I love to argue…with the right people and the right conditions, it can be a lot of fun. Remember the TV show Moonlighting back in the 80’s? Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd argued over each other constantly, like there were two dialogs going on at once. I’m sure many people found it annoying, but I found it interesting how they crammed in so much dialog, and sped up the argument. The conditions to argue existed, and their relationship was based on it.
So why don’t we all argue that way? Because we are all too sensitive and our stage is filled with trap doors that will make us fall through. If we argue with our boss, our job feels in jeopardy. If we argue the wrong position, we may be labeled something we don’t want to wear. So the question becomes, how do we set the stage.
Recently, my friend John Robinson from OurAbility had an argument. We love to argue. But it never felt like an argument. It felt like a free-flow collaboration. We just both went on, talking over each other, building our ideas upon each others. Rejecting ideas that we did not like, and repositioning them in different ways, until we land on something we both love. This then became the model for a new way of staging collaborative arguments, which we called Hyper-Collaboration.
We did this in front a two seventeen year old boys, who sat there in awe watching us. My son said to me that was the coolest thing he ever saw. It was totally foreign to what he is being taught. It’s not that polite conversation is not pleasant and good, it’s just too slow. You have to find someone you trust, decide you’re going to argue, and then go for it.
There are rules to Hyper-Collaboration, but we have not argued about them yet.