and indeed for life... at least, it feels that way to me. I struggle to bring us to a sensible solution, and as my wish comes close to coming true, you trample on it with yet another pie-in-the-sky idea. Worse, your idea might fit perfectly, but I simply won't see it that way. I will interpret your every new idea as an attempt to prolong the agony, whereas you will interpret my every attempt to choose a solution as an attempt to shut you down. Result? War. Root cause? Cross purposes. Remedy? Alignment. (Surprised?) Two goals, two meetings Consider, instead, having two separate meetings: one to generate proposals, and one to select a proposal. You might find that that helps. In the first meeting, we generate ideas, brainstorm, solicit opinions, run impact studies... whatever we need to do to generate proposals. The people who come to this meeting might or might not care about making the decision. Whatever happens, we can feel certain that whoever shows up wants to lend their ideas to the group, and most importantly, we ignore any attempt at choosing a solution . We agree in advance to ignore them, because we have a different goal in this meeting. We agree not to chastise people for attempting to choose a solution because they form part of our natural impulse to jump to a conclusion. We agree to recognize each other's humanity by allowing each other to compare or rank solutions, but we generally ignore those attempts