Turnthe tables!
Sick of arguing with relatives during the holidays? A tech exec says he’s got a hack for that
IN the run-up to the 2016 election, Buster Benson had an ongoing conversation on Facebook messenger with four good friends from his highschool cross-country team. They’d been close for decades, all had different political leanings and had gone various directions with their lives.
Benson was a Bay Area techie who had worked as a product manager and engineer for Amazon, Slack and Twitter. One guy was a special needs teacher in Texas, another had traveled the world as a videographer for Vice and Al Jazeera. Between July 2016 and the elections, they exchanged more than 30,000 words and various viewpoints. Whenthe votes came in and Trump was declared the winner, Benson was so shocked he couldn’t even discuss what had happened with his old pals and abruptly signed off.
“I’m devastated. I’m ashamed to even be a US citizen,” he wrote. “I’m gonna need some time.”
Benson came to realize that he’d acted regrettably, an experience that inspired him to pen “Why Are We Yelling: The Art of Productive Disagreement” (Portfolio), out now. “I was at my worst,” he writes of his post-election behavior, “and so unproductive that I realized I had to find a different approach.”
His book espouses a refreshing, rather radical philosophy about differences of opinion (and one that might prove useful around the holiday table or in contentious Facebook comment threads): We shouldn’t try to win arguments — doing so typically only results in frustration and alienation — but rather look at them as tools for finding greater understanding, security, connection and even enjoyment.
“Changing minds is really hard,” Benson writes. “There’s really only one mind in the universe that you can change, with some luck, and that’s yours.”
Benson recounts discussing gun control at a potluck he hosted. To keep the debate productive, he first asked everyone to share their personal history with guns and how they came to form their beliefs. Asking such open-ended questions that elicit potentially surprising, empathy-building answers is key.
Benson then had each person suggest what needed to be fixed in our country when it came to guns. Everyone, from those who sought much stricter gun control to those who favored gun freedom, wanted fewer homicides and suicides. With that goal in mind, they were able to talk about more creative solutions to getting there, from designing “smart guns” that only worked if fired by the owner to having a DMVlike organization that would test and license firearm owners. The group didn’t solve the gun issue over dinner, but by discussing things in this manner, they had a civil, worthwhile discourse.
“Suddenly, it became very easy to ditch simplistic solutions like banning assault rifles and adding a waiting period to gun purchases,” he writes. “By allowing our very black-and-white initial positions to fade into a spectrum of gray possibilities, and by working on arguments together from a shared end game, we felt somehow wise and more full.”
A key technique for better arguments is understanding what the conflict is really about.
“The easiest thing you can do to have more productive disagreements immediately is to remember to ask the other person: ‘Is this about what’s true, what’s meaningful or what’s useful?’ ” Benson writes. To reach a resolution, we must first know whether it’s about simple facts (what Benson calls “the realm of the head”), personal taste (“the realm of the heart”), utility (“the realm of the hands”) or a combination of the three.
Benson recounts working at Twitter in 2014 and there being an internal debate over adding a “View Tweet Activity” feature that would show impressions and clicks on a tweet in real time. Many worried that the change would cause a backlash from advertisers, and the team had reached an impasse. To unblock things, Benson shifted the conversation away from what the feature might mean for the company to how it might work and asked everyone to come up with best- and worstcase scenarios, shifting things from the realm of the heart to the realm of the hands. Everyone’s concerns were heard this way, and they decided to test the feature, rolling it out slowly to a limited number of users. The launch went well and “View Tweet Activity” is now a popular feature.
Of course, sometimes it’s not worth arguing at all. At Amazon in the early aughts, Benson recalls debating with CEO Jeff Bezos about the workings of an internal rating system on employees’ ideas. Benson thought the ratings should be from one to five stars; Bezos thought it should go up to 100 stars. Benson reluctantly had to defer to the big boss and took the attitude of “I’m going to build the best 100-star rating system I can.”
Today, after splintering in the wake of Trump’s election, Benson and his high-school buddies have been making use of the techniques in the book and they have resumed their ongoing political chat in a healthy, respectful manner.
As a result, Benson says the group is “feeling much more prepared for the 2020 election season!”