only as long as the individuals believed that there was a relationship. Your sense of various relationships -- involving people and situtations -- impact your sense of truth and your actions.

This helps explain why it is so difficult to achieve consensus in a diverse group, even when everyone is looking at the same facts. It also demonstrates why simply giving people more information -- the old "tell and sell" approach -- by itself doesn't help to get consensus.

Building consensus is one of the biggest challenges in our work in planning, policy and community development. Getting people to nod their heads in agreement is one thing; getting to a shared understanding is far more difficult. It takes time and a commitment by leadership to a process that allows people to get and reflect on new information, and share what they believe. Under the best of circumstances, the participants create new "truths" that become the foundation for a group action.

For the professional leading the consensus building effort, perhaps the most difficult challenge is accepting that his or her truth is only one of several valid interpretations. If you're not willing to do this, you're not building consensus, you're selling your ideas. And if you have improper assumptions, or if participants get wind of what you're really doing, you run the risk of getting into uncomfortable and stressful situations.

Here are some tips on managing multiple truths:

• Seek to understand before seeking to explain.
• Work to help others understand your views. Understand why you might see the same facts and come to different interpretations. Then share your views.
  
• Many professionals assume that when others disagree with them, it's because "they don't know." This thinking is often wrong and, frankly, insulting to our clients and colleagues. If we're going to have effective conversations, we need to have the courage to look into our blind spots.