I think rephrasing the comment (as the post suggests) in terms of "that might work if we can [resolve fatal flaw]" is a good suggestion, in that case. It's a much less negative way to point out the flaw.
All you have to do is bring up the issue that you think kills the idea, you don’t have to issue a judgment.
If people can’t see that it kills the idea, then either you are wrong and it can be mitigated, or again you are wrong and it is not the issue you think it is, or you are right but you are dealing with a group of people that can’t see reason, which is something you would want to know anyway.
There's an important callout here that often someone's "showstopper" isn't correctly viewed as a showstopper elsewhere.
If the someone calling out the showstopper isn't the final approver or able to sway the group that it's a showstopper then suggesting a follow-up validation to demonstrate the showstopper can be a good strategy.
If you just say "what about <showstopper>?" without offering a way to continue the discussion, then you might come off as TWWP. I would suggest that it could be phrased in a more constructive way, which was the point I tried to make in the article.
Instead of "what about <showstopper>?" you could say "I think that might be a reasonable solution. What impact will <showstopper> have on it?" and now you've validated the good and brought up the potential showstopper without shutting down the conversation about it.
> without offering a way to continue the discussion
It is asking asking a legitimate question in a neutral manner. It’s not supposed to be a microaggression. Asking a legitimate question should provoke discussion, unless discussion is fundamentally broken in your current environment, which again would be good to know.
If you're in a brainstorm session for solutions (which is what this sounds like), keeping a positive flow is way better than halting to consider a neutral or even a negative.
In other words, don't ignore the atmosphere and end up killing it. Which is kind of the point of the article, I feel.
I suppose if you say it with a superior tone and act like you know better, sure. It's all in the delivery. If you ask it as a genuine question, assuming that you don't have the answer, then I can't see how it would be taken that way by most people.
No, it's not the delivery, it's the content and the fact that you're lying to save the other person's feelings. Specifically, the lie is that you think the solution is "reasonable" in the same breath that you raise an objection you believe puts it in serious doubt, if it's not outright fatal. You can deliver that in perfect sincerity and if I see what's going on, the condescension will come through crystal clear, because I'm not a child.
It doesn’t need to be a lie. You could be seeing that the proposed solution is way better than everything else out there including the existing solution. If only you could fix “<showstopper>” somehow.
We very often have discussions around which solution we take. Often we take the one that we don’t like as much but we know how to make it work. The other solution designs are kept so we can revisit them sometime (or as reference for when somebody says “why don’t you…?”) with fresh minds and then see a new way around the problems we saw before.
In my experience the “<showstopper>“ is almost never a law of physics but a shortcoming of a dependency, either it’s implementation or architecture, or just some assumptions that are or have become invalid later on.
that sort of faux-diplomacy annoys me more personally because it always is blatantly obvious what the person is trying to communicate, and it sounds like it comes out of some kind of corporate PR training session. Like, if someone thinks what I does suck I always invite people to tell me so. If you're trying to sugarcoat it not only is it obvious that you think the idea sucks, you also think I can't accept your opinion, that's worse lol.
I think in general, not just in the workplace, people are very fine-tuned to noticing false compliments or underhanded criticism, and it's always worse than just playing it straight.
