I have often contended that—contrary to popular wisdom—compromise is bad. The fundamental problem? Compromise takes two people’s desires and cuts them in half, leaving nobody particularly happy. Sure, it’s better than an impasse (sometimes). But it’s often worse than a variety of more creative solutions.

Nowhere is the problem more apparent than in the creation of a team presentation. Indeed, if you’re tasked with creating such a presentation, avoiding a compromise is often the only way to make life negotiable.

Huh? A story to illustrate:

A colleague and I were recently asked to coteach a class that covers two related but distinct topics—let’s call them apples and oranges. Given that apples and oranges are two distinct fruits, and given that my colleague is naturally more familiar with the apples from his normal course while I’m more familiar with the oranges from mine, the easiest thing to do—and the thing most people do—is slap half the apples and half the oranges into a single presentation, in sequence. A compromise! It avoids disagreement, minimizes additional work, and appears to respect everyone’s thinking. Right?

Well, yes, but anyone who’s ever done that (or heard that presentation) knows the outcome: an incoherent mishmash of a presentation—a presentation where we learn all there is to know about apples from presenter 1 and all there is to know about oranges from presenter 2. But then we walk away scratching our heads about what in the world apples have to do with oranges, or even what the whole presentation was about. Compromise, in the context of a team presentation, fails us badly.

But luckily, there’s a better way. And luckily, my colleague and I knew enough about the pitfalls of compromise to adopt it. Instead of half a presentation about apples and a half a presentation about oranges, how about a whole presentation about a two-fruit salad? In other words, how about a presentation that takes the best parts of each person’s thinking, integrates them in a coherent way, and uses the resulting integration to extract new insights that would’ve occurred to neither alone.

Yes, of course, it takes more time. But, to smash the fruit metaphor into a pulp, I assure you that it almost always results in a tastier dish. And it usually takes less time than scrapping the incoherent two-fruit sequence, then mixing up an entirely new fruit salad, as you’ll probably have to do in response to the negative feedback generated by the initial presentation.

So the next time you’re tasked with compiling a team presentation—or tempted to compromise in general—consider the possibility that meeting in the middle is neither necessary nor necessarily desirable. Integrating the best of everyone’s thinking to produce a novel and intriguing whole often results in a far juicer final product.