Facilitating technical disagreements with a joker card
Disagreements are incredibly important. In tech, disagreements can easily be found. Just post “JavaScript is the best functional language” anywhere on the Internet and bam, you'll instantly have a flamewar on your hands.
Useful disagreements take a different form from fruitless disagreements.
Flamewars based on personal opinions often end up falling into the fruitless category, because they mostly come down to “which language do I personally like best?”. On the internet, that’s not much worth value. In a company though, personal preferences can often affect team happiness. Making a C# team use JavaScript probably will negatively impact the team.
Useful disagreements on the other hand tend to have productive outcomes. In open source communities, it can influence what direction a project goes in. The same applies to companies. What frameworks should we use? How should we build services? What infrastructure setup do we need?
There are a few blockers to useful disagreements in a company. One is power dynamics. Another is emotions.
In a company, people’s seniority and role tends to play a factor in whether people will disagree with them or not. In particular, people may disagree with more senior people, but not voice it in productive ways. Either people are silent, or they are too vocal.
Why is silence problematic? Resentment builds when they strongly disagree with something that impacts them. On the other hand, over-vocalisation of an opinion tends to derail conversations and become more similar to internet flamewars.
Figuring out how to avoid both of these takes a bit of practice. Different people and cultures will conduct disagreements in different ways. Establishing the ground rules, and the shared common interest is fairly important.
There’s plenty of good reading in books and the internet around facilitation rules, but I just want to share a useful one I use somewhat often.
Enter the joker card.
The rules are simple: everyone in a discussion gets a joker card. At any point in a discussion, anyone can play their joker card to provide a devil’s advocate view, or to actually disagree. The discussion can’t move on until at least one person has played a joker.
By giving everyone a chance to voice disagreement, it removes the silence problem. It also provides a way for over-vocalisation to be interjected when needed.
I introduce this in discussion-heavy meetings where there’s a need for productive disagreement. When I’m introducing the joker, I try to set the example of how and when to use it. A good usage of the joker provides more depth to a discussion. What hasn’t been covered yet in the discussion?
If the discussion is taking place physically, an actual physical card is preferred. Digitally, it could be an emoji reaction. I’ve also used physical cards in digital meetings, too. Props are a big aid in facilitation.
The aim is to have everyone feel comfortable playing the joker card, sharing their opinion, and furthering the discussion. Give it a go, see how it goes, and figure out how to effectively use it in your disagreements.