In this Café, I talk about the challenge of disagreeing constructively. Disagreement is an inevitable part of life. Most of the time, we do it poorly. I then initiate a conversation as to how we might get better at it.
Theme: How do we disagree constructively?
Format: Knowledge Café
Delivery: Face-to-face or Zoom
Duration: 120, 90 or 60 minutes
Introduction
This Café is one in a series of Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership that I run face-to-face, on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Each Café is themed on material from my online blook on Conversational Leadership.
If you are unfamiliar with the Knowledge Café concept, this event is participatory, though I can run it as a webinar.
Theme
Disagreement is an inevitable part of life. Unfortunately, we mostly do it poorly. We need to learn to disagree constructively. But how do we disagree well?
Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way.
In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.
But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different.
It would seem strange even to call what they were doing "arguing."
Perhaps the most neutral way of describing this difference between their culture and ours would be to say that we have a discourse form structured in terms of battle and they have one structured in terms of dance.
Format
In this Café, I talk about the theme for 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the participants and the time available, and then pose the Café question
How do we disagree constructively?
We then go into Café mode.
Reading Material
This post in my blook is optional reading material for the participants before or after the Café.