What’s left to try when you’ve done everything right?

“Positionality”: Share the ground you stand on

Ever had that situation where you were sure you’d been crystal clear, not just about what your idea is, but about why it’s important? You’d supported it well. You were sure it was the right thing for this situation, for these people. And still, they just… didn’t get it.

You’d avoided the avoidable errors, the ones that make an idea ignorable. You made it relevant. You made it comprehensible. You made it defensible. And it still didn’t land.

So what’s left to try when you’ve done everything right but something’s still wrong? Simply this: look at the ground you’re standing on.

Different is only half the job

Here’s the issue I see over and over. However we’ve talked about our idea, however we’ve helped people make sense of it, the challenge often comes when we’ve focused as much or more on what’s different about our idea—on how it’s different from what people are doing now—than on what’s the same, or at least familiar.

Now, I get it. I can almost hear you saying saying: “Wait! My idea IS new. It IS different. If I don’t focus on what’s different, people aren’t going to understand!

Yes…and:

You can only reach people where they are, not where you wish they were.

When we focus so much on the gap between your idea and where someone is right now, we end up increasing the perceived risk of change. (And as I’ve said before: Change aversion is risk aversion.)

So is difference important? Absolutely. People have to see that what you’re saying isn’t the same as what they already do or how they already think. At the same time, it can’t be so different that it feels incomprehensible or indefensible to them.

Self-evident to whom?

So let’s say you do meet your audience where they are. You make your idea relevant. You talk about your idea as pieces and parts of what they already know, and they start to see that it’s different, but just the right amount of different: unfamiliar, but comprised of familiar parts.

And yet, something about the way you’re explaining still doesn’t work. Why not?

I believe the simple reason is this: Self-evident truths aren’t always evident, or true, to everybody.

What you take for reality is the view from where you stand.

Your view of reality—and thus what’s real, true, and self-evident—is literally unique to you. No one can possibly see the world exactly the way you do. Not only that, we also (and also literally!) cannot see the ground on which we’re standing.

That said, your audience can’t see their ground either. Yet, for both you and them, that ground is what supports what you do, why, and how (literally and metaphorically!).

Much like the soil affects the flavor of the grapes that turn into wine, your “ground”—what’s known as your positionality—together with your view, flavors everything you say or do, as well as every idea you consider valuable enough to transfer to someone else. Fun fact: winemakers have a word for that handed-down flavor of place: terroir, the character of the ground that shows up in what’s grown in it.

Which reality?

That word I just used, positionality, is very academic and a little ridiculous, I grant you. But it’s also useful. Positionality describes the nature and the attributes of the position you’re standing in—and the ground you’re standing on—when you come up with your ideas, and when you share them. It’s your terroir.

Those positions vary more than we assume. Whether we realize it or not, different people hold different beliefs about what reality even is. Some hold that there’s one real world, the same for all of us, and we only have to study and question hard enough to find it. Some hold reality is real, but that your reality and mine honestly differ. Some hold that there’s no shared reality at all, that whatever we call real is something each of us builds.

Each of those positions has a name (more on that in the coming weeks), and that’s where the idea of positionality comes from. Philosophers have spent millennia on it, sorting how we take different stances on what’s real, how we know, and what we value. They call those “flavors” of positionality ontology, epistemology, and axiology. (And don’t worry, those won’t be on the quiz. It took me a looooooong time to even start to make sense of what they are and how they’re different.)

Here’s the part that matters for sensegiving: those flavors layer, they stack. How you think you can know something depends on what you think is real to begin with. If you believe there’s one objective reality, then “knowing” means studying it harder. If you believe reality lives in each person’s mind, then knowing means getting at what’s happening in someone else’s.

Same word, doing different work, depending on the ground you started from.

This idea of identifying and stating up front what I believe about reality, how that affects what I believe we can know, and what I value turned out to be one of the most useful things I’ve learned in my doctoral program. It’s also useful to anyone who wants to make things make sense to other people.

So what matters is this:

• First, those positions exist, or at least I believe they do.

• Second, your position may or may not match the position of the people you’re talking to, and you usually can’t know which until you put something out there.

• Third, that gap, when it’s there, is exactly where a well-defended, comprehensible, relevant idea can still fail to land.

Work the ground, not the idea

Does it mean the end of your idea? Not by a long shot.

No, the gap is a signal to stop trying to convince, and start trying to understand. Better still, start working toward a mutual understanding about where each of you is actually standing.

Why? So you can back up, find where there’s common ground, and make your idea make sense there. If positionality is the terroir you’re handed (or have come to occupy), what comes next is your élevage: the craft of raising that idea into something that can travel, while still maintaining your own unique touch. Another fun fact: in blind tastings, expert wine tasters—sommeliers—can often identify which producer blended the wine (not just the grape), a mark of that élevage.

Here’s how you can do that with your own idea.

Start with your own ground

Step back or out a little and look at where you stand. Most of us never stop to ask whether other people might see reality differently, let alone what that means for us our ideas, and how transferable they are to others.

So ask yourself: “Now that I know someone else might see it another way, what do I believe?” Or at least, “What do I believe right now?”

Then own the phrasing. Don’t smuggle your position in as fact. Say it as yours:
“I believe that if we want X, then Y makes sense, and here are the things that are self-evident to me.”

Get curious about the ground they start from

If your idea still isn’t landing, that’s your cue to get curious, not louder. Look at the pieces of your core case: the outcome it delivers, the approach you’re taking, and the self-evident truths that justify that approach. Where do those align with this person, and where don’t they? Then start exploring the where and the why of the gaps.

You might hear someone say, “I don’t believe that everything is interconnected.” Maybe they don’t. That kind of belief, a primal belief, isn’t something that changes; you either hold it or you don’t. But good news: even running up against a primal belief isn’t a dead end.

Find the ground you share, and test it

When you suspect there’s a chasm you can’t cross like a primal belief, look for a smaller, nearer claim you can both stand on.

“Maybe you don’t think everything’s interconnected. But would you agree that in this context, we’re at least interdependent? That something I do is going to affect something you do, even if it’s not direct?”

If that’s ground you both stand on, the job comes back to you: Can you make your case from there, the place where you both see things the same way, even while you’re standing in slightly different spots?

Past the fixed beliefs you may not share, and short of the topics that start fights, religion, politics, there’s a wide stretch of shared ground in between. That’s where to start. Basic principles, the natural laws of math and science, well-accepted proverbs and sayings (for example, “Seeing is believing”): most people stand by, and on, those.

In fact, when it comes to people rather than numbers, research has found a set of values that show up across cultures. A near-universal one is reciprocity, aka “the golden rule.” Treat someone well, and they’re likelier to treat you well. Reciprocity is the most cross-cultural ground there is.

One rule throughout: test it, don’t assume it. Say your position(ality) out loud, so it’s exposed and so you’re just as clear about where you stand as you’re asking them to be. Inference is the enemy, because someone standing somewhere else will see the same thing differently, and if you haven’t said where you stand, you can’t expect them to guess.

But isn’t this just relativism?

You may be asking, “If what’s real is just the view from where you stand, haven’t we given up on truth altogether? Isn’t this relativism, where every position is as good as every other, and no idea is worth making because it’s all just perspective?”

Well, and now we get to see how positionality works in real time, because my current view* is: No. Noticing that people stand in different places is not the same as saying there’s no ground at all. I believe there is a real world, but that each of us sees our own version of it, influenced by our own experiences, beliefs, values, and the rest.

But that’s exactly why I also believe common ground is reachable. Not because everything is relative, but because I believe there’s something shared and real underneath the differences, and that we can work toward finding it, especially when we work together.

And notice what examining your positionality does not ask of you. It doesn’t ask you to abandon your idea, or to pretend you don’t believe what you believe. It asks the opposite: be clearer about where you stand, so you can find the ground your idea can actually hold with someone else. You’re not giving up the idea, or even your version of it. You’re discovering where to plant it so it has the strongest chance to grow and thrive.

(*One of my favorite ways to signal I recognize something is a position, not a fact.)

Ready the idea, ready yourself

Ultimately, when it comes to making sure your idea is strong enough to survive first contact with an outside audience, avoid those avoidable errors of irrelevance, incomprehensibility, and indefensibility. Locate your idea in the landscape of other ideas. Offer a frame for your idea, and then fill it with the content of your idea. And finally, support your idea with the evidence of your audience’s own experience.

Those cures, those steps, ready your idea. But paying attention to your positionality, to where you stand and where your ideas come from, helps make sure that you are ready too. It helps you understand the context you got your idea from in the first place, and so, what you might be blind to when you go to share it with someone else.

I’ll go into more detail on each of these kinds of position—reality, knowledge, and values—in upcoming posts. For now, I’ll leave you with this:

Where might something that feels self-evident to you be more a product of your position than of a reality, whether or not that exists?

Until next time,

Tamsen

Go Deeper

A few places to dig in.

• If you want the research behind reciprocity as common ground, read Curry, Mullins, and Whitehouse, Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies (2019). They find seven cooperative behaviors, reciprocity among them, treated as morally good across all 60 societies studied.

• If you want to map your own deepest beliefs about the world, start with Jeremy Clifton’s plain-language What Are Your 3 Deepest Beliefs About the World? (2022), then read the research behind it, Clifton et al., Primal World Beliefs (2019). Where “primal beliefs” like interconnectedness come from, and why they don’t shift easily. You can also take a quiz and discover your own primal beliefs!

• If you want a famous articulation of the blind spot idea, where a fish doesn’t know what water is, watch or read David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (2005 Kenyon commencement address; published by Little, Brown, 2009).

• Speaking of which, if you want the thinking on how metaphor shapes and reflects what we take as real, read George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980; 2003 edition). It describes why a word like terroir can do real work, not just be a fun fact….

• If you want common ground built in a hard, real-world case, read Ferraro and Beunza, Creating Common Ground (2018). How dialogue forges shared ground between parties who started far apart.

• How I originally learned about terroir and élevage in particular [video]: Working with rum distiller (!) Maggie Campbell on her TEDxCambridge talk, back in 2014.