Member-only story
What if Agreement Stopped Being the Goal?
Consensus Isn’t the Solution…
I’m helping a colleague out with an event — Good to Great: Leadership That Makes the Difference (although the title is irrelevant!) — and we met yesterday to walk through the activities we wanted to do with the group.
Towards the end of our time together, the conversation strayed into what the participants might see and where we wanted to point them. We started to talk about losing attachment to our own perspective and how to listen to the person in front of us.
We talked about empathy and how, ironically, the effort to see someone else’s perspective can keep us focused on the content of that perspective, and how we relate to it, rather than what’s probably better described by ‘compassion’ — looking to the person beyond their point of view.
I made a comment about where I thought compassion came from and he responded,
Oh I completely disagree with that!
Without a thought, I said,
Stop right there! That’s a perfect example of where you and I don’t have to be in agreement. We’re not teaching, we’re certainly not adding more information, we’re helping people have insights, and it might be fascinating to bring that to the group as a question rather than a fact.
