blogcontent/blog/content/posts/how-to-reach-agreement.md

title	date	draft	tags
How to Reach Agreement	2024-06-21T07:01:25-07:00	true	communication productivity

I'm a big fan of eponymous laws, to the extent of keeping a list of some of my favourites¹ on my personal page on the Wiki of any company I join². I tend to find that putting a name to a concept makes it easier to conceptualize, remember, and reason about; and anything which someone thinks important enough to put their name to is probably worth consideration³.

For the past few years, I've been mulling over a perspective that I suspect has some real legs as a helpful tool, and so I humbly present for your consideration the first draft of Jackson's Law Of Policy⁴ Alignment:

When a group of individuals, acting in good faith to decide on a policy to achieve a shared goal, are in agreement on:

1. The goal itself, and the criteria for and definition of success
2. The properties of the proposed approaches, including degrees of certainty where doubt exists then the group cannot fail to reach agreement.

As it stands, the observation itself is not particularly interesting - "when people agree, then they agree" smells like a tautology. Where it gets interesting in in observing the converse - if disagreement on conclusion exists, then this observation enumerates the possible causes.

Possible causes of disagreement

T_subbed_K - good faith (self-interest), context (some may believe that more or less risk is available)

Lack of Good Faith

This is both the most common cause, and the hardest to recognize and remedy. All too often, policy-makers are not acting entirely in good faith to whole-heartedly and solely achieve the goal. Manager may choose a solution that allows their team to garner more glory or avoid toilsome work. Legislators may support laws that harm their constituents but benefit themselves. Self-interest abounds, and is powerful.

Disclarity in goal

It sounds ridiculous to say "If you don't agree on what the goal is, you won't agree on the solution", but this happens more often than you might think.

T_subbed_K Internal or External

Disagreement on context

Part of agreeing on a goal is agreeing on the context in which it exists - the environmental factors like timescale, integrations, dependencies, and so on. One decision-maker might believe that they're trying to find a long-term, sustainable, extensible, comprehensive solution to the problem, and another might believe they're looking for a quick-fix patch which will stem the bleeding for a short time until the problem is ameliorated by other means. In this situation, they will naturally disagree about the properties to prioritize.

How to address them

T_subbed_K - clarify definitions, reduce to illustrative examples

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1. They are, in no particular order: Ashby's, Sturgeon's, Brandolini's, Hyrum's, Goodhart's, Hoftstadter's, and Conway's, along with the differently-named Chesterton's. And, while writing this article, I came across this excellent page which collects many of the best. ↩︎

2. which - I'm increasingly realizing as I get older and more cynical realistic - was a mistake. Own the information that you create, in such a way that it is portable when you are no longer convenient to the organization providing you with hosting - and recognize that "an index of useful information" is itself useful information! ↩︎

3. for similar reasons, if I'm eating at a new restaurant and they have a dish named after the establishment, that's usually my default first choice - though I might there be being a sucker for a subtle priming technique... ↩︎

4. In my original formulation of this observation, it applied to technical decision-making and system designs. However, I believe it applies to any decision of the form "What should we do in order to achieve some goal?" ↩︎