Title: Conversational Leadership Café: Disagree Constructively
Date: Wednesday 16th March 2022
Time: 17:00 to 19:00 GMT, London time (your time zone)
Host/Speaker: David Gurteen
Location: Online Zoom Event
Price: Free
Registration: Please register on Eventbrite
Introduction
This event is one in a series of online Knowledge Cafés on Conversational Leadership run on the Zoom video conferencing platform.
Each Café is themed on material from my online blook on Conversational Leadership.
Before each Café, I may ask you to do a little homework and read one or more posts in my blook relating to the theme.
If you are not familiar with the Knowledge Café concept, this event is participatory. It is NOT a webinar.
David will speak to the following theme of this Café and pose a question to trigger the conversation. We will then divide into break-out rooms for three rounds of small group conversations followed by a whole group conversation.
Theme: Disagree Constructively
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.
Reading Material
Please read this short post in my blook on the subject if you have the time. It is not a pre-requisite.
If you wish to read more on the subject see the posts in my blook tagged constructive disagreement.
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