Tag Archives: consensus

The Name On the Front

There is a timeworn adage in team-sports that may be familiar to many of you: It’s the name on the front of the jersey that matters, not the name on the back.

In other words, the objectives and achievements of the team must always take precedence over individual team-members’ accomplishments.  That is the only route to collective success.  No doubt, individual accomplishments do help the team to succeed, but individual glory is secondary to team triumph.

If you’re a sports fan, you may remember Sidney Crosby’s ‘golden goal’ in 2010, which won an Olympic gold medal for Team Canada in ice-hockey.  And you can be sure the joy on Crosby’s face as he celebrated with his rapturous teammates was not because he scored the goal; rather, it was because the team won that coveted prize.  Sid the Kid was and is a consummate team-player.

This lesson was drummed into my psyche from the time I first started playing team-games—hockey and baseball—around the age of ten, until I finished my last game nearing the age of sixty.  Given the vicissitudes of age as I complete my eighty-first trip around the sun, I don’t miss playing those games now, but I’m awfully glad I had the opportunity while yet I could.

Over all those years, I came to realize that the lesson implicit in that old adage might well apply to all of life.  In this country, for example, all of us wear a jersey with the same name on the front: CANADA.  Politically speaking, however, there is a plethora of different names on the back of those jerseys, as there is for any team: LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE, NDP, SPECIAL INTERESTS, LOBBYIST, and many more.  Ideally, given the name on the front, we would all be playing for the greater good of the team, pulling together to advance our collective best interests.

Alas, all too often, our elected representatives in Parliament push their selfish interests to the forefront.  They choose to heckle and yell, rather than listening to one another; to dismiss differing viewpoints out of hand, rather than trying to understand them; to criticize and condemn, rather than seeking compromise and consensus.  Question period—which is a made-to-order opportunity to seek honest answers and debate them sincerely in an effort to advance a common cause—has become a travesty that would shame an unruly class of six-year-olds.

During my working career, I learned and frequently made use of a valuable strategy for helping bring people to consensus.  On the assumption that agreement is impossible without understanding, I would assign a person (or group) to listen carefully as someone presented an idea.  Next, I would require that person (or group) to ‘play it back’ in their own words in such a fashion as to indicate they had grasped the concept.  If the original presenters agreed they had, we could safely go on to debate the merits of the idea, knowing no one harboured—unknowingly or deliberately—misconceptions about it.  The debate was thus based on a common set of understandings.

If the original presenters believed the listeners had missed the point, I would  have them present it again, and the process would repeat.  If nothing else, it forced people to listen to and focus on what they were saying to each other, rather than just waiting for a chance to refute what they thought they were hearing.

It’s no secret that our country—indeed the entire planet—is having to deal with a number of issues and concerns right now: among them are the prospect of another pandemic for which we are sorely unprepared; the re-emergence of fascism as a political force; a lack of affordable housing; economic and social inequities; famine and drought; the twin-scourges of racism and xenophobia; and the incessant wars being waged around the world.  And towering over and above all of these in scope and consequence, there looms the existential threat of climate change.

On planet Earth, the only home we have, there is but one team.  And the name on the front of that team’s jerseys is HUMANKIND.  But, just as with any other team, the names on the backs of those jerseys are different—in this case, the names of the political, cultural, economic entities we know as nation-states: CANADA, CHINA, EU, GERMANY, INDIA, JAPAN, RUSSIA, UK, and USA, to name but a few.  All but the first on this list might rightfully be deemed a superpower, which Britannica defines as “a state that cannot be ignored on the world stage and without whose cooperation no world problem can be solved.”

The biggest problem facing Team HUMANITY, however, is that these individual players are not cooperating to find solutions to the crises facing the planet.  Rather, they are in pursuit of individual accomplishment, usually to the detriment of each other, as if they are playing a zero-sum game in which, for every winner, there must be a loser.  In hockey terms, it’s as if twelve players are on the ice, each with a puck, firing it at random in every direction, with no concept of who the opposition might be, what team-play looks like, and what winning or losing is.

In the battles our planet is experiencing, there will definitely be a loser, but it won’t be the planet.  It will survive in some fashion or other, perhaps greatly changed from the sanctuary we have come to know, but still circling the sun.  It is we who will be the losers, Team HUMANITY, unless, collectively, the individual players stop paying attention to the names on the backs of their jerseys.

Will we prove able to do that?  I don’t know, of course, but I’m not optimistic.  I despair of the future, though I’ll surely not be around for a whole lot more of it.  As a species, we are as dysfunctional a team as ever I have seen, each of our players strutting and brandishing his own name on the back of his own jersey.

But here’s the one, indisputable thing—in life, as in team-sports, it’s the name on the front that matters.

The Smartest Guy

During my working career, sometimes I was the smartest guy in the room.  But only sometimes.  Fortunately for me, in many of the situations where I wasn’t, I was the highest-ranking guy in the room, so the smartest folks, if they wanted corporate decisions and actions to go their way, had to convince me of the merits of their positions.

On occasion, that was relatively easy for them, because the evidence in favour of their arguments was plentiful and conclusive, and I’d have had to be the dumbest guy in the room not to understand that.  But I was never the dumbest guy, so in matters where there seemed only one reasonable course of action, not much convincing was needed. 

Other times, though, those smarter folks in the room would present conflicting data to me, sufficient to rule out an obvious choice, and that’s where the need to be convincing became paramount.  Whenever I was presented with two or more sets of factual data, each suggesting plausible courses of action, the art of persuasion became more significant.  And in such cases, I could always be persuaded by logic and passion.

Early on in my career, before I‘d reached the point where I was the arbiter in such scenarios, I watched as other smart folks made their pitches—sometimes in concert with me, sometimes in opposition—to those who would ultimately decide the matters in question.  And I learned that, absent overwhelming evidence in favour of one option or another, the most effective presentation of the differing bodies of evidence usually won the day.

Most of the folks to whom I reported along the way—men and women both—considered themselves the smartest guys in the room.  But just in case they might be wrong, all of them surrounded themselves with subordinates who might be—and who often were, in fact.  More importantly, the most effective of my bosses listened closely to their people, allowing themselves to be swayed by facts, logic, and passion—usually in that order.

I soon learned that passion alone would rarely, if ever, win the day with the smartest guys in the room.  For them, facts and logic were essential; they were, after all, rational beings.  But whenever reams of facts and heaps of logic offered divergent paths that might plausibly be followed, emotion entered the arena—enthusiasm, zeal, fervour, each of which is an essential part of the art of persuasion. 

Over time, I noticed the people who had the most success at winning over the decision-makers embodied similar characteristics, employed similar methods.  They were open and transparent about themselves, for example, and allowed others a chance to know them on a personal level, to learn what they stood for, what they valued.  When talking with someone, they focused exclusively on that person in the moment—leaning in, making eye contact, smiling and nodding when appropriate—all of which had the effect of making the person feel singularly important—even the boss.

The effective influencers were highly-visible in the workplace, too, and always asked pertinent questions of others in conversations and meetings to solicit their viewpoints.  They listened actively to the responses they received, sometimes saying them back, perhaps in their own words—not just to indicate understanding, but often to reframe the discussion in their direction.  They tried to establish links between colleagues’ ideas and their own, seeking to achieve synthesis—and eventually, consensus.

All of them were consensus-builders, but the consensus they strove for invariably skewed toward their own desired outcomes.  They would acknowledge and commend the results suggested by others’ proposals, then meld them with their own to offer higher-order outcomes, often coupled with a variety of strategies and tactics to achieve them.

One of the most effective of these tactics was their engaging habit of beginning their responses to others’ ideas with a phrase like, “Yeah, I agree…” or, “Yeah, I like that…”.  And then they’d segue to their own proposal by adding something like, “And if we were to combine that concept with this one…”, the point of which was to move the needle on the consensus-meter in their direction.

Without exception, all these folks who were successful at winning others over had a keen sense of anticipation, a nose to the wind for what might be coming, perhaps unexpectedly, and they made sure they were prepared with contingency plans.  I took notice of how they always had responses at the ready for questions that might never get asked, for objections that may never be raised.  They radiated readiness and competence, and as a result encouraged confidence in their abilities on the part of those around them.

With few exceptions, these smart folks with whom I worked were well-intentioned, not self-serving or conniving.  Almost all of us had the best interests of the organization at heart, and each of us believed the option we were advancing in a particular circumstance, even where it differed from colleagues’ proposals, was the best alternative for the organization.  We competed, yes, but for the overall good.

After I eventually ascended to the arbiter’s chair, the critical factor for me in favouring one proposed course of action over another was integrity—each person’s integrity, definitely, but also the underlying validity and foundation of her or his proposal.  The credibility of both the person and the proposal were paramount.  When those were in place, when the data and logic were clear, I was ready to be convinced, to be persuaded.

Even today, long-since retired, I consider the importance of having to be the smartest guy in the room over-rated.  One could be merely a shade above average in a roomful of average—hence, the smartest in the room—yet not particularly well-equipped to make critical decisions.

Far more important for decision-makers, I have always thought, is to encircle themselves with folks with the potential to be the smartest guy, and then encourage them, listen to them, take direction from them, and earn their commitment to a final consensus—a consensus that may ultimately combine elements of several proposals.

Now, if you’ve read this far, it’s possible that you disagree with me about some or all of my thinking, so feel free to persuade me otherwise.

I can be reached.

Don’t Tell Me!

It was only a minor argument between a father and his daughter, one quickly forgotten after the heat of the moment.  But for me, a bemused bystander, it featured one of the funniest rebuttals to an angry demand I’d ever heard.

“Don’t tell me what to think!” one of them declared vehemently after being told what to think.

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The other, perhaps unable to come up with a suitable riposte right on the spot, retorted, “Don’t tell me, ‘Don’t tell me’!”

I laughed out loud, even as I wondered if there might be a third repetition, and maybe a fourth.  How long might they have gone on telling each other not to tell each other not to tell each other not to tell each other…?

But they didn’t.  And they laugh about it now, too.

I am reminded of the incident every time I survey the pessimistic contents of the various news media to which I subscribe.  Almost every story of national or international import seems to be a variation on that angry theme.  Leaders of the world—the free world, the enslaved world, the first world, the third world, the western world, the eastern world, the wealthy world, the impoverished world (all apparently oblivious to the stark reality that there is truly only one world on which we all must coexist)—shout back and forth across the social media platforms:  Don’t tell me!

And the reply each inevitably receives from the other seems eerily akin to what I heard so many years ago:  Don’t tell me, ‘Don’t tell me’!

Political insults cast on friend or foe alike are answered with retaliatory insults.  Harsh economic sanctions are met with retaliatory sanctions.  Tariffs engender retaliatory tariffs.  Expulsions of a nation’s diplomats are answered with retaliatory expulsions.  Embassy closings are countered by retaliatory embassy closings.  Bombings are met with retaliatory bombings.  Missile attacks are countered with retaliatory missile attacks.

Think of the retaliation if there is ever a full-out, nuclear, pre-emptive strike.

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It’s reminiscent of the excuse I used to hear from children on the playground so many years ago:  It’s not my fault, sir.  The fight started when he hit me back!

Having been the victim of an unprovoked, life-threatening attack myself—years ago, and too complicated to delve into here—I well understand how difficult it can be to turn the other cheek in the face of aggression.  Trying to understand another’s motivation in such circumstances, and perhaps to forgive, is nigh impossible.  I get that.

But, on a global scale, the consequences of not doing so are potentially catastrophic.  During the unlamented Cold War years almost half a century ago—where two nuclear superpowers, the USA and the USSR, faced each other down—the doctrine that prevented an accidental armageddon was the notion of mutually-assured destruction:  You might kill me, but you’ll die doing it!

I always thought the acronym for that misguided doctrine, MAD, seemed a perversely-perfect name.  And history tells us that humankind came terrifyingly close on too many occasions to perishing in its calamitous effects.

Wouldn’t a better approach, I wonder, be MAP—mutually-assured partnerships?  Would it not be better for the nations of the world to listen to one another’s concerns and aspirations, rather than turning a deaf ear?

As I’ve written in this space before, all of humankind—regardless of the power some wield, their wealth, political stripe, skin colour, religion, gender-identity, or ethnicity—all reside on one fragile planet.

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Is it too hard for us, organized as we are into nation-states, to accept that none of us owns any of this world?  That we are merely borrowing it for our use during our blink-of-an-eye lifetimes?  That, if it belongs to anyone, it is to the future generations we hope will follow us?

I long, perhaps vainly, for a day where the world’s leaders will open themselves up to each other.  “Tell me,” they could say, inviting the other side to respond, determined to listen.

“Now, let me tell you,” they could then reply, looking for a sharing of viewpoints, rather than a clash.

“Tell me more,” the other side might next say, encouraged by the openness.

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Wouldn’t we all be better off if that could ever happen?

Despite the pessimistic news reports of today that dampen my hopes and cause a weary shaking of my head, I force myself to remain optimistic that humankind might yet reach that stage.

“Don’t tell me we can’t all sit down together!” I protest.  “Don’t tell me it’s too late!  Don’t tell me we are doomed by our own stupidity!”

Don’t tell me!