Learning about leadership forces you to understand how people make decisions and go on to live their lives. The trouble with that thinking is that no two people are the same or think in lock step with each other. To make matters worse, a person can see the sky as blue one day and a few days later they might think of it as purple. People are not static, they change, sometimes a lot. So you might be just like them on Tuesday and wildly different than them on Friday.
One of the under explored consequences of this love of differentiating ourselves from each other turns out to be how are we going to get along with each other once we can no longer avoid each other. You can go full hermit and you still will run into someone that will confront you about this or that. You may dislike taxes for instance, but the tax man will not allow that as an excuse to avoid paying them. Unless you live in the remotest place, you are going to have to rub shoulders with others. Try as hard as you might, you can’t avoid it.
This is a troublesome condition of life today. Getting along with others and even learning to enjoy their company is growing less and less real. We have sophisticated ways of avoidance instead of conviviality and fellowship.
Where this will end, no body knows. But it can’t be good.
One of my attempts to solve this distancing of ourselves is found in the idea of Principles-Policies-Procedures. Principles are well understood as the base of society. Don’t kill or lie or steal. I admit these seem to be losing their power today like never before. But still, I think you could get some basic agreement on these principles.
Policies are the next level down. Policies are an attempt to help people live by the guardrails of our base Principles. We want people to obey speed limits and avoid distracted driving and so on. These are policies based on principles.
Then there are procedures or perhaps preferences. I want to do something in a certain way because it works for me. I want to go to the other side of town along certain roads for several reasons. Basically, I prefer my route to your route.
So whenever conflict or disagreement came up, I would try to unpack the inherent questions, Are these Principles, Policies or Preferences. Some people never did slow down for a minute when they were unwilling to answer the question. They just wanted to bully forward with their way or the highway. But some people would back up for a moment and start to look at just how important their idea was. These are the ones you could hope for to have an aha moment.
Greece created Debate out of nothing. Before Greece during the Athens age, if you tried to debate you could easily end up dead. But everything changed with Athenian Democracy. Next time you find yourself at odds with someone or some idea, take moment and ask yourself the question, Is this a Principle, Policy or Preference? It might just help you to have more friends and acquaintances and fewer opponents.
One of the signs that we are in danger of moving backwards toward tyranny is the ability to discuss and debate and talk with each other. Lost that entirely and we will lose much more. That is one of my top principles.