[card_zero]

Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about. It's not just semantics ... or, wait a minute, are you saying everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded? Maybe you all know that already. That would be excellent, if it's commonly understood.

It's a valuable idea, because otherwise what you get is an established habit of bad resolutions to disputes, where it becomes normal and is seen as virtuous for everybody to settle for half-measures. The article, which is very short, might be promoting that mindset, for all I can tell. In fact it clearly states it:

> The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker something else will be. That’s okay!

No, it isn't okay, and that's a shitty zero-sum uncreative way to view the world.

[necovek]

You are obviously using a newly defined phrase "mutual preference" which does not seem to be familiar to most people and a quick search does not bring anything of value for me (there is "mutual preference method", but that's about matching people to one another).

I — among others — believe that "sweet spot", "balanced", "trade-off" and even "compromise" are good enough words to describe a solution that achieves good outcomes for multiple competing goals (not just people), and I really believe that whether any of those is negative is in the eye (ear) of the beholder.

If you are instead claiming that there are no competing goals when you are eg. building a product, you might be looking only at very simple products (though I have a hard time imagining a product so simple there are at least not two goals in tension — eg. a knife and toothpick both need to balance sharpness and safety).

[card_zero]

But those describe a different thing. I use "mutual preference" carefully. Dale Carnegie described this in 1936. I don't remember what term he used for it, if any. But instead of any trade-off, which I will repeat is a lose-lose because both sides settle for an inferior version of their idea, you create a new idea which satisfies the spirit of what both sides wanted - quite likely satisfies it better than what they first thought of - and is quite different in nature.

This is of course difficult to do, and you may give up and compromise instead. Sometimes that's understandable. It is however worse.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That’s fairly classic CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making).

Sometimes, it works nicely; other times, you end up with The Abilene Paradox[0].

Group creativity is a crapshoot. Sometimes, lots of crap shoots out.

Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox

[necovek]

I do not think anyone disagrees with that — ideally, you get two ideas to meet and satisfy them completely (or two people to agree on the solution working for them both). But even a new idea comes from someone, and you might still have egos to deal with where one party won't budge if it wasn't from them.

But what people are stating (me included) is that in majority of cases, you are actually dealing with conflicting goals and outcomes so it is really the art of making decisions that allow you to do a good creative job within a set of needs.

So it is really more of a "yes, and" to you — with nobody disputing that you should first try to find a solution that meets multiple goals, people are finding that it's not just hard, but sometimes impossible to do so and really talking about this what we perceive to be "majority of our work" in operating within this "yes, and..." zone.

This is also why we have so many different tools for superficially the same job: from knives, forks and spoons (and yes, a spork ;-)), over accounting software, cars, shoes, clothes, phone sizes and underlying operating systems...

I mean, it'd be great if there was one tool I could use to eat my hot soup on a cold day, and shovel snow in the street, but... Yes, one could eg. imagine a way where one thing could do both where it's about eating a soup and cleaning snow (perhaps a straw-based system that sprinkles hot soup onto snow while having a junction to feed me too? :)), but the OP was using "compromise" in a way where he splits the two needs and focuses only on one.

And while this example seems far-fetched, it is not unusual in the world of software :)

[saghm]

> Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about

I mean, sure, if you think that there's literally no way for you to improve how you communicate to more effectively convey your ideas, then yes it's because of the other people and not something you can address. One person getting the point isn't a sign that everyone else is going to though. If your goal is to be persuasive to enough people that you don't need to risk downvotes though, you might find more success from looking closer at why you failed to get the outcome you want than from trying to justify it as not your fault. As I said though, I don't have any agenda here; I didn't downvote you, and if you're happier with the outcomes you're getting rather than being open to trying to communicate differently, it doesn't bother me! Given that you seemed upset about the downvotes though, it seemed like maybe you genuinely wanted to learn what might have caused them so you could try to avoid it in the future, so I was offering what seemed like the reason to me.

> Everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded

Not quite, I'm saying that it's not really a secret (at least not intentionally); it's just that common definition that most people understand the word to mean includes both win/win and lose/lose. It's totally understandable that this might not be your understanding of the word, since there's no way to really find out which words you might not understand the same way everyone else does, short of looking up every single word in a recent dictionary, which isn't a particularly fun way to spend time.

[card_zero]

It's fine, I got a conversation, that's all I wanted. Thank you, by the way. No, I won't modify my behavior. :)

Re: the definition, that's exactly what I said in the first place! "Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises", I said. I'm promoting making the distinction because I think it matters, a lot.

[saghm]

Ah, I didn't originally read what you said as promoting a distinction as much as arguing that the distinction already exists, which I think is where some of the disconnect is. Looking back at the comment that spawned all of this discussion, I think I put more weight on the initial opening that to me reads as stating the distinction as a categorical fact already than on the conclusion with the quote you mention. If I had to guess, I'd say that how carefully people will read each part of a comment is probably inversely related to how much content in the comment has come before the point where they're reading that part, so people who disagree with the first parts will weight later parts that convey more nuance less and less as they continue to read. Since you're happy with the outcome you got here though, fair enough that changing what you might say the next time isn't appealing!

The idea that there should be a semantic distinction certainly is more interesting than my original interpretation of what you said; I'd need more time to figure out whether I agree with it or not, but this type of philosophical discussion is definitely the type of thing I enjoy (and I suspect you're right that it's also something that a lot of people here would similarly be interested in discussing).