What if your proof isn't enough for them?

Let's see if this sounds familiar. We've got two people looking at their monthly budget. One says, "It's fine, we've covered everything for the month." The other one says, "Mm, that's not fine because there's nothing left over. If anything unexpected happens, we're gonna be in trouble." What may also be familiar is how that can sometimes escalate into a bit more of a disagreement. And here's the thing, you could hand each of them every spreadsheet in the world and document very clearly where they are or are not okay, and it still may not move them both to the same position. Why? Because as we've talked about before, some arguments are not actually about the evidence. And in this case, the argument is actually about which evidence counts and for what. This kind of deeper, or at least more hidden disagreement, is one of the trickiest ones to look for, but thankfully not one of the trickiest ones to solve. And it's part of a bit of a series I've done on this. Around what happens when everything about your idea or your case or your argument is right and the other person still doesn't agree. One of those is whether or not something is even real. Sometimes it's about what people value. This time, as we saw in the example, people agree it's real, but they're still stuck. Why? Because they don't agree on how they know whether or not they're okay or not okay. There's a name for this kind of description of the nature of the position of where you're standing when you take your perspective on something, your positionality. This layer is called epistemology. As usual, it's not on the quiz, but epistemology, fancy word, basically just means your position on how we know that we know, or how we know what we know. You don't have to remember the word, just remember that it's another version of one of these hidden disagreements that's really important to surface before for an argument or a real disagreement suddenly scales. Similar to those other disagreements, the solution isn't more proof, more evidence. Again, epistemology is all about agreeing out loud on what evidence would count, on what evidence you would agree on, and how far it has to hold. In other words, what we're looking for is a standard that both people agree on for that evidence. But a standard lets two people reach the same conclusion without having to take each other's word for it. And note, that isn't the evidence, it's the standard for the evidence. Without that shared standard of what evidence counts, your proof, my proof, his proof, her proof, their proof may never agree. Imagine a founder who says, customers love this new product. I've talked to 10 of them and they all agree it's Fabulous. And the colleague says, hopefully out loud, maybe under their breath, listen, I agree that talking to customers is a good reflection of demand, but who are those 10 customers? Were those 10 customers that you already had a relationship with? If so, that may not be an accurate reflection of demand. So even when people agree on the kind of evidence that counts, customer testimonials, customer voice, they can still be stuck. Because one of them is claiming that those results hold everywhere, and the other will only say it holds here and only so far. Same standard, different reach. Now, I would love to tell you that having a shared standard is enough, and because I've just set it up that way, you already know it's not. That's why in addition to the shared standard, we have to be really specific about the conditions of that standard, and therefore how far that particular standard holds, under what conditions, when, where, how, etc. But that means we don't have to say, "This is how things are everywhere. This is how we know at all times." And honestly, there's relief in that. So put it all together, and what it means is that if we really want to get somewhere with someone who sees the world differently, particularly about not only what's knowable but how we will even know what that is, In other words, in order for a couple from the beginning to agree that they are fine, they have to agree on what fine is in particular context, under the conditions, and for how long that particular set of evidence would last. So how do you do that? Well, the first piece is to state out loud what evidence would convince you. One partner said, hey, fine for me is all the bills are paid on time. The other one said, fine for me is that we're able to accommodate some level of unexpected expenses. This requires that you figure out what that standard is, because whether you realize it consciously or not, you do have a standard for what is or is not valid. This step is so critical because most disagreements about evidence are really disagreements about standards that are going unspoken. The second step is to pick one standard together. And more often than not, that's going to be a different standard than either party walked in with. This isn't about winning or losing. It's about finding together the thing that works. Again, it does not have to be agreement on that category of evidence or that kind of standard across everything everywhere. Nope. It just has to work for this particular situation and this particular outcome embedded in that. But I wanted to separate it out is the third step, which is to say how far that reaches. That's the formalization of putting the box around— we're going to agree on this standard as long as these conditions are present. That's what allows you to say we're agreeing on this here for now, not on this everywhere forever, which is kind of hard to get anyone to agree to. The last step is, like most things with this process, check the assumption. Don't just assume that everybody agrees with it. Make sure everybody does. And in doing that, invite people to disagree. You can say, how comfortable with that are you? Is there any part of that that still doesn't feel right to you? By actually pursuing those opportunities where to give permission to surface what doesn't work for someone is the only way to get it out on the table early rather than let it wait and fester, get bigger, etc. Now you might be thinking one of two things. Number one, oh, this is just about reaching consensus. No, it's not. The other thing you might be thinking is, uh, some people are just too far apart. There's no way to reconcile their two views of the world, so we shouldn't even try. That's one perspective. I, however, believe that a standard with a stated reach answers, or at least accommodates, both positions. Agreeing what would count, what would make something knowable as valid or not, as successful or not. It's agreeing on how we'll check and how we will agree for this moment that we have been successful in whatever it is that we're trying to do together. You can almost always find one narrow claim that will work for both parties. And besides, total agreement again was never the bar. Enough to move forward and keep exploring is. And again, I'm not saying this is the correct epistemology. I just told you what would convince me. And how far I'd allow that to go. That's it. So looking back at where we started, we don't break out of this what's knowable about reality gap by out-proving somebody else or by forcibly moving them to our point of view. It's about finding that place wherever it might be where our point of views overlap, where you agree on what would count as knowing, what would count as us being able to know whether or not this thing has happened or this state exists Once you have that, then you can build from there. As I've alluded to, this is the second big area where these hidden gaps that sit below evidence can show up, and they can stack. So that first gap is on what's even real in the first place. That's ontology. It describes what we even think is there, what's underneath everything else. Sitting on top of that belief about reality is how we know it, how we can prove it. To ourselves or to other people. There's even one more above that, and that one can be the most difficult to spot and to solve because it's about what we value amongst what's knowable. Let's say you've created a scoped definition of what's real. You agree on how you'll know, either because you already do or because you have found that scoped definition of reality for this particular case. Even if you share that ontology and epistemology, you share definitions, even scoped unbounded of reality and how you'll know, you can still disagree on whether or not it even matters. That's value and something that philosophers call axiology. But until we get there, here's what I want you to think about. Think about an argument or an idea where you're stuck right now between you and the world, you and somebody else, you and a team, whatever it might be. And ask yourself, are you really disagreeing about the evidence, or are you disagreeing about what would settle the question in the first place? As always, comment right back. Let me know. Until next time.