When facts are not wining argument, Relax!

In changing business landscape, professionals demographics disturbance and aggressive targets; business arguments exponentially increase. Not a surprise to expect potential conflicts as a result, yet the working environment atmosphere suffers the most. Apart from knowing that there is no absolute right or wrong in any business model, professionals knowledge facts are still the sole reference for driving business solutions. Nevertheless, its not always the case!

Given nowadays economics ecosystem, business challenges have been evolving towards less smooth operational models affecting business relationships between customers, employees, management, vendors, suppliers and even shareholders. The most common theme of interactions becomes more and more arguments, influenced by multiple types of pressure. Accordingly, put professionals in stressful situations triggering involved parties to rush into conflicting expectations with narrower window for compromises or creating common ground. In such case facts are being subject for wider interpretations moving away from being clear reference anymore; consequently less business solutions in place.

Most of professionals fall into the trap of relaying on facts only to win the argument. However, this approach make it worst due to the following:

a. Facts are being a victim of interpretations making argument more lengthy and less productive

b. Waste of energy in stating the obvious serving the purpose of having the argument in first place

c. Participate unintentionally to extend the argument beyond its initial topic resulting in lengthy, exhausting and valueless discussions

At the time I believe that facts are the sole source of truth, however, saving the value of facts becomes a responsibility on professionals more than ever. Luckily business environments across industries still have founder professionals whom not yet retired. Although they are going fewer in count, they are still the save guards bring greater value add to their industries factually.

Now its the time for factual professionals to step in critically to shift the mindset adopting new thinking process on dealing with arguments. I thought of naming this thinking process: Relax!

Relax is not meant to go easy, not meant to give up, not meant to do nothing and most importantly not meant to avoid arguments. On the contrarily; Relax is a state of mind enable professionals to have higher capacity to go into more arguments adopting different thinking process, driving argument outcomes to supplement business needs and serve the ground reality facts!

Relax state of mind associates higher degree of realizing the collective strength of IQ, EQ and LQ. Relax means relief your mind from negative thinking or energy consuming distractions, such as:

o Contributors in the argument use personalized attacks instead of business topics

o Judgmental comments, using gossips or poison the ears statements

o Parties in the argument acting dumb, telling lies or igniting frictions

o Beware of: “if you can’t convince, confuse”

o Beware of participants targeting to take the argument to a wider group, keep track of time and be carful of externalities

The above few example of provoking tools most likely taking arguments far far away from facts. Despite its not an easy job to have the right state of mind all the time to isolate its impact, Relax will help: 

? Enabling comprehensive learnings throughout variety of situations 

? Isolating noisy distractions quite naturally and timely

? Adopting your thinking process to mature faster in your mind, position you ahead of the argument

Upon maturing your mind to master Relax, its time to takeover full control of arguments; streamline the flow to facts orientation. Nevertheless, in many arguments it would be still early to switch back to facts directly. Those type of arguments that went too far involving more audiences across multiple groups should need extra steps to clear the air and bring everybody back together to articulate working business solution. Put the facts straight away on the table, wouldn’t be the best thing to start with. There are few questions to ask, regardless of the answers, in order to reach truly factual business solution. In essence, few basic questions would do, i.e. :

? What we are trying to achieve as a group?

? Do we really still need to continue this (business, project, investment, ..etc.)?

? How much can we spend doing this (time, cost, manpower, ..etc.)?

? Do we have decision makers involved or we are to postpone till engaging right people (experts, managers, owners, customers, ..etc.)?

? Do you know the ground reality facts or need sometime to understand the details?

Going through a structural discussion would isolate factors of argument for the sake of argument, and eventually lead to more factual results creating better business solutions. The hope on professionals on going factual adds extra responsibility and sometimes more stress. Hence, professionals need to Relax more!