I’ve spent forty-one years in courtrooms, and I’ve watched people sit through the same trial, hear the same witnesses, review the same evidence, and leave with entirely different understandings of what happened. Sometimes the disagreement comes down to credibility. One person believes a witness, and another doesn’t. Other times, the difference is more interesting. Two people believe the same testimony but weigh what they heard entirely differently.
That creates a problem for a trial lawyer. You spend months preparing a case, working through testimony, documents, expert opinions, and legal arguments. You believe you understand what the evidence establishes. Then you put the case in front of twelve people whose life experiences have taught them to notice things you might never have considered important.
I learned early in my career that listening to someone describe an event and understanding how they reached their conclusion are two different exercises. If you spend all your time preparing answers without understanding what the other person sees, you’ll have a difficult day in court.
The same problem follows people into boardrooms, executive meetings, and organizations where experienced professionals disagree about what ought to happen next.
The story people heard
Years ago, after finishing a burglary trial, I was having lunch with the defense attorney at a diner. We had spent several days arguing opposing positions before a jury, questioning witnesses, and challenging one another’s evidence. In court, we were adversaries. Outside the courtroom, we were colleagues who respected one another.
As we ate, a woman approached our table. She had served on the jury, and she seemed genuinely confused to find us sitting together.
“Why are you two eating together?” she asked.
We laughed, but she wasn’t joking.
She explained that the jury had spent only a few minutes discussing the evidence. They had spent nearly an hour debating how much the two lawyers hated each other.
Think about what happened. We were trying a burglary case, and the jury had become preoccupied with a relationship between two lawyers that existed largely in their own interpretation of what they had witnessed.
They had observed real arguments. They heard objections, watched us challenge testimony, and saw each of us press our position. None of those observations were necessarily wrong. Their conclusion about our personal relationship was another matter.
I remember that conversation because it was an extraordinary reminder of how easily people build an explanation around incomplete information. The jurors weren’t lying about what they saw. They had assigned meaning to it without knowing the relationship behind it.
What still interests me is how much time they spent discussing something neither lawyer intended to put on trial.
What did you actually see?
In the courtroom, one of an attorney’s first jobs is to separate observation from interpretation.
A witness tells me a driver was speeding. I want to know what the witness actually observed. Did they look at the speedometer? Of course not. They might have seen a vehicle traveling faster than other cars. Perhaps they heard an engine accelerating or watched the driver approach an intersection without slowing down.
Those details matter. They help establish whether the conclusion is reasonable and whether something else might explain the observation.
I also want to know where the witness was standing, how long they observed the vehicle, and what else was happening at the time. An estimate based on a brief glimpse across a busy intersection carries less weight than an observation made over several seconds with an unobstructed view.
The point of questioning isn’t always to prove the witness wrong. Sometimes careful examination confirms what the witness said. Other times, you learn that the witness saw something accurately but interpreted it incorrectly.
I’ve examined expert witnesses who understand their disciplines far better than I ever will. When a physician explains a medical finding or an engineer explains a structural problem, I respect their expertise. I also need to understand the assumptions supporting the opinion and the conditions under which their conclusion remains valid.
An expert opinion is often conditional. Change an underlying fact, and the answer might change. If I don’t understand those conditions, I don’t fully understand the opinion.
That habit has served me well outside the courtroom, particularly when dealing with executives who are confident in their recommendations.
When professionals disagree
During my years working in government, I sat through meetings where people appeared to be discussing the same problem. After twenty minutes, I sometimes realized they were having entirely different conversations.
The attorney was concerned with whether a proposed action was legally authorized. The financial people wanted to know what it would cost. Operations was concerned about the people and resources required to carry it out. Each was answering a question within their area of responsibility.
The meeting became difficult because we tended to treat those answers as competing conclusions about the same issue.
I could understand why each person believed their concern deserved priority. The legal answer might establish whether an option was available. The financial answer might determine whether it was affordable. Operations might explain why an otherwise reasonable plan would fail once people tried to implement it.
The disagreement became more useful when we stopped asking everyone to defend a recommendation and began examining what their recommendations depended upon.
Suppose an association board is considering a new member service. The financial report suggests the organization has enough money to support it. The membership team believes members will welcome the program. The executive responsible for implementation is concerned about the staffing required.
It’s tempting to describe this as a disagreement between finance, member services, and operations. But there might be no disagreement about the facts at all. The people involved are answering different questions, and leadership needs the answers to all of them.
Perhaps the program is affordable only if the projected enrollment materializes. Perhaps the membership team is relying on interest expressed by a relatively small group. Perhaps operations has sufficient staff to launch the service but not to maintain it.
Those aren’t interchangeable concerns. Each affects the decision differently.
Before voting, the board needs to understand the conditions beneath the recommendations. What must be true for the program to succeed? Which assumptions have been tested? What happens if enrollment is lower than expected, or the service requires more staff time than anticipated?
The answers might support the original proposal. They might require a revision. They might reveal a reason to reject it. At least the decision will rest on an examination of the relevant issues rather than the relative persuasiveness of the people presenting them.
Disagreement deserves examination
In Hold the Horizon™, I describe a tool called Difference as Data. The idea is straightforward. When capable people disagree, examine the difference before trying to eliminate it.
I learned to approach disagreements this way because lawyers have to understand competing explanations. If an opposing witness reaches a different conclusion, simply repeating my position accomplishes little. I need to know how the witness arrived at theirs.
Sometimes a disagreement reveals a missing fact. Sometimes it exposes different priorities. Occasionally, the people involved are using the same words to describe different things.
Sometimes someone is simply wrong. I’ve heard plenty of testimony that didn’t withstand examination, and I’ve encountered recommendations built on assumptions that turned out to be mistaken.
Listening carefully doesn’t mean every opinion deserves equal weight. It means examining an opinion’s basis before deciding how much weight to give it.
A few questions I find especially useful.
First, what do you know firsthand? This helps separate direct knowledge from information received through someone else.
Second, what are you assuming? Sometimes people haven’t consciously separated what they know from what they believe must be true.
Third, what would cause you to change your opinion? I like this question because it shows whether the person has examined the limits of their conclusion.
A fourth question deserves attention when several professionals are involved: Are we even trying to answer the same question?
That last one has saved me a considerable amount of time.
The problem with deciding too early
I’ve watched young lawyers become so committed to their theory of a case that they stop hearing information that doesn’t fit. The same thing happens to experienced lawyers, although they’re often better at hiding it.
Once you settle on an explanation, it’s easy to spend the rest of your time organizing facts to support it. Contrary evidence becomes an inconvenience. Questions become challenges. A competing interpretation starts to feel like an attack on your judgment.
Executives face the same temptation.
A CEO hears a convincing recommendation and begins moving toward a decision. Someone raises a concern, and the conversation shifts toward defending the proposal rather than examining the concern. Everyone senses that leadership has already decided, so the discussion becomes shorter and safer.
The meeting ends. The disagreement hasn’t been examined. It has simply stopped being discussed.
I’ve served on enough boards to appreciate the pressure to move things along. Nobody wants to spend another hour discussing a matter that appears settled. But a board should know whether it has resolved the important questions or merely reached the point where nobody wants to raise another one.
That difference affects what happens after the meeting.
A person who believes an important concern was never examined might comply with the decision without trusting the reasoning behind it. Another person might leave believing the board approved something different from what others understood. Management inherits the task of interpreting a decision that appeared clear only because the discussion ended.
A few more minutes spent examining the disagreement might prevent considerable trouble later.
Listening before deciding
The Generalist’s Advantage™ has always reflected my belief that experience in one discipline changes how you approach another. Engineering taught me to examine how a system’s parts work together. Law taught me to examine evidence, assumptions, and competing explanations. Those disciplines still shape how I approach executive decisions.
When I encounter a disagreement today, I try to understand what each person sees before deciding what I think of their conclusion. That doesn’t mean withholding judgment indefinitely. Some decisions need to be made quickly, and some disagreements aren’t worth further discussion.
But when the matter is important and experienced people reach different conclusions, I want to understand why.
The Integration Gap™ is the distance between what your people already know and what actually reaches the decision. Sometimes the missing information is sitting in a report nobody read. Sometimes a person who wasn’t invited into the discussion holds it. And sometimes it is contained in a disagreement that leadership ended before anyone bothered to examine it.
I keep coming back to that jury foreman at the diner. The jury had listened to days of testimony and spent an hour debating a relationship it didn’t understand. Their observations were real. The story they built around them was mistaken.
As a lawyer, I learned to distinguish between the two.
As a leader, I have learned not to stop asking those questions when I leave the courtroom.
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