Inadvertent Agreement

I have participated in more than a couple contentious meeting recently. Most of these have been technical in nature. The high concentration of feather ruffling has heightened my sensitivity to some issues that can wreck the effectiveness of the meeting. You would think that all-out disagreement would be the worst possible scenario but I am starting to think this is not the case. In the situation where no-one agrees, the conversation continues. Everyone wants to get the last word and as long as there is strong disagreement, the issue does not go away. While this may seem sub-optimal, it has the benefit spawning further discussion.

One would think the best possible outcome would be for everyone to agree. If everyone does in fact agree then this is true. But the problem is, particularly in convoluted technical discussions, that consensus has a nasty little cousin that causes tons of problems: inadvertent agreement.

Inadvertent agreement happens when someone gets so entrenched in their perception of the discussion that they filter out a different interpretation that is often masked by poor semantics. I am starting to believe that inadvertent agreement is far more damaging to an engineering team that disagreement. The false sense of confidence results in a termination of the discussion, an unresolved issue, and the team potentially splintering on different development paths.

This problem is most prevalent in early development stages when brainstorming an architecture on a blank piece of paper. As the session progresses the paper becomes cluttered with many different streams of thought. A good brainstorming session is one of my favorite parts of design and engineering, but I need to make sure that when everyone starts to agree, they agree on why they agree.