RE: discussion style and respect

["Tony Hain" <[e-mail]>]

Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Mike,
> On 13/06/2015 04:52, Michael StJohns wrote:
> ...
> > My - let's not call it a theory, but an emerging hypothesis - is that the
> consensus process tends to incentivize confrontational approaches,
> especially when the difference between winning and losing may have real
> world implications for the participants in the form of compensation,
> recognition, product acceptance etc.
> 
> I snipped this out of context to bring up another point we haven't really
> focussed on: all this talk of winning and losing. My emerging hypothesis is
> that treating a standards discussion as a zero-sum game, with winners and
> losers, is a fundamental mistake that we all tend to make. We should always
> be looking for a win-win. Probably the most important thing that ADs and
> WG chairs could do to make our discussions more courteous is to remind
> everybody of this whenever necessary.
> 
> I have a secondary hypothesis that the nature of the rough consensus
> process makes people a bit more likely to behav as if they are in a zero-sum
> game, but that is secondary and hard to prove.

I don’t believe that is necessarily a correct correlation. Getting consensus that a proposed solution meets the requirements is not necessarily a zero-sum effort. If people disagree about the requirements to start with, it is very hard to get consensus about any proposed solution. It becomes a zero-sum when it is a beauty contest or competing implementation biased "one size fits all" outcome. Remove the "one-size-fits-all", or otherwise constrain the requirements to a set with consensus (yes that means more requirements documents), and you reduce the chance of a zero-sum outcome. Insist on "one-size-fits-all", or skip the requirements document, and you almost ensure a zero-sum fight. 

Tony

> 
>      Brian