Have better arguments: a case for the adversarial system in business
This, from The Spectator, is one of my favourite magazine advertisements.
Debate — at Course Concierge, it’s a tenet of our company.
My business partner Till and I “argue” a lot. But it’s one of the reasons we’ve had so successful a first two and a half years.
Should anyone ever ask “What’s the secret?”, this would be our answer. The essence of a well-run company is good decision making; the way to ensure it is robust debate.
We can drive each other up the wall on occasion, but it’s important. Debate is almost always a case of calling into question each others’ blind spots.
Reading this, why would you want to invite more contention into your life?
Because, as I will argue, it brings about the best kind of solution.
Leo Burnett, the founder of one of last century’s great advertising organisations, wrote:
From a Washington Post review of Andrew Roberts’s Masters and Commanders (on the allied victory of WWII), “As Roberts makes clear throughout the book, hammering out Allied strategy was an untidy, exhausting, sometimes debilitating process, replete with fist-shaking arguments and emotional tantrums. But the debates, ill-tempered as they often were, produced the searching questions and unsparing analysis needed to come up with a plan for victory, which, in the end, was the only thing that mattered. Feelings might have been bruised, but the alliance itself never fractured.”
Another reviewer of the book: “the extreme adversarial relationship among the drivers of the Alliance was the reason for its ultimate success and saved the Alliance from the kind of huge mistakes that might have altered the outcome… Roberts observes that the German military was superior to those of the Allies. But Hitler lacked the partnership — either with allies or with his General Staff — that could have filtered out the blunders that he made. We are all lucky that he didn’t.”
Extrapolating from war, returning to client-service companies, debate is especially important. As marketing advisor David C. Baker has put it, you want the “centre of (healthy) tension” inside your firm — between project and account manager — not between you and your client.
Till and I recurrently argue timelines (mine too slow, his too fast), budgets (his overly optimistic, mine admittedly pessimistic), and even aesthetics — for instance wanting a modern yet classic look for our website. (Whether or not to have red in the colour palette was contested bitterly, but the outcome is brilliant.) Yet another “duel” led us to happen across a whole new area of accounting. Debate is both a balancing and furthering force.
Going into a debate we’ve recognised that there are typically three potential outcomes: we come to a consensus — an answer that’s somewhere between what each of us has argued for (possibly arriving at a new solution neither of us had previously seen); one bests the other and has the mutually agreed prevailing argument; or one of us simply wants it more, is willing to fight more doggedly, and then, borrowing a phrase from Jeff Bezos at Amazon, we “disagree and commit”. (When we do this latter, the “disagreeing” party almost always in quick time comes to see the virtues of the other’s argument.)
There are entire organisations (I’m thinking the Munk Debates) set up because of their belief that debate produces best outcomes. But admittedly elsewhere it often doesn’t. So what are the ingredients to successful debate? We’ve identified five.
1) Diversity of opinion — for us by way of difference in temperament (as noted above).
I once said to two co-founder friends: “Isn’t it great to have someone disagreeing with you on everything? It continually checks your thinking.” They replied no, they were so similar they found that they agreed on everything. (They didn’t think this positive, and were actively seeking a third balancing member.)
2) An environment which allows for argument. Fearless contention might sound nice in theory, but the reality of two people going at it hammer and tongs isn’t always pretty.
Sometimes a third party can help (say, our accountant coming in to lightly moderate something in their area of specialty), but internally in an organisation, when done repeatedly and at intensity, it’s best kept private.
3) Time. Allowing debate to carry over the span of several weeks. You might fiercely contest something, stay at loggerheads in that discussion, then one of you will read a similar opposing argument from another source that causes it to “click”. Stamina to push through disagreement is imperative. (Implicit in this is that you’re trying to achieve a mutual objective — not the case in much political party altercation.)
4) Humour. Today’s editor of The Spectator on the publication’s original Joseph Addison formula: “Almost all of The Spectator’s essays — not just those of Addison and Steele — were humorous. Some were rude or even outrageous, but the tone mattered: it was a vehicle for exploring incendiary topics without getting swivel-eyed. Humour was the medium for a proper exchange of ideas, the antidote to tribalism (or ‘enthusiasm,’ as Addison called it).”
5) Humility — both in defeat (the ability to change stance when presented new evidence — debate is dreadful when sides clutch obstinately to their positions) and victory.
“The secret of conflict resolution,” Tigranes, future king of Armenia, once said according to Xenophon “is to ensure that one does not so humiliate the enemy as to guarantee that he seeks revenge at the earliest opportunity.” (True for allies as well as enemies.)
Or Churchill a few millennia later, “In victory, magnanimity.”
As heated as it can get, debate must always remain amicable.
At Course Concierge, this isn’t just between us as co-founders. As we grow, we hope that no matter rank or position, if someone can best another with reasoned argument for how something can be better done, we want to hear it.
Debate needs to be better championed, and societally we need to stop being so squeamish about a good argument.
To all those in business reading, we advise: find a good debating partner.
Again citing Churchill: “the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.”
