there has never been a better time for disagreement and I have found that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing I was leading a workshop a couple of weeks ago and I felt like it went really well I led the whole session everybody seemed to be really participatory this was kind of a semiu thing that was hosted by another organization so there were about 20 people in the room representing different organizations everybody seemed to be with me as I led this session about business development and how you can be to really maximize the opportunity when you’re networking when you’re leading Business Development conversations when you’re gearing up for interviews when you are advising The Proposal folks on your perspective sharing some language that they can put into the proposal it was a really good session I felt like everybody was with me every step of the way and the host organization invited feedback from the participants and I did get some really great feedback it was almost entirely positive and there was one person who anonymously said I disagreed with what Pete had to say and I felt like this was a real missed opportunity not just for me not just for the person who disagreed but really for the whole room because the the whole room could have participated in a conversation that didn’t happen because this person didn’t chime in and say yeah I disagree I see it a different way now I do typically ask the room for other perspectives other thoughts and I think I probably did during this session I can’t guarantee it but I think I probably did and the reason I do that is I want there to be disagreement I want people to lay out their perspectives not so that I can argue with it and tell them why they’re wrong but so that the whole room can hear the debate it’s kind of like in a courtroom when two lawyers throw out two different perspectives about the same events the jury gets to weigh in they gets they they get to hear these two different perspectives and decide what they believe the there isn’t one right place to be on anything and I don’t believe that Sage presence is the one and only and best perspective on anything in particular but I do think we have some pretty darn useful perspectives we do have some good approaches and what I want is for people to take it on enough to try it out and see what happens when they try it out so if I made a mistake a couple of weeks ago in this session it was not to invite the disagreement enough to not make enough room for disagreement to not invite people into the conversation enough and I want to invite you to do this to invite others to disagree with you and to explicitly make room for additional perspectives not so that you can argue with them but so that there can be a more robust conversation more people can participate in that conversation and decide for themselves what is right for them
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