Concept
The and-stance
The and-stance holds your view and theirs, your feelings and theirs, as both valid at once: you can be right that the close was wrong and she can be right that the bank feed made it impossible. It is what the word 'but' destroys and the word 'and' preserves.
Difficult conversations tend to collapse into either-or: either I am right or you are, either my feelings count or yours. Stone, Patton and Heen show that this is usually false and always unproductive, because the moment one person's view is declared invalid they stop contributing. The and-stance is not compromise and not agreement; it is the refusal to make the other person's reality disappear so that yours can stand. In practice it is a matter of conjunctions and of order: 'I understand the feed changed, and the summary still went out wrong' keeps both facts alive. Carnegie said the same thing in 1936: you cannot win an argument, because the loser goes away unconvinced and now also resentful.
A real-life example
A senior developer dismissed a junior's design in front of the team. The design would have broken the payments flow, and the way he said it damaged the junior. The and-stance holds both, and the outcome is a changed review format rather than a reprimand or a shrug.
How to use it
- 1Replace every 'but' in your notes with 'and' and read what it does to your position.
- 2Say the other person's true thing before your own, joined by 'and'.
- 3Treat both sets of feelings as data, not as a contest.