Winning the Debate vs. Finding Common Ground

I attended my son's college graduation last week, after having skipped my own more years ago than I care to mention. The speaker, Dr. Stanley McKenzie, gave an interesting speech - much better than most people were expecting. Most commencement speeches have some memorable thoughts expressed, and this was no exception. While I didn't write down the exact words, here is one simple but important comment he made that stuck with me.

When two people with different views are discussing a topic, our cultural tendency is to try to refute the other person's argument every way we can and win the debate. The expected outcome is that the other person will concede and adopt your point of view. Experience will tell you that such an outcome is exceedingly rare of course. In reality the more useful approach actually is to (1) try to first understand why the other person is holding their views, and (2) see if there are any points of agreement that you can work together on. ( Note that I did not say compromise on what you think is right. )

It's interesting that in our hyper-individualistic and competitive culture, trying to "win the debate" seems like the only possible approach to disagreements. In reality there are other approaches, and if we were more logical about things we might admit that experience shows that other approaches can be much more useful. It just takes some time to overcome our cultural habits.