Disagreement Archives - Page 2 of 3

The Dissent Channel

The State Department has an official Dissent Channel. It began in 1971, during disputes about policy in the Vietnam War. Through it, American diplomats can disagree with policy openly. Those who use it are protected from reprisals and disciplinary action.

In January 2017 press reports said that more than 1,000 foreign service officers and civil service employees had signed a dissent against President Trump’s immigration order. The State Department did not confirm the number. The second-largest dissent in the channel’s history had 51 names.

The Great Dissent

In 1896 the Supreme Court approved the principle of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson. The vote was 7 to 1. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote the lone dissent: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.”

Thurgood Marshall later cited Harlan’s dissent in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that overturned Plessy.

Charles Evans Hughes, chief justice from 1930 to 1941, called a dissent “an appeal to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of a future day.”

I Dissent

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ended her dissent in Bush v. Gore with two words: “I dissent.” The sentence before them reads: “Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.”

In 2012 Ginsburg received a “dissent collar,” a necklace of fake jewels from Banana Republic. She wore it on days when she disagreed with the majority. So in her later years on the bench, everyone knew as soon as she walked into the courtroom. In a 2014 interview with Katie Couric, she said: “It looks fitting for dissents.”

Justices sometimes read a dissent aloud from the bench. In 2007 Linda Greenhouse of The New York Times called this “an act of theater.” It shows that a justice thinks the majority is “profoundly wrong.” She wrote that it happens “just a handful of times a year.”

Crew Resource Management

After the 1977 Tenerife collision, in which a captain began his takeoff roll despite warnings from his first officer and flight engineer, NASA psychologist John Lauber coined the term at a 1979 workshop. United Airlines ran the first airline programme in 1981, and the FAA later made it mandatory.

CRM keeps the command hierarchy and changes what may cross it. Junior crew are trained to question the captain, and — in the phrase used in the training — to advocate for critical information until it is acted upon.

An American industry concluded that its aircraft were failing because information was not moving, and rebuilt its training around the flow rather than around the flying.

So what?

The standard American challenge to a presented finding, asked openly and without hostility in meetings. The question is not whether the finding is true. It is what follows from it being true, and a finding with no answer to the question has not earned the time.

Disagree and commit

In Amazon’s 2016 letter to shareholders, Bezos described the practice directly: if you have conviction on a direction even though there is no consensus, say I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?

He added that he does it himself, all the time.

The phrase names the sequence exactly. The disagreement is voiced, and then the decision is executed as though it had not been.

The sandwich

American management training teaches delivering criticism between two pieces of praise, and the technique is common enough to be mocked by its own recipients. The structure exists to cushion the middle. What is being cushioned is not the information — it is the person receiving it.

The rating nobody will give

Across the federal workforce of roughly two million people, about 60 percent are rated outstanding or exceptional, and 0.3 percent are rated below satisfactory.

The Office of Personnel Management’s own commentary notes that most organisations of that scale would expect to see five to ten percent underperformance in any review cycle.

Managers will not write down a judgment about work, because in the American reading it is a judgment about the person — and they will be the one delivering it.

Praise in public, criticize in private

A standing American management maxim, taught in manager training and repeated in HR guidance: when there is something good to say, make sure others hear it; when there is a correction, handle it one to one.

The rule pairs the two halves deliberately. The same event either gets an audience or is kept from one, depending entirely on which direction it points.

Isn’t that what management is paid for?

Americans and Germans have very different expectations about how to manage interpersonal conflicts when they arise, which can lead to huge misunderstandings. As part of an ongoing series of articles, an American consultant living in Germany offers some advice.

When Germans and American collaborate, there will be conflict. This is normal. However, their respective approaches to conflict resolution differ. These differences, if not understood and properly balanced, can hinder just and lasting conflict resolution. And unresolved conflict threatens collaboration and success.