Presenting the Case

Aargh! It’s happening again!

You’ve explained why you’re certain that something is true, but your friend/coworker/family member just isn’t on the same page.

You can’t believe it. They just can’t see things the way you see them, even though everything is completely obvious to you.

You’re about to apply Hanlon’s Razor here, since it’s far easier to explain this disconnect by way of ignorance than by malice, at least in your own mind. After all, you generally like this person you’re talking to, and you don’t want to think of them as a monster.

Then, it hits you: maybe you’re looking at this whole thing through a different lens. You might be talking about one thing that’s entirely different than what the other person sees, just like two observers will never agree precisely on when an event happens.

What if you go all the way back to the very core of what you’re trying to explain, and build logical steps upward to your conclusion?

This technique has many names: laying the foundation, making the argument, articulating the point. My own preferential term is presenting the case. It reminds me that there is a lot more to the discussion than the final point, and that foundational case has to be made patiently and diligently, like a lawyer arguing in court.

If you strip away everything from a conversation in order to find out where it went wrong, analyzing it piece by piece, I bet you’ll find that one person (or both) took for granted that the other person understood or believed something they did. That one divergence just caused an unbelievable amount of frustration.

Think about how many shouting matches (virtual/metaphorical and real) you’ve seen where people just go straight down their own little rabbit hole. Once you’re down in this hole, you’re siloed against other ideas getting in, at least this far down.

This rabbit hole is where your central thesis has formed. This is your core assumption about something, and you don’t always go back down this hole to visit the idea, so you don’t really notice that it’s there all the time. It lives under the surface, and you imagine that any other reasonable human has this same core assumption.

I’m here to tell you that we humans have all sorts of different core assumptions. We are all wired differently, in a manner of speaking.

Maybe I’m here to tell you sounds arrogant to your ears, and that bothers you. Maybe I don’t understand why you’re getting so frustrated while I just made a perfectly rational point that any dummy would understand, and you can’t understand why such an arrogant prick wants to lecture you on something you know more about than him.

This is one of those little rabbit holes that hide these assumptions, and they are all over, everywhere. While we share tons of common values, we simply don’t all see the world the same way.

That’s why it’s so important to present the case.

I wash the dishes in my house, at least most of the time. Our kitchen isn’t big, so I tend to like to use the clean as you go method I learned working in restaurants, and that definitely extends to our sink.

The sink isn’t just for dishes, though: it’s for washing lettuce and other produce for salads, and for several other important non-dish-washing processes. I know that I have no right to get particularly upset if my partner throws dirty dishes into the sink when I’m about to prep a salad for the night.

Instead, I need to better explain the way I think of the space we call the sink, and that’s not always easy to articulate in the moment. It’s not at all obvious to anyone else that I have this little sacred space I like to keep to myself, at least unless I present the case.

I have to remember that I spend a couple of hours every day in the kitchen, between making breakfast for Dink-Dink and us, brewing and pouring coffee, and often prepping either lunch or dinner. This is not only a space I’m intimately familiar with, but also a space I feel responsible for.

If the case is never presented, there’s no reason to imagine that the behavior will change, and therefore no reason for me to get frustrated.

The next time you find yourself in this type of situation, remember to think like a lawyer. Go down into your rabbit holes of thought and see what’s really down there. Present the case.