Quotes About Discussion

When a group of intelligent people come together to talk about issues that matter, it is both natural and productive for disagreement to occur. Resolving those issues is what makes a meeting productive, engaging, even fun.

This failure to build trust is damaging because it sets the tone for the second dysfunction: fear of conflict. Teams that lack trust are incapable of engaging in unfiltered and passionate debate of ideas. Instead, they resort to veiled discussions and guarded comments.

Meetings are ineffective because they lack contextual structure. Too many organizations have only one kind of regular meeting, often called a staff meeting. Either once a week or twice a month, people get together for two or three hours of randomly focused discussion about everything from strategy to tactics, from administrivia to culture. Because there is no clarity around what topics are appropriate, there is no clear context for the various discussions that take place.

decisions never seemed to get made; discussion were slow and uninteresting, with few real exchanges; and everyone seemed to be desperately waiting for each meeting to end.

Another challenge in making strategic meetings work is the failure to do research and preparation ahead of time. The quality of a strategic discussion, and the decision that results from it, are improved greatly by a little preliminary work. This eliminates the all-too-common reliance on anecdotal decision making. The key to ensuring that preparation occurs is to let team members know as far in advance as possible what issues will be discussed during the Monthly or Ad Hoc Strategic.

To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict. By doing so, they'll keep people engaged, which leads to more passionate discussions, and ultimately, to better decisions.

There is relatively little emphasis on legal issues and quantitative evaluations, which often distract employees from the critical messages their managers are trying to communicate. What is more, these systems are customized to provoke meaningful discussion between managers and employees about relevant issues that they are dealing with on a daily basis.

Now, the wrong way to determine an organization's values is to survey the employee population. This may seem to be a useful way to test a hypothesis, but it is not a replacement for the introspection and discussion of an executive team. More important, it can lead to the adoption of a value set that executives are not willing to support.

You have a passionate, unfiltered, messy, provocative discussion that ends when the leader of the team decides all the information has been aired. At that point, if no one has made a compelling enough argument for making a decision, the leader breaks the tie.

Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That's why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion.

Let me assure you that from now on, every staff meeting we have will be loaded with conflict. And they won't be boring. And if there is nothing worth debating, then we won't have a meeting." The

3. How do you talk about and use the answers to these questions?

Tackling Old Testament ethics is a challenge. Besides a lot of territory to cover, the ancient Near East seems so strange and even otherworldly! We need a good bit of background discussion to help make better sense of this world and of certain Old Testament texts.

Meanwhile, el taller, two hours in the morning, a discussion over lunch, always an outing and often dinner: full days with two dozen students who had become my friends. I had not taught in a classroom for more than forty years, and rediscovered the pleasure of the back-and-forth with intelligent, engaged students. I was eager to meet them each day, I enjoyed their company, and I was grateful for their companionship.

Love doesn't need to be discussed; it has its own voice and speaks for itself.

men love to explain things, and they have opinions on everything.

Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.

Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.

A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question." Charles Darwin

If I had an argument with a player we would sit down for twenty minutes, talk about it and then decide I was right!

That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting.

Argument is conclusive, but it does not remove doubt.

There are three sides to every argument. Yours. The other guy's. And the right side.

The best argument is that which seems merely an explanation.