The evidence for arguing a decision out is solid and nearly forty years old. The evidence that it makes people like the process less is from the same studies, and it is the half that gets left out.
The core study is Schweiger, Sandberg and Ragan in the Academy of Management Journal, 1986, later meta-analysed by Schwenk in 1990. Groups worked the same strategic problem under three conditions: consensus, devil's advocacy, or dialectical inquiry, where a counter-plan is developed and argued against the original.
The method that decides best is the method people least enjoy. Any product built on it has to solve for that.
If you are choosing how a team should make an important call, this says argue it out and accept the friction. If you are building something people pay for monthly, it says something less comfortable: the mechanism that makes the product good makes it unpleasant to use. Ignore that and you get excellent sessions and quiet churn.
The workable answer is not to soften the method. It is to move the argument off the surface. The methods contend with each other, the output arrives as options, risks and the missing question, and the person deciding sets how blunt the delivery is. The rigour stays in the engine.
Assign the role rather than hoping someone volunteers, because volunteers get read as difficult. Rotate it, so it does not become one person's identity. Point it at the load-bearing assumption rather than the plan in general. And say out loud that the next ten minutes are going to be uncomfortable, which reliably takes the sting out of them.
Five Peers editorial note. Sources named in the text.
The argument runs between the methods. The output comes to you.
Compose my board