No it isn't (and no it isn't). I only complain because I hand you all what I believe to be a valuable idea and then somebody reacts by silently making a rude finger gesture at it, and they don't even say why, that's the irritating part.
So, what are you saying about framing everything as binary? That actually sounds like what I'm saying is bad: to be uncreative and stubborn and reject any new idea on principle, a Not Invented Here sort of mindset, even if when you thought about it you'd prefer the new idea. That stubbornness is what leads to difference-splitting.
I wasn't one of the ones who downvoted you (I didn't land on this thread until after all of this discussion about downvotes had happened), but I also don't really understand what you think is valuable about the idea you presented. At best, it comes across like semantics about what the correct definition for something is (which seems to come from a prescriptivist take that disagrees with the overwhelmingly common usage of the word, so it's not surprising that it's not being received well).
If the intent was to share an interesting fact about the origin of the word, then that would be something I'd find interesting, but quite often tone ends up mattering as much as content, and the way you've phrased it doesn't make it clear at all that's what your intent is rather than sounding like you're saying that everyone here is ignorant except you. Whether or not that's accurate (and for the record I don't think it is, since I tend to consider a definition that doesn't fit what people actually mean as irrelevant), generally convincing people that they're wrong requires a lot of careful communication. At the end of the day, you have to decide whether you're commenting because you genuinely want to convince people of something or just because you want to say it regardless of the outcome; if you're motivated by the former, then how people react to your tone is tautologically the measure of whether you need to change it or not, and if you're motivated by the latter, you're going to have to accept that downvotes are an inevitable consequence when you're saying things that people don't agree with in a way that they don't like.
Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about. It's not just semantics ... or, wait a minute, are you saying everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded? Maybe you all know that already. That would be excellent, if it's commonly understood.
It's a valuable idea, because otherwise what you get is an established habit of bad resolutions to disputes, where it becomes normal and is seen as virtuous for everybody to settle for half-measures. The article, which is very short, might be promoting that mindset, for all I can tell. In fact it clearly states it:
> The more you tip the scale on one side, the weaker something else will be. That’s okay!
No, it isn't okay, and that's a shitty zero-sum uncreative way to view the world.
You are obviously using a newly defined phrase "mutual preference" which does not seem to be familiar to most people and a quick search does not bring anything of value for me (there is "mutual preference method", but that's about matching people to one another).
I — among others — believe that "sweet spot", "balanced", "trade-off" and even "compromise" are good enough words to describe a solution that achieves good outcomes for multiple competing goals (not just people), and I really believe that whether any of those is negative is in the eye (ear) of the beholder.
If you are instead claiming that there are no competing goals when you are eg. building a product, you might be looking only at very simple products (though I have a hard time imagining a product so simple there are at least not two goals in tension — eg. a knife and toothpick both need to balance sharpness and safety).
But those describe a different thing. I use "mutual preference" carefully. Dale Carnegie described this in 1936. I don't remember what term he used for it, if any. But instead of any trade-off, which I will repeat is a lose-lose because both sides settle for an inferior version of their idea, you create a new idea which satisfies the spirit of what both sides wanted - quite likely satisfies it better than what they first thought of - and is quite different in nature.
This is of course difficult to do, and you may give up and compromise instead. Sometimes that's understandable. It is however worse.
That’s fairly classic CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making).
Sometimes, it works nicely; other times, you end up with The Abilene Paradox[0].
Group creativity is a crapshoot. Sometimes, lots of crap shoots out.
Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
I do not think anyone disagrees with that — ideally, you get two ideas to meet and satisfy them completely (or two people to agree on the solution working for them both). But even a new idea comes from someone, and you might still have egos to deal with where one party won't budge if it wasn't from them.
But what people are stating (me included) is that in majority of cases, you are actually dealing with conflicting goals and outcomes so it is really the art of making decisions that allow you to do a good creative job within a set of needs.
So it is really more of a "yes, and" to you — with nobody disputing that you should first try to find a solution that meets multiple goals, people are finding that it's not just hard, but sometimes impossible to do so and really talking about this what we perceive to be "majority of our work" in operating within this "yes, and..." zone.
This is also why we have so many different tools for superficially the same job: from knives, forks and spoons (and yes, a spork ;-)), over accounting software, cars, shoes, clothes, phone sizes and underlying operating systems...
I mean, it'd be great if there was one tool I could use to eat my hot soup on a cold day, and shovel snow in the street, but... Yes, one could eg. imagine a way where one thing could do both where it's about eating a soup and cleaning snow (perhaps a straw-based system that sprinkles hot soup onto snow while having a junction to feed me too? :)), but the OP was using "compromise" in a way where he splits the two needs and focuses only on one.
And while this example seems far-fetched, it is not unusual in the world of software :)
> Oh, so people are annoyed at me because they aren't getting the point, maybe? The commenter who mentioned Steven Covey knew what I was talking about
I mean, sure, if you think that there's literally no way for you to improve how you communicate to more effectively convey your ideas, then yes it's because of the other people and not something you can address. One person getting the point isn't a sign that everyone else is going to though. If your goal is to be persuasive to enough people that you don't need to risk downvotes though, you might find more success from looking closer at why you failed to get the outcome you want than from trying to justify it as not your fault. As I said though, I don't have any agenda here; I didn't downvote you, and if you're happier with the outcomes you're getting rather than being open to trying to communicate differently, it doesn't bother me! Given that you seemed upset about the downvotes though, it seemed like maybe you genuinely wanted to learn what might have caused them so you could try to avoid it in the future, so I was offering what seemed like the reason to me.
> Everybody secretly knows that what they call compromises ought ideally to be creative mutual preferences, and not involve either or both of the parties having to put up with things and having their goals degraded
Not quite, I'm saying that it's not really a secret (at least not intentionally); it's just that common definition that most people understand the word to mean includes both win/win and lose/lose. It's totally understandable that this might not be your understanding of the word, since there's no way to really find out which words you might not understand the same way everyone else does, short of looking up every single word in a recent dictionary, which isn't a particularly fun way to spend time.
It's fine, I got a conversation, that's all I wanted. Thank you, by the way. No, I won't modify my behavior. :)
Re: the definition, that's exactly what I said in the first place! "Often people don't make the distinction and call both things compromises", I said. I'm promoting making the distinction because I think it matters, a lot.