How to Make Thinking Visible — Three Forms of Business Argumentation Support

The main reason for categorizing input relies on a common purpose. Most groups gather around a common purpose.

For example, treasury groups gather their departments around financial capital. While human resources gather their departments around human capital. Sales and marketing gather around customers’ needs for products and services. Force your participants to make thinking visible around their purpose and why they organize the way they do.

Evidence-based

Three forms of support for business argumentation include:

How to Make Thinking Visible -- Three Forms of Business Argumentation Support

How to Make Thinking Visible

  1. Evidence,
  2. Values, and
  3. Credibility

When you challenge meeting participants to make their ‘thinking visible’, use active listening and reflect back on WHY they believe their claims to be true. Isolate the proof behind their claims, understanding that you will need to reflect on the facts and examples they provide to boost their claim. Let us take a closer look at the three forms.

Evidence

Much is written about evidence, and while the following is not all of it, business arguments rely on three types of evidence to support claims, namely:

  1. Surrogates
  2. Trends
  3. Vision

Surrogates

Surrogates provide examples and operate through analogy to support arguments. Meeting members might refer to competitors as surrogates for their own group. Examples might not even come from within the industry but may derive from an analogous situation. Some clothing dry cleaners introduced drive-up services, having viewed the success of a surrogate industry, the fast food industry.

Trends

Statistics are frequently used to support business arguments. Since proof about future conditions cannot be established, support is provided for likelihood and probabilities. As you know, historical performance does not prove future performance. The value of statistics derives from trend lines.

Historical performance and statistics provide a lagging indication when time has passed and nothing can be done to reverse the past. Linked together, however, tends to appear to support the likelihood or probability of future performance. As a facilitator, be prepared to further challenge the assumptions from historical performance that may be carried over to support future claims.

Vision

When leadership establishes visionary claims, such as establishing “world-class” or “best-of-breed” aspirations, meeting participants will use the vision to support their claims. Visionary arguments may be similar to arguments supported by values, in that they are likely to be more fuzzy than SMART.

Organizational goals and objectives capture measurements toward the vision and will be used to support many arguments. If participants can make clear claims for example, that their positions will generate the most profit, most will support them if their claims are clear and valid.

Values

Operating in a similar fashion to vision, values also drive “board room to boiler room” behavior and will be used to support arguments. An organization focused on “safety” for example, may defer to the argument that claims to be the safest approach if everything else is held constant.

As a facilitator, strive to have the organizational values (also called Guiding Principles, Tenets, Elements, etc.) handy, and preferably posted for all to see. Likewise, having a clear line of sight to enterprise, business unit, departmental, and project objectives can be leveraged to resolve arguments.

Credibility

Credibility is “the perception that the arguer is competent and trustworthy, and has good will” (see “Argumentation and Critical Decision Making” by Rieke, Sillars, and Peterson, pg 280) toward the other meeting participants. Participants naturally give stronger adherence to other participants with greater credibility. Extensive research and other books and journals speak to the power of credibility. From a facilitator’s perspective, challenge even the credible to make their thinking visible. Make sure everyone in the meeting understands WHY the credible participant has formed his or her belief or claim.

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