"if you don’t express your opinion strongly, it may not stick in the listener’s head as well as an overall weaker idea that someone else expresses with more zeal."
OK, sure. Connecting confidence with correctness is one natural human heuristic for assessing an idea or proposal.
But it's also an unreliable one, and encouraging everybody to assume it when delivering ideas seems as likely to magnify the problems as it is to put everybody on an equal playing field.
If you're trying to cultivate a culture where consensus decisions are better decisions, I think what you really want is less opinions that are strong than positions that are clearly reasoned and articulated.
I suppose it's possible that the author of this piece (and those who coined and use the phrase on which it's based) really mean that, but I think the "strong opinions" phrasing is easy to confuse with general brash confidence.
OK, sure. Connecting confidence with correctness is one natural human heuristic for assessing an idea or proposal.
But it's also an unreliable one, and encouraging everybody to assume it when delivering ideas seems as likely to magnify the problems as it is to put everybody on an equal playing field.
If you're trying to cultivate a culture where consensus decisions are better decisions, I think what you really want is less opinions that are strong than positions that are clearly reasoned and articulated.
I suppose it's possible that the author of this piece (and those who coined and use the phrase on which it's based) really mean that, but I think the "strong opinions" phrasing is easy to confuse with general brash confidence.