Productive Disagreement
A track of P62 · Disagreement & Influence.
Steelman-first disagreement, escalation that preserves the relationship, and influencing without authority - your concern translated into the other side's incentives.
"How do you handle disagreement with a colleague or your manager?" is one of the most reliably asked questions in professional life — and the skill it probes is used daily, long before any interview: opposing a decision without making an enemy of its owner. This track teaches that skill for any field; a teacher, an interpreter, and an engineer run the same plays.
It opens in the room where the decision lives: steelmanning the other position at full strength before countering it, aiming at the decision rather than the person, framing the exchange around a goal you both share, and disagree-and-commit — with an openly agreed tripwire — when the call goes against you. Then the room above: the reversibility/blast-radius/confidence triage for when to escalate at all, the transparency rule (they hear it from you first, never via a forwarded email), the escalation written as a five-sentence decision request instead of a complaint, and the aftermath that decides what the whole episode meant. It closes where you hold no authority at all: translating your concern into the stakeholder's own incentives, a cheap experiment instead of a strong opinion, the coalition built one transparent conversation before the meeting, and an ask shrunk until yes is easy.
Every rung is mentor-graded prose about real experience — your own, or a low-stakes substitute whenever you prefer; the grader assesses the telling, never the life.