The Story
In 1998 I was directing percussion at Air Academy High School in Colorado Springs. Competitive marching band — the kind where you write an 12-minute show, the judges score it on execution and design, and your students perform it 15 times that season against schools that are equally serious about the result.
The staff that year had people I learned from. Experienced arrangers. People who had done this before and had strong views about how it should work.
The disagreement that mattered was about the percussion feature — the section where your section carries the whole show for about 90 seconds. My position was that we should build tension without fully resolving it. Make a promise the closer would eventually deliver on. Something held in reserve. The audience leans forward.
The horn staff had a different philosophy. Their view: every segment should earn its own moment. The opener peaks. The ballad peaks. The percussion feature peaks. The closer peaks. Each chapter justifies itself. Nobody leaves a section feeling shortchanged.
I thought they were wrong. They had experience and logic on their side. We were both working toward the same outcome — a winning show — and neither of us could prove the other's approach would fail.
What that kind of disagreement actually costs
When two people with standing disagree about design, the easy exits are always available: defer to whoever has more authority, split the difference and produce something neither person believes in, or let the timeline make the decision by running out of room.
None of those are the same as working through it.
What actually happened was slower. Neither side let go of their position quickly, because both positions had something real in them. The horn staff was right that a segment which doesn't land in the room is a problem you cannot recover from later. I was right that a show where every chapter peaks at full intensity has nowhere left to go by the time the closer arrives.
The version we built together didn't belong to either position. Peaks were still present — each segment still had to earn the room — but the sequence was shaped so each peak fed the next chapter rather than competing with it. The show could still deliver at every moment. The closer still had room to go.
That outcome wasn't a compromise in the sense of giving something up on both sides. It was a third thing. Neither of us would have written it alone.
What made it possible
Looking back, the disagreement worked because of one specific condition: we both cared more about the outcome than about being right.
And the outcome had to be concrete. Not "a good show" — that is too vague to arbitrate against. The shared outcome was specific: a show that could still move an audience when the closer arrived. That constraint gave the argument somewhere to go. We were not negotiating philosophy. We were solving a problem together, and we both knew what a correct answer had to do.
We won state that season. I don't lead with that because it is the point. I mention it because the show was genuinely better than either version would have been. I believe that. I think the horn staff did too.
What this means at scale
I've watched this play out in different work since then. Music, professional settings, across different kinds of creative collaboration.
The same dynamic appears: two experienced people with standing, disagreeing about approach, both working toward the same outcome. The question is whether the team creates room for the third thing to emerge, or whether the decision gets made by default — authority, timeline, or convenience.
The third option only exists if both people are willing to stay in the disagreement long enough to find it. If they're willing to argue not to win, but to build something neither of them would have built alone.
That's the work that doesn't show up in a project plan. It's also the work that determines whether the output is competent or exceptional.
The students who performed that show never knew any of this happened. They performed the version we landed on. That's probably how it should work. The argument is the staff's problem to have. The result is what the ensemble deserves.