@carnage4lifeDare Obasanjo This is the root cause of almost all technical conflicts I need to mediate. People wasting their time arguing, instead of understanding.

The eng leads at YouTube had a great way of addressing this. One of the ground rules for any VP-level Eng Review was that each side needed to be able to articulate the other sides perspective, including pros/cons and top concerns. If you failed to demonstrate this during the review (either explicitly or implicitly), then the meeting was stopped and rescheduled for later. Both sides were told to go back, understand each other's points, rework the deck, and come back when they could articulate each other's side.

SVPs shouldn't waste their time mediating catfights. They need to focus on making hard technical decisions that will determine the success or failure of the company. Putting this ground rule in place (and living by it) quickly got the message across -- don't bring us fights, bring us hard problems with difficult tradeoffs.

Worked wonders.