communication styles (was Re: RFC Series Editor Resignation)

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

Dear colleagues,

Though I am employed by the Internet Society, in this case I do not
speak for it.

On Wed, Jul 03, 2019 at 10:02:40AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> happened.  And it seems abundantly clear that many people are
> unwilling to admit that perhaps "mistakes were made", and that in
> fact, perhaps we *should* improve.

I don't find that "abundantly clear" at all.  What I have seen in this
quite large volume of mail are several different reactions, many of
which seem to me to be suggesting that the outcome was (in more than
one dimension) less than everything one might have hoped, which is the
same thing as people admitting that mistakes were made.  I think there
may be differences of opinion about what the right path would have
been, but that does not mean that people are not conceding that,
whatever else is the case, the current state of affairs is not ideal.

In my opinion, some of the people who have been involved in this
dicussion have been pretty aggressive about their positions, and I
think that there have been several posts in the thread where, if
people were working anywhere in a management chain where I have
responsibility, I would be taking them aside for some discussion about
constructive approaches.  I don't think it discourages discussion to
point out that such aggressiveness may tend to drive people to avoid
expressing their opinions.  Whereas we have plenty of evidence that
highly aggressive styles of communication _do_ tend to discourage
discussion.  (And I recognize that I am one who is sometimes guilty of
that transgression.)

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[e-mail]