When a hard line is the soft option
Here’s another excerpt from Chip Scanlan’s article on Tools of the Trade: The Question.
Unfortunately, in all too many cases, interviews have become the street theater of news with both sides tacitly accepting their role. The reporter asks questions that may sound tough but provide subjects a variety of exit ramps while the subject pretends that they are responding when in fact they are using the dull question as a launching pad for their own agenda and rhetoric. The biggest loser in these kinds of exchanges, of course, is the public.
This reminds me of those battles where people spend so much time and effort arguing about the ideologically correct process that nothing actually gets done. Taking a hard line is really a soft option. It’s a way of avoiding the real situation and changing nothing.
This happenes when people drive own agenda in a collaborative situation. They are stuck in the “I” and will not, or cannot, move to the “We”.