Reasonable disagreement

I was following bits of the BlogNashville conference, particularly the session on “How to disagree without being disagreeable". Unfortunately, it sounds like the workshop wasn't an agreeable experience for some of the participants. And the wrangling over the fall-out seems to be getting a little out of hand.

So what went wrong? How did the disagreement begin and why did it become so, erm..., disagreeable?

When conference sessions go wrong (and believe me, I've seen some lulus), it's tough not to blame the participants, but I'd like to focus instead on the process. Because, it seems to me, a number of process factors were so wrong here that, regardless of the personalities involved, a positive outcome for all concerned was not a likely event.

In particular, there seems to have been a lack of fit between participants' expectations of the session and what they actually got.

The write-up suggests that the session may have been intended as a social experiment "challenging an audience of bloggers to respectfully disagree with one another", as well as an attempt to arrive at "a set of shared values that may be suggested as guidelines for the blogging community."

From the information provided beforehand, participants might have reasonably anticipated the latter but would have been ill-prepared for a challenging social experiment.

Confusion and conflict are predictable outcomes of role-ambiguity. In this instance, there seemed to be confusion around the session leader's role in the discussion. Was the group expecting to be moderated or led? Was the session leader required to lecture or facilitate? Open discussion or focussed debate? Or something else entirely?

It doesn't look to me like this issue was explicitly resolved either before or during the discussion. Frustration and conflict with the leader were characteristic of the session and continue to overshadow the post-mortem debate.

I certainly don't want to get involved in any of that. But I do think more attention to process would have likely reduced the possibility of conflict.

As to the question of how to disagree without being disagreeable, my advice is simple: Don't disagree with people who don't want to be disagreed with.

Update
Dave Winer points to a BloggerCon page that provides background on the role of discussion leaders at the conference.

It not only demonstrates a concern for process (so scratch my remarks to the contrary above), it also clearly sets out the role of the discussion leader as being that of both reporter and editor.

As Winer describes it, the role of the discussion leader is to be both "a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room" and an editor "so if he or she feels that a point has been made they must move on to the next point quickly. No droning, no filibusters, no repeating an idea over and over."

It's a fascinating and challenging structure, casting the discussion leader as storyteller, required to weave a narrative from diverse contributions. I've seen it used in other contexts, most entertainingly at a European bankers' conference where, over three days, a professional storyteller mixed with the participants, eliciting contributions before combining them in a compelling (and highly amusing) narrative for the conference finale.

Anyway, thanks to Winer, I now have a better understanding of the BloggerCon process and, referring back to the point of my original post, it doesn't look now like process was the problem.

Of course, having learnt a little more about them, I'm keener than ever to get along to one of these blogger conferences.

Maybe one day.