Everyone Is Right

“Everyone believes that they are doing the right thing. Even when they know they are doing something wrong, they believe they are doing wrong for the right reasons.” If you honestly follow this frame and apply it to every difficult situation in your life, I predict that you will never be able to see the world in the same way again.

“Everyone believes that they are doing the right thing. Even when they know they are doing something wrong, they believe they are doing wrong for the right reasons.”

I learned this philosophy many years ago, and decided to see if I could find any situation where this was not true. I’m still looking.

More accurately, I found two types of situations:

• In some situations, I did not have access to the inner thoughts of the “bad people”.

• In all other situations, they thought they were doing the right thing based on the information they had.

The last few articles have been mostly about the business side of Democracy and Monarchy Thinking. In this article I’m going to talk more about the politics side, but everything I say here I also use in organizations with the same effect.

Prioritizing Problems vs Fact Checking

Prioritizing problems (Decision Point #2) and defining problem metrics (Decision Point #3) are two separate activities, but they depend on each other. I learned how to define problem metrics decades ago, but it wasn’t until I started studying politics that I discovered how prioritizing problems determined success or failure.

If we disagree on which problems to solve, the other person won’t care about any facts or evidence we might present. This is what is happening when fact checking fails. If you want to convince anyone to consider a new position, first agree on which problems you want to solve. Then discuss how to measure when each problem goes away. Only then do facts and evidence have any meaning.

If we disagree on which problems to solve, the other person won’t care about any facts or evidence we might present.

Politics, Fact Checking, & Startups

I uncovered this two-step approach in the Summer of 2016. In the lead-up to U.S. elections, I was exploring a fact checking startup idea with a friend. Fact checks were in high demand, so we wanted to see if we could make a difference in sorting truth from fiction.

We made one important, foundational discovery: For every fact check that we wrote, the only people that cared about sharing them were the people who already believed what was in the article. They wanted to use it to prove someone else wrong, and prove themselves right. If the article said that they were wrong, the number of shares was way lower.

As we tried out additional formats for fact checks, we uncovered one that performed much better than the others – percentages. When we scored articles based on percentages of wrong and right, we sparked curiosity. It allowed people to be partially right and partially wrong.

This discovery unlocked an important piece of the puzzle that would eventually become the exercise “Prioritized Epic Problems”. Obviously, no one likes to be beat over the head with “you’re wrong!” When both sides of the argument were both right and wrong, we saw them trade information.

That’s when I noticed a curious thing happening. When presented with new information, the “wrong” person either discussed it with curiosity, or they said, “But <my issue> is more important!” They were subconsciously prioritizing problems, and disregarded information they thought was less important. But when the new information was personally valuable to them, they asked for more details.

Difficult Conversations Require Different Thinking

As I shared previously, when it comes to neurobiology, these techniques are not “natural”. In the Double Aces article, we talked about Kahneman and Tversky’s concept of “Pattern Matching”. By default, our brains are wired to identify what’s wrong, what we expect to see, and what’s missing. We are not wired to identify what’s “right” about what the other person is saying. 

Biologically, by default, we mentally skip over the issues where we and the other person agree. 

We ignore our similarities and focus on our differences. This creates a divide that only gets wider as we skip over more points of agreement, and highlights with growing passion what’s “wrong” about the other person.

As we outlined in Double Aces, we don’t have to agree with the other person about everything to create change. Change comes through slowing down, identifying out loud the parts of the conversation where we do agree, acknowledging what’s important to the other person, and sharing new information about topics that are important to them.

Political Example: DC National Guard

Here’s a real world example about applying Double Aces and Prioritizing Problems that happened to me. I was discussing the deployment of National Guard troops in DC near where I live. The people with whom I was discussing this live about 500 miles (800 km) away and hadn’t spent any time in DC for about 20 years. However, 20 years ago they were involved in some bad experiences involving crime and harassment in DC.

Instinctively they had expressed one their most important problems. “People shouldn’t have to worry about being threatened, robbed, and harassed.” So I made sure to tell them that I agreed with them on that point. Their second problem was that if the DC police cannot protect its citizens, and the National Guard can, the safety of citizens should not take a back seat to legal red tape.

On high alert for a difficult conversation, I adopted an informal version of Prioritized Problems. They were expressing that the safety of citizens is higher priority than legal fights over who has jurisdiction. I acknowledged their views, without agreeing, through asking a Confirming question. From their point of view, was a debate about turf between federal agents and DC officers less important than stopping innocent people from being robbed, harmed, and physically assaulted?

Many people I know would have immediately launched into a counter argument about the legality of using the Home Rule Doctrine and declaring a National Emergency. These were also valid problems to consider, but they did not address the stated problems already on the table. Instead I moved the conversation to problem metrics. I didn’t even add any of my own problems to the list. I simply used their list of two Prioritized Epic Problems.

Technique: The Magic If

I started by confirming their order of priority by reversing their problems into questions.

Case 1: What if National Guard troops were deployed, but there were no threats to the safety of citizens for them to respond to. Would that be okay? 

They protested that there obviously were threats, or else the National Guard would not have been deployed. After all, they had experienced such threats 20 years ago. The National Guard, however, is a solution, so I wanted to remove the solution from the discussion and focus first on simply confirming the order of the problems.

So I deployed a technique I learned in acting, the “Magic If”. (Credited to the acting guru, Konstantin Stanislavski.) I clarified that we could pull the data on citizen safety after deciding on the order of problems. I simply wanted to know, in their opinion, What If the National Guard troops were deployed to a region where there were no threats? With the facts set aside for the moment, their opinion was that sending troops without a clear threat would be an inappropriate use of the National Guard. Their reasons were the cost of deployment, the disruption to the families of the National Guard members, and the potential dangers that might arise for both citizens and soldiers when deploying armed military into any area. 

Even if it is possible to look up factual data, I find data ineffectual at this stage of a debate. The “Magic If” is much more effective. It creates the possibility that either of us could be “wrong”, helps us find common ground, and facilitates understanding on all sides.

It creates the possibility that either of us could be “wrong”, helps us find common ground, and facilitates understanding on all sides.

Case 2: What if deploying the National Guard caused more people to be robbed, harmed, or physically harassed?

They immediately assumed that I was accusing the National Guard of robbery and harassment and jumped to their defense. So I assured them that I was just establishing the priority of the problems. I also pointed out that I was using their exact words as we had written them down. They had complained that 20 years ago they were robbed, harmed, and assaulted. 

I was establishing a problem metric. If the amount of theft, harassment, and bodily harm goes up, there is a problem. If they go down, then the problems are going away. They agreed that the goal is to make those things go away. This gave us a frame for our discussion. 

Case 3: What if the National Guard stopped a U.S. citizen to check their immigration status?

The discussion did eventually move into immigration. It started from an article about people who were not committing a crime, robbing, assaulting, or harassing anyone else. This particular example was a delivery driver who was stopped while making a delivery, caught on camera by a resident who was waiting for that delivery driver to deliver his food. Did the delivery driver being stopped count as harassment, since they themselves were not engaged in a crime?

The counter argument was that since he was stopped, he probably was an illegal immigrant. The reality of the conversation, though, was that none of us knew if he was or not, so I called out our lack of knowledge.

I introduced this as a new problem to be prioritized into our list. Drawing a connection to the highest problem on the list – crime, assault, and harassment – I asked which problem was more important to them: crime, harassment, or illegal immigration? “Illegal Immigration is a crime,” was the reply.

So I put it in personal terms, “Starting with crime, would it be okay for them to stop you, if they suspected you of a crime?” Their position was that it would be annoying, but it was more important to find the criminal. “Then would it be okay for them to stop you if they suspected you to be an illegal immigrant?” The people I was talking with happened to be Latino. “No,” was the response, “because I came here through the proper legal channels. I came here the right way.” So I wanted to know, “How would the Guard members know until after they stopped you? Is it okay for them to stop you and ask for your ID?” Again they responded, “No, because I’m an American citizen,” which led to a discussion about Probable Cause.

The conversation continued to unfold through issues like parts of town with high homicide rates, a comparison of homicide rates now versus 20 years ago, and versus 5 years ago. With the help of Google and AI, we learned that some parts of the city were much lower now, but others less so. In the areas with continuing high crime rates, we found stories about residents who were welcoming the National Guard into their neighborhood with open arms. There was a contrasting story where a store owner, who had been vandalized, requested National Guard protection but was instead sent a camera crew. After the cameras left, they were vandalized three more times, and the National Guard never came.

At each step we used the “Magic If” to compare scenarios, moving items up, down, splitting, and merging where needed. We didn’t agree on everything, but we agreed about most of the Magic If scenarios. And we were talking, finding common ground, trading stories, and researching new information to immediately share with each other. Through embracing everyone’s possibility to be both right and wrong, we all walked away knowing more.

Use the “Magic If” to compare scenarios, moving items up, down, splitting, and merging where needed.

Conclusion

I won’t continue that debate, because this article is about how to disrupt difficult conversations and redirect them in a better direction through prioritizing and measuring problems. Also each of us has access to different evidence and the debates would unfold differently for each of us. 

What I will share instead is that when I participate in debates (political or corporate) around prioritized problem metrics they are always more productive and respectful than debates about solutions. When people debate about what makes problems better or worse, instead of fighting about which solutions to implement, more collaboration happens. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than the alternative. 

“When people debate about what makes problems better or worse, instead of fighting about which solutions to implement, more collaboration happens.”

To learn more about these skills, join me in this free workshop I’m prototyping for Prioritized Problems on a new education platform called “Skool”. I would love your feedback on the format and effectiveness of the techniques.

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