Sam thinks the client presentation should be ten slides. You think it should be three. The meeting is in an hour.
Most people know only two moves here: stay silent and resent it, or fight to win at all costs. Both are expensive. Silence means the team loses your good idea. Fighting means that even if your idea wins, Sam remembers how it felt — and next time he stays silent. As the last lesson showed, teams run on people feeling safe to speak, and how you disagree is where that safety is made or destroyed.
There is a third move, and it is a learnable skill with actual scripts.
Rule zero: attack the idea, never the person
The whole craft rests on one separation:
- "This plan has a gap" — about the idea. Fine.
- "You always ignore the details" — about the person. War.
The word "you" plus a character judgment turns a discussion into a defence of someone's identity — and nobody updates their opinion while defending their identity.