What to do
Making your own claims sortable
Say the kind in the same breath as the claim. Three sentence patterns, and what each one does to the reply you get.
Claims this part is about, and what each was answered with
Showing up for each other is part of what a team is
Value→A statement of what mattersAnswered in its own kind, which is why it went somewhere
People should be free to choose where they live
Value→A principleNew starters take longer to become productive remotely
Empirical→Evidencethree claims · one empirical and two value · every one of them was answered in its own kind
The three claims on this record that were answered in their own kind.
Everything on this site is easier to apply to other people. The one thing entirely within your control is how you state your own claims, and stating the kind along with the claim changes the reply you get.
The three patterns
Empirical, with the measurement attached.
I think new people learn faster near others, and the thing that would show it is time to first independent delivery by cohort. We have that.
The measurement in the same breath does two things: it commits you to a result, and it makes the claim much harder to answer with a principle, because you have already named what would count.
Value, declared as one.
This is a view rather than a finding: I think a job should not require owning a car.
Six words of preface and the study never arrives. It also removes the most common failure mode for a value claim, which is being argued at with evidence and then having to defend a position you never took.
Cost, with the figure and no request.
There is a cost here that falls on me: ninety minutes each way, so seven and a half hours a week. I am not asking for anything; I think it belongs in the room.
Covered in more detail elsewhere on this site. The operative clause is the last one.
What each pattern does to the reply
| You say | They tend to reply with |
|---|---|
| A claim plus its measurement | A question about the measurement |
| A value declared as a value | Their own value |
| A figure with no request | Another figure, or "I had not thought of that" |
This is the most reliable effect in the whole method and it does not depend on the other person knowing anything about it. People match the register they are handed.
The cost of doing this
Real, and worth naming.
Declaring a value as a value gives up the authority of the empirical register. "This is a view rather than a finding" is a weaker opening than "offices are more productive", in the short run, in a room that rewards confidence.
What you get back is that the claim cannot be refuted, because you have not claimed anything refutable, and it stays on the table through the whole discussion. The empirical-sounding version gets knocked over in week three and takes your actual point with it.
The one to do first
If you adopt only one: name the measurement when you make an empirical claim.
It is the least costly of the three — it sounds like rigour rather than retreat — and it has the largest effect on the discussion, because a claim with a named measurement is the only kind that can actually be settled. On this record, one claim was stated that way and it is the one claim out of twenty-four that got answered.
What it feels like to do this
Worth describing honestly, because the first few attempts are uncomfortable in a specific way.
Saying "this is a view rather than a finding" feels like handing somebody a weapon. You have pre-emptively conceded the thing they were going to attack, and for a moment the room is quiet in a way that reads as having lost ground.
What happens next is usually the opposite. Nobody attacks a declared value, because attacking it has no obvious form — there is no refutation available, and dismissing it looks bad. The claim sits there for the rest of the discussion, undisturbed, which is more than can be said for anything you dressed as evidence.
It takes three or four occasions before this stops feeling like a risk.
The one place not to do it
Avoid declaring a value as a value in writing, for readers who were not present, unless the rest of the document has been sorted the same way.
In isolation, in writing, "this is a view rather than a finding" reads as a weak claim marked weak by its author. It works in conversation because the register carries it, and it works in a document only when the document has established that everything in it is sorted the same way.
That is the argument for sorting the proposal document rather than individual sentences, and it is covered elsewhere on this site.