I was doing martial arts in school, and my sensei had me demonstrate some forms. Being new, I was very hesitant.
He was annoyed at this and explained that when I kept hesitating, I didn't complete a motion fully. He couldn't see what I was trying to do because I wouldn't commit to it. Thus he couldn't show me what I was doing wrong and teach me the correct way to do it.
"Strong opinions weakly held" is trying to address the problem of not committing to a position. It can manifest as not fully expressing your ideas, or adding unnecessarily qualifiers to them, or not following them to their conclusions.
The consequences can be you don't fully advocate your position, or someone with a different idea isn't able to identify the weaknesses in your argument.
> If you have a strong opinion, you look like a fool if you change your mind when evidence is shown to you.
If you present your views as mush, you can also sound like a fool. If you're citing a standard and say, "the standard says this, but I'm not really sure I read it correctly," you don't sound humble, you sound like you can't read.
If, otoh, you simply cite the standard, then your colleague is clear on where you're coming from. So now he can object that implementations don't follow it; the discussion can advance.
I think the problem you're getting at is someone staking their reputation unnecessarily on their views. You're right: that's a mistake. I've been in an argument over a fairly subjective design decision where one guy got frustrated and said, "look, my 20 years working with databases says we do it this way."
To avoid that, the key is to be specific; "we tried that on project X and it worked / didn't work, and this is very similar." Now it's not your reputation at stake, you're simply giving a factual account of your experience.
And sometimes the matter really is subjective or the data isn't great. If that's the case, you want to be clear about that uncertainty, "we just don't know because our data is crap." Then it becomes clear the team needs to put more resources into getting better information.
On the other hand, if you're too strong about how you phrase your case, some people will take you at face value and assume "he seems pretty sure about this, he's probably right". A little hedging in how you phrase things gives other people an easier-to-take opening to raise counterpoints without feeling like they're getting into an actual argument.
I was doing martial arts in school, and my sensei had me demonstrate some forms. Being new, I was very hesitant.
He was annoyed at this and explained that when I kept hesitating, I didn't complete a motion fully. He couldn't see what I was trying to do because I wouldn't commit to it. Thus he couldn't show me what I was doing wrong and teach me the correct way to do it.
"Strong opinions weakly held" is trying to address the problem of not committing to a position. It can manifest as not fully expressing your ideas, or adding unnecessarily qualifiers to them, or not following them to their conclusions.
The consequences can be you don't fully advocate your position, or someone with a different idea isn't able to identify the weaknesses in your argument.
> If you have a strong opinion, you look like a fool if you change your mind when evidence is shown to you.
If you present your views as mush, you can also sound like a fool. If you're citing a standard and say, "the standard says this, but I'm not really sure I read it correctly," you don't sound humble, you sound like you can't read.
If, otoh, you simply cite the standard, then your colleague is clear on where you're coming from. So now he can object that implementations don't follow it; the discussion can advance.
I think the problem you're getting at is someone staking their reputation unnecessarily on their views. You're right: that's a mistake. I've been in an argument over a fairly subjective design decision where one guy got frustrated and said, "look, my 20 years working with databases says we do it this way."
To avoid that, the key is to be specific; "we tried that on project X and it worked / didn't work, and this is very similar." Now it's not your reputation at stake, you're simply giving a factual account of your experience.
And sometimes the matter really is subjective or the data isn't great. If that's the case, you want to be clear about that uncertainty, "we just don't know because our data is crap." Then it becomes clear the team needs to put more resources into getting better information.