On Sun, 8 Oct 2006 13:56:35 -0700, "Matt Brown" morven@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not very good at defusing tense situations either. But I tend not to try. Tony is, on the other hand, possessed of pretty good instincts in respect of content and has a long history of spotting and correcting obvious errors in the deletion process.
Tony has good instincts when it comes to being on the right side of an issue. He's bad, however, at convincing others of it without pissing them off.
Most of the time I think they needed to be pissed off. The people Tony aggravated are, in many cases, process wonks, adhering to process in the face of a self-evidently bad result for the project. What Tony did was in effect to point out the absurdity of their position; yes he did it in a confrontational way (I think he likes a bit of drama, myself) but I almost invariably found his reasoning entirely persuasive.
Guy (JzG)