What do you do when you can't agree on what matters?
"Positionality": Agree on what comes first, and what it costs.
The core case of this post, for the framework-curious or attention-guarded:
Establishing common ground about what matters requires a priority with a stated cost. That’s because (1) a priority lets two people make the same choice without having the same values and (2) value is what you’re willing to give up for something.
They want the same things and still can’t agree
If you’ve ever gone house- or apartment-hunting with a friend or roommate, you’ve probably been practicing what’s known as axiology. Now, don’t get scared! Axi- means value, -ology means the study of, so axiology is really just the study of what we value.
When you sat down and made your list—“We want this many bedrooms,” “We want this kind of kitchen,” “We want outdoor space,” or “a place to entertain,” or “a bathroom for each of us”—you were talking through what was important to you, what was valuable to you, and weighing all of it against things like location, cost, and your relationship to each other.
Those conversations are rarely trouble-free. Not only are you dealing with what trade-offs matter to you, individually (“I only want to spend this much a month, but I really want my own bathroom, which might mean I have to consider a whole different neighborhood than the one I’d been picturing”), but also the tradeoffs the other person is making, and then the tradeoffs you then need to make with each other.
As you’ve probably gathered, this applies far beyond apartment hunting. It can apply to a negotiation, or a new idea, or a political position, or...well, you get the idea. It can apply to all sorts of things, which is why it’s important to know what’s causing it, and what to do about it.
The position, and the priorities underneath it
Let’s imagine that two friends have narrowed their choice to two apartments—one downtown, one by the park—that are otherwise largely similar. One person says, “Let’s go for the one downtown!” And the other one goes, “No, I want the one by the park!” And now they’re stuck on “This is my position,” literally.
“Downtown!”
“No, park!”
By arguing for their preferred apartments, each of them is defending their position on which apartment they think is “better,” based on their own individual view of what “better” means in this situation. There have been a lot of books written on how often we argue positions—and just as much research on how badly that tends to go.
Thankfully, there are a lot of ways to get past position-based arguments. Because it ties right into what people value, the approach I’ve found to be the most practical is to look past the positions to the priorities those positions represent.
The friend who wants the downtown apartment has reasons for their position that go beyond the downtown location: those aspects of being or living downtown that they find valuable. It might be that living downtown is a status signal to them. Or it means they can walk more, and that matters to them because being active matters to them. The person who wants the park apartment has reasons for their preference, too. They might want access to nature, or the view, or they think a park location will be quieter.
Those deeper reasons represent the priorities underneath each person’s position. Importantly, hiding among those priorities could be one both friends actually share, and a shared priority lets two people make the same choice, regardless of their broader set of values.
A shared priority lets two people make the same choice, regardless of their broader set of values.
A shared priority isn’t enough
Finding those underlying priorities and where they overlap is a key step to overcoming an impasse. Unfortunately, a shared priority rarely removes the impasse entirely.
Let’s go back to our two friends. Say that, by surfacing the underlying priorities hiding inside their positions of “park” versus “downtown,” they realize that both friends value their chosen apartment’s location because it gives them a way to walk regularly. In other words, “walkability” is a priority they both share.
Do you see how that doesn’t necessarily “unstick” them? The downtown apartment has walkability...but so does the park one. While the friends found something they both value, they’ll likely go back to saying that one apartment’s version of walkability is “better” than the other one’s—unless, that is, we can give the two friends a way to turn their stated values into terms that can actually be measured and compared.
How? Well, if we can give them a way to assign actual value to their values, by tying them to costs, they’d be fulfilling the very definition of value: what you’re willing to give up to have or keep something else.
The very definition of value: what you’re willing to give up to have or keep something else.
When two truths fight, only one wins
In situations like an apartment hunt with a budget attached, we can talk in terms of literal cost. For example, using their agreed-upon budget as a “neutral” term, the two friends realize that the park apartment’s version of walkability fits in that budget, but the downtown apartment’s version doesn’t.
The downtown fan can now say, “Okay, I see. With the park apartment, I still get walkability (which is important to me), and I can keep the other thing I value, which is sticking to our budget.”
Note that these “stated costs” are not always about money. A stated cost is what trade you’d be willing to accept to get the priority you care about. For example, collective well-being often comes at the cost of individual autonomy (think about seatbelt laws or smoking in public).
That means that sometimes the cost is reprioritizing some of your own priorities. As I say in my book, Say What They Can’t Unhear, “When two truths fight, only one wins.” So in the face of two competing priorities—walkability and budget, as represented by a specific location—the downtown person now has to decide which of those two priorities is actually more important. Either they say, “Hmm, I don’t actually care about the budget as much” (which might put the whole roommate discussion into play!), or they say, “Yeah, I thought walkability was driving my preference for the downtown location, but actually it’s this other thing.”
Yes, that might reopen the discussion of underlying priorities, but it reopens it back to finding a priority they both actually share. And if they don’t? Well, they’ve found out—before signing contracts and investing money—that they don’t have enough overlapping priorities to make living together work. (Personally, I’d rather know that sooner than later!)
Costs come in many forms
There are other kinds of costs that give weight to the value a particular priority holds. Sometimes it’s giving up something a little more personal, a little more ego-driven, like winning, or being certain, or being right in this particular situation. (And that, by the way, takes us right back to making sure we agree on the overall question we’re trying to answer in the first place.) Sometimes the cost of moving forward, of being practical or pragmatic, means softening an absolutist position on some other principle you hold, something that research suggests is a lot more common than we’d like to admit.
Again, this isn’t about saying “everything has a price,” at least not in economic terms. I personally don’t believe that all values can be reduced to monetary status. To paraphrase negotiation expert (and my friend!) Fotini Iconomopoulos, what would actually satisfy you and what you value? That’s different than creating a ranking with a financial price attached. It’s about agreeing what comes first when two priorities collide, and what you’re willing to give up in order to honor what you value most.
And remember, as with other forms of finding common ground—about what’s real, about how we’ll know—this priority with a stated cost only has to hold for this particular decision.
How you get there
So how do you find this cost-weighted priority?
Look under your own position and figure out the priorities it contains. What’s the grouping of things you consider important that are captured in the position you’re holding? Then choose one. (Fun fact: while the word “priority,” singular, is about six hundred years old, “priorities,” plural, only showed up 90 years ago. 🤯 For most of its life, there was just one priority. I’m voting for going back to that.) Yes, the other person needs to do the same thing. But, thanks to the nearly universal value of reciprocity, if you do it, someone else is more likely to do it too.
Look at the priorities that surface and find the overlaps. If there’s more than one, look for the one that carries the most collective value for both of you. If there’s none, keep looking, or change the goal.
Say what it costs each of you to hold to that priority—what you’re willing to give up. Are you willing to say, “Okay, I’ll take less of this thing, or more of that thing, in order to maintain this priority we both agree on”? If so, what is it? Make it explicit. Say it out loud. Write it down.
Finally, once you’ve stated the value-weighted priority, make sure you both have the same understanding. “This is what we agreed on, yes?” “Yes.” In other words, make agreement explicit, too. (That helps engage our tendency towards behavioral consistency—acting in ways we’ve explicitly committed to, and thus have attached in some way to our identity.)
By following this process, our two friends can stop arguing about downtown versus park, because what they care about most is walkability. They end up choosing the park apartment because, for one of them, it was worth staying within their budget, and for the other, it was worth the second bathroom (even if it meant not being downtown).
Isn’t this just win-win or compromise?
Is this fundamentally different from other approaches to negotiation? I have no idea. What I do know is that it’s about doing the work to figure out why a position makes sense to you first, so that you can make your view make sense to someone else, whether or not they ultimately agree.
Turning back to my go-to negotiations expert: Fotini Iconomopoulos says the best approaches to resolving a disagreement aren’t win-win, or win-lose, or anything competitive or combative at all. Rather, she’s found that the best outcomes, for all parties, come when the focus is on what would satisfy each person, on their terms. When each person can walk away and say, “I’m satisfied with what I’m getting from this, and with the choices I made to get there.” In other words, each person gets what’s important to them at a cost they are equally satisfied to pay.
What this approach is really asking is that you own the stance you hold. It’s not about making the other person adopt it, or even to agree on the same cost. One friend is not asking the other to say that a second bathroom is equally important to each of them. It’s about that friend saying, “Since I care about continuing to live with you, and we agree that we both care about walkability, I’m willing to give up the second bathroom.”
Now, you might say there are some things you’re not willing to put a price on. I’m going to push back on that a little, because “there’s nothing worth giving up this priority” isn’t an exception to this! It’s exactly what the other person needs to hear, because now they understand that this priority lives up to the definition.
The best part, in my view, is that a priority with a stated cost doesn’t just let you find common ground with someone who sees the world differently than you do, and give your idea a better chance to take hold. It also adds nuance to each of your positions. You come away understanding, more deeply, why you believe what you do, and why they believe what they do.
And that just might add a little more understanding, and a little more empathy, to every exchange you have going forward.
Putting the pin in positionality (for now)
This post is the last in a series about what to do when it feels like you did everything right in making something make sense to somebody else, and they’re still not on board. When that happens, there’s almost always something underneath the position, the disagreement, that isn’t being surfaced. There’s something in the nature of each person’s position (their positionality) that doesn’t match up. Put another way: you’re holding a position without examining the nature and the quality of it. And that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about this whole time.
You’re holding a position without examining the nature and quality of it.
There are three places these positionality gaps tend to open up, and they layer on top of each other. The good news: there are three solutions, too. The first big gap is whether something is even real, and the solution is drafting a scoped definition: agree on what one thing is, for this purpose, for now. The second gap has to do with how we’d know what’s real. The solution there is to set a standard with a stated reach: what standard are we going to hold, and under what conditions? The third gap, which is the one we talked about here, is about what actually matters to those involved. As we’ve just talked about, the answer is to find a shared priority with a stated cost.
So when you’ve done everything right, and somebody understands your position but just doesn’t agree with it, stop and figure out where the disagreement actually is. Is it about what’s there? About how you’d know? Or about what even matters?
Because no matter where it is, you don’t reach common ground by out-evidencing, out-proofing, out-I’m-righting the other person, or by saying they care about the wrong things. Those are sure paths to never getting agreement at all.
If the outcome you’re working toward is worth it for all of you, so is the work that will get you there.
Until next time,
Tamsen
Go Deeper
A few places to dig in.
If you want the origin of looking past positions to what’s underneath, read Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton, Getting to Yes (3rd ed., 2011). The classic case for negotiating interests rather than positions. I see my version, above, as sharpening the values layer of their approach.
If you want the research on the things people refuse to put a price on, read Philip Tetlock’s work on sacred values and taboo trade-offs (“Thinking the Unthinkable,” 2003; “The Psychology of the Unthinkable,” 2000). Why naming a non-negotiable is information the other person needs, not the end of the conversation.
If you want the negotiation approach that isn’t win-win or win-lose, read Fotini Iconomopoulos, Say Less, Get More (HarperCollins, 2021).
If you want where the “one priority” idea comes from, the Oxford English Dictionary traces priority to the 1300s, meaning precedence, with the “most important thing” sense (the one we pluralize) arriving only in the last century. Greg McKeown’s Essentialism (2014) is the plain-English version of the point.
If you want the oldest version of “value is what you’ll give up,” read Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book I, chapter 5, where the “real price” of anything is “the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”
If you want to know why saying something out loud or writing it down makes an agreement more likely to stick, read Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (1984; new and expanded ed., 2021). His commitment-and-consistency principle says that, once we state something explicitly, we act to stay consistent with it.