Scrumpy Dad stories: balancing individual needs in your relationships

How to find common ground in just 3 steps

A practical approach to sort out mutual priorities together

Getting your own priorities right is already difficult enough, let alone in collaboration with other people, who often have different views. Depending on the importance and sensitivity of the topic at hand, emotions may be involved, resulting in heated debates.

There are plenty of examples where it’s important to understand individual priorities of members of a group, and to align on the most important ones together. Think about planning your summer holiday trip with your family or a social event with friends. That should be a happy journey, right? Not something to end up in a fight triggered by misunderstanding and frustration.

After my previous story, I’m taking you along on another personal adventure: my wife and I are currently busy house hunting as we are planning to move to another city.

For a while we had been browsing the national #1 real estate website, evaluating potential new homes on the market. Both of us had selected a few favorite houses that seemed worth visiting. Every now and again we would discuss our personal favorites together. Sometimes we would both agree on the potential fit of a particular house for sale. But quite often we would disagree, just as easy. Or one of us might simply reject a house, once so carefully selected by the other.

As you can imagine, my wife and I were getting a bit annoyed by the randomness of our house selection process. It was clear we were both applying different criteria to evaluate the potential of a house. Our requirements were clearly vague. The relative importance of our requirements was also unclear. It was about time to make things a bit more explicit.

Enter the Scrum Master and his Post-its (don’t get me wrong, being a Scrum Master is an awful lot more challenging and fun than carrying around sticky notes). It was time to have an exercise to clarify our individual requirements, come to one shared list, and assess them on their relative importance. So here we go…

Step 1: what do I want?

Step 1 in our exercise was the individual approach. We both made our own prioritized requirements list. So we started writing away on sticky notes, putting them on the wall, hidden for each other. We both sorted our requirements lists vertically, from high priority to low priority. Here the first personal challenge started: you have to sort them explicitly. Individually you need to make up your mind already and make a choice which requirement is more important than others.

For me it was important that we had a nice garden. I also want some kind of garage where I can park my motorbike. And plenty of bedrooms for when our kids come over and want to stay for the night. And I had some more items on my list as well of course.

Step 2: now what do YOU want?

Next, we talked each other through our individual lists. Now it got really interesting. Of course we shared certain requirements, like neighborhood, garden, number of bedrooms, etc. But we had formulated them differently. And obviously they were not in the same order. Not at all, I could add. And we both had some items that we didn’t have in common. So more explaining was needed.

The key point of this step was to understand each others wishes and needs. And to be as specific as possible in expressing our personal priorities. We had to explain to each other what we really meant by our brief descriptions, and why it was important. “Nice garden” just didn’t cut it. By asking open questions like “When is it a nice garden?” and “Why is it important for you?” we helped each other to better articulate our needs.

For me it meant that I was looking for a place with a spacious garden and with still plenty of sunlight in the evening. I just love to be able to come home after work and chill in the garden, enjoying the last rays of sunlight of the day. My wife liked that too, so we found common ground already, at least on this requirement, not necessarily on its priority.

The best part was the actual discussion to understand what the other person wanted. Clarifying your needs is extremely helpful, not only when hunting for houses. Better understanding each other is already a great achievement in itself. It also brings you closer to each other, which helps to find a solution that works for all parties involved. So this step was a great prelude to step 3.

Step 3: so what do WE want?

Of course we had a common goal, so we had a shared interest to make this work. But that still doesn’t make it easy to agree on requirements. To come to one prioritized list, we started with the #1 requirements from both our different lists. Guess what? They were different already! For my wife “Nice neighborhood” mattered most, for me “Nice garden” was on top of my list. Time to compare and find the relative order.

My wife likes a sunny garden too, especially when a nice glass of wine is being served. But she made a convincing case that a nice garden doesn’t really matter if the house is in an unpleasant neighborhood, where you don’t feel at home each time you go outside. So there we had our first priorities sorted: first a nice neighborhood (green, safe, friendly), than a sunny garden to relax after work. On to the next items on our lists!

And so we progressed and evaluated all our requirements together. Since we already had the first two requirements sorted, and we had our individual lists sorted, putting the next requirements in order wasn’t too difficult. It was just a matter of running down the common list and finding the relative position where the next requirement should go. It was actually quite fun, because we both felt that this approach was going to help us in our house hunting mission.

In those circumstances where we couldn’t reach consensus, we were looking for practical examples to make the comparison really practical. We used the houses we had bookmarked on the real estate website as examples, to test how they scored on the requirement currently under discussion. Making things down-to-earth practical really helped to clarify priorities. In the end we ended up with a nice list of prioritized requirements we were both happy with.

Here are my tips to define your mutual priorities in a constructive way:

1) Find your common goal

There will be a common goal. People often forget about this when they get dragged into discussions about priorities and conflicting personal needs. But there is always something that binds you, something you both care about or depend upon. Otherwise you wouldn’t be discussing this at all, you could just move on individually.

Because of this dependency, you both will have an interest in solving the priority puzzle together. (And if one of you doesn’t care, you have a different problem to tackle first, good luck with that!)

2) Get your own priorities right

If you don’t know what you want for yourself, it will be tough to explain or negotiate with others. And the overall priorities will be incomplete because your needs are not included. You risk major disappointment and frustration. So do your homework to know what you want!

3) Understand each others needs and motivation

Only when you are able to open up to the others involved, will you be able to truly understand them, what is important to them. How can you expect others to care about your needs if you don’t invest time to understand theirs?

You will have requirements in common, and there will be differences. Chances are they may even have items on their list that you forgot about. You want to have this overview to be able to understand it all and get the complete picture.

4) Work it out together

You have to resolve this together, remember the common goal. That means a bit of giving and taking as well. Since you have your own priorities sorted out already, it’s easier to know what matters to you most. So you know when you need to stick to your most critical requirements. And where you have room for negotiation.

I hope this article will help you in your personal challenges when mutual priorities are important yet difficult to agree on. If you have other solutions to address this topic, I’d love to learn from you!

It’s now so much easier to select or reject new houses on the market, because we can focus on what matters most, for both of us. We have found our new house and currently we are finalizing the deal. It’s a perfect match because all our common requirements are met. We are looking forward to move in soon!