I’m constantly in situations where I’m working with another person to try to make some decision.  This could be figuring out where to go out to eat with my wife, or which vendor to go with for a major purchase at work.  Either which way, when there are multiple people involved in the decision, it’s easy to find yourself at an impasse where everyone has a different preference.

One of the tricks I’ve learned for making these situations easier is to routinely give an indication of how strongly I feel about any particular option.  Of course, that can range from absolute certainty that something is a terrible idea to a positive and unshakable conviction that it’s the best thing ever.  So, when talking about how I feel about a certain option, I try to use language which gives a clear indication of where I am on the scale.  For example:

• I’m vehemently opposed to __________.
• I completely disagree with __________.
• I don’t think __________ is right.
• I’d prefer not to __________.
• I’m not convinced that __________ is a good idea.
• I’m not convinced that __________ is the best option.
• I don’t really have a preference about __________.
• I’m slightly inclined toward __________.
• I think __________ is the best option on the table.
• I think __________ is a good plan.
• I really like the idea of doing __________.
• I’m super excited about going with __________!
• I think __________ is the perfect choice!

As you can tell, these are arranged to scale from strong disagreement to strong agreement.  And, of course, this is barely more than a starting point for the kind of language you can use to place yourself on the scale.  While there are certainly a whole lot of other excellent options, there are a few things these particular ones all have in common:

1. They express my own opinion of the idea without judging the person who suggested the idea by starting with “I…”.  This makes it clear that I’m only expressing my own opinion: not passing judgement on someone else.
2. They provide a wide range of shading on how much you like or don’t like the idea: not merely whether you’re in agreement or not.

These are both incredibly important when trying to come to a decision with other people.  The first one attempts to ensure that the conversation says friendly.  It’s much harder to come to a win-win decision with another person when you’ve managed to get them pissed off at you.  The second allows you to each gauge whether there’s a large disparity in passion.  If one person is strongly in favor of an idea, while another person is mildly against it, the best course of action may well be to just go with it (so long as the decision is sufficiently reversible).  If one person is violently opposed, when the other person is so-so… it’s almost certainly best to give it a pass.

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I first thought of using this technique when I was in a start-up with just two other people.  It was incredibly helpful in unravelling decisions where we didn’t have anywhere near enough data for any of us to really convince the others objectively.  In those cases, it was often just each of us with our own intuition about how a certain course would turn out, and this tool made it a lot easier for us to express how strongly that “gut” feeling was.

Since then, I’ve used it quite a bit on software engineering teams when trying to figure out exactly how best to build various features or solve certain technical challenges.  Again, these were often cases where clear, objective answers were hard to come by (e.g., what would users think about X change to a feature?).  Using this technique allowed each person to weigh their own ideas against the others in a productive way.