Two aggressive disputants crossing swords in a typical business meeting? A dysfunctional couple on the road to a messy split?
Well, no. Actually, the two verbal combatants described above were none other than Wilbur and Orville Wright.
As James Tobin describes them in his book To Conquer the Air, the Wright Brothers did not always (or even typically) engage in calm, collegial discussions in their collaborative efforts that led to the first manned flying machine. “To outsiders,” writes Tobin, “the brothers’ way of thinking looked less like cooperation than combustion.” Tobin goes on to observe:
“From the fracas, ideas emerged. They enjoyed the fight. But the fight was also a method, and the tougher the fight, the better the results. Will [Wilbur] once analyzed it for a friend:
“’No truth is without some mixture of error, and no error is so false but that it possesses some element of truth. If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it, and in accepting the arguments of the other man he is sure to get some error with it. Honest argument is merely a process of mutually picking the beams and motes out of each others eyes so both can see clearly. Men become wise just as they become rich, more by what they save than by what they receive. After I get hold of a truth, I hate to lose it again, and I like to sift all the truth out before I give up an error.”
As I read that, I immediately was struck by an apparently contradictory “truth’ of my own that I had asserted in an earlier blog article. The proposition I put forth can be summed up in the article's title: Want to Defeat the Truth? Then Start Arguing!
Well, like Wilbur, I also prefer to sift all the truth out of an assertion before I give up any erroneous elements it contains. And I would immediately observe that Wilbur’s statement actually echoes a concept I’ve also described: The And Stance.
The And Stance is an attitude between conflicting parties that, instead of saying “I’m right and you’re wrong,” puts forth the proposition that “I’m right AND you’re right” – that is, each of us has a piece of the truth in our possession. The process of searching for truth then involves “sifting” through the contents of our respective positions and agreeing on the truths we can jointly adopt.
Clearly, Wilbur’s statement recognizes that the process of argument doesn’t consist of beating the other party into submission with the brilliance of our points. Instead, argument – honest argument, as he called it – is a mutual process of testing each party’s ideas and having each party be willing to modify (or even give up) those that don’t hold water. In this way, the “honest arguer” is like the champion athlete who simultaneously convinces himself of his strength to prepare him for competition while also being open to the gaps in his game so he can improve. As I wrote in my Want to Defeat the Truth? article:
The typical arguer commonly fails to [recognize] that he could actually be wrong. By ignoring the holes in his own position, an arguer becomes like the athlete who convinces himself of his indomitability but overlooks the often glaring evidence that tells him where he's falling short. When both verbal combatants fail to acknowledge their own fallibility, the typical argument becomes … "less about seeking the truth than about overcoming opposing views" - or, to use another combat analogy, an attempt to batter the other with one's position until he submits. Whichever party "wins" such a battle, the truth is usually the real loser.
Obviously, the Wright Brothers’ methods for seeking the truth were successful – because they didn’t get married to positions that they held onto until the bitter end. As proof, Tobin cites this anecdote related by the Wrights’ niece:
One of them would make a statement about something very important, and then there would be a long pause. Then the other would say, ‘That’s not so.’ ‘Tis too.’ ‘T’isn’t either.’” And “at the end … Wilbur would say, ‘Well, I think you were right. You certainly were right about that.’ And [Orville] would say, ‘No, I think you were right.’”
When’s the last time you participated in a business meeting where the “combatants” ended up saying something like that?
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