To Understand is to Not Accept

My Manager and I were at our client’s office to discuss the criteria to accept the software-application built for them. This is known as acceptance-criteria in software industry. And is one of those must-have conversations, that can also be quite difficult.

The discussion became heated because neither of us could agree on the criteria. Then It became so bad that my manager and the client kept interrupting each other often.

Needless to say, we did not get an opportunity to express our views, as the customer was not willing to listen. We ended the discussion where we started, without making any progress.

After the discussion I enquired about the incident to my manager. He mentioned that he didn’t agree with the customers’ view and gave it as the reason to interrupt the conversation.

From my manager’s view point, what he did may have been right. But then, we did not make any headway in the discussion. And as managers we have to make things happen/ move things forward.

Now this is a scenario that we face many times in our work and personal life . We come across opposing views in our interactions with our spouse, family members, friends, and colleagues at work.

Some of these view points will be completely disagreeable to us. We may even have a genuine reason for the same.

But it is our ability to handle scenarios / view points that are opposite to what we hold , that determine how we mature into good human beings, trustworthy individuals and leaders of people.

The secret (it is no secret at all) is to remind ourselves that ‘understanding is not the same as accepting’.

To further elaborate, because to understand something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we have to agree to what is said. If this is still confusing, let us roll back a bit and go to our school days.

In our science classes, we are taught various theories about the planetary system and one of them is the geocentric theory. It says that the earth is the centre of the universe and all planets and sun travel around it. Now we all know it is wrong and we also know the fact.

When there is a question asked about this theory in exam, will we say that we won’t respond as we don’t accept the theory? We don’t do that. We understand the theory, though we don’t accept it.

We answer the question knowing very well that the idea is very wrong. All that we need to do is to bring the same thought process to our life.

Ok, conversations at home or at work place are not the same as science lessons at school. A person can always think that listening to what is being said may be misunderstood as accepting the point. There is also an element of truth in this.

People typically voice their disagreement by refusing to listen or by not continuing the conversation. And it leads to unpleasant situations and stress , that too, when you have to work with the person holding the opposing view to achieve a common goal.

We make our stand clear, If we send across the message that we only try to understand what is being said and may or may not accept the view.

We meet this goal by using the sentence “I am trying to understand what you say though I may not agree with you now”. Or re-phrase what they said in our own words, enquire if we got it right and add that we are trying to understand the point though we may not agree to it.

The ‘now’ part is important because decisions are time bound and have to be taken .

Used judiciously, this will win us lot of trust and respect from our colleagues and customers.

Try this for sometime in conversations when we listen to opposing views, which may not be agreeable to us for whatever reasons.

I am sure we will definitely see a sea change in our attitude and how we conduct ourselves in conversations. I see quite a few advantages of this.

• We won’t interrupt conversations where the view is not acceptable to us
• We become better listeners
• This helps us to win the trust and confidence of people whom we move with (because we listen better)
• Because we listen better, there is a higher probability of making others agree to our view/idea
• Even if we can’t convince others, we end up getting a different perspective on the point
• And finally, for all we know (or don’t know), the opposing view that we don’t like may be the right one or the better one. So we may also end up changing our position and accepting the view/idea.

But no problem, we accepted something after we understood. :-)

Note: This is based on a real-life incident. we came back the next day and reached an agreement with the client.