You are obviously using a newly defined phrase "mutual preference" which does not seem to be familiar to most people and a quick search does not bring anything of value for me (there is "mutual preference method", but that's about matching people to one another).

I — among others — believe that "sweet spot", "balanced", "trade-off" and even "compromise" are good enough words to describe a solution that achieves good outcomes for multiple competing goals (not just people), and I really believe that whether any of those is negative is in the eye (ear) of the beholder.

If you are instead claiming that there are no competing goals when you are eg. building a product, you might be looking only at very simple products (though I have a hard time imagining a product so simple there are at least not two goals in tension — eg. a knife and toothpick both need to balance sharpness and safety).

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card_zero an hour ago | parent [-]

But those describe a different thing. I use "mutual preference" carefully. Dale Carnegie described this in 1936. I don't remember what term he used for it, if any. But instead of any trade-off, which I will repeat is a lose-lose because both sides settle for an inferior version of their idea, you create a new idea which satisfies the spirit of what both sides wanted - quite likely satisfies it better than what they first thought of - and is quite different in nature.

This is of course difficult to do, and you may give up and compromise instead. Sometimes that's understandable. It is however worse.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That’s fairly classic CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-Making). Sometimes, it works nicely; other times, you end up with The Abilene Paradox[0]. Group creativity is a crapshoot. Sometimes, lots of crap shoots out. Ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
	▲	necovek an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I do not think anyone disagrees with that — ideally, you get two ideas to meet and satisfy them completely (or two people to agree on the solution working for them both). But even a new idea comes from someone, and you might still have egos to deal with where one party won't budge if it wasn't from them. But what people are stating (me included) is that in majority of cases, you are actually dealing with conflicting goals and outcomes so it is really the art of making decisions that allow you to do a good creative job within a set of needs. So it is really more of a "yes, and" to you — with nobody disputing that you should first try to find a solution that meets multiple goals, people are finding that it's not just hard, but sometimes impossible to do so and really talking about this what we perceive to be "majority of our work" in operating within this "yes, and..." zone. This is also why we have so many different tools for superficially the same job: from knives, forks and spoons (and yes, a spork ;-)), over accounting software, cars, shoes, clothes, phone sizes and underlying operating systems... I mean, it'd be great if there was one tool I could use to eat my hot soup on a cold day, and shovel snow in the street, but... Yes, one could eg. imagine a way where one thing could do both where it's about eating a soup and cleaning snow (perhaps a straw-based system that sprinkles hot soup onto snow while having a junction to feed me too? :)), but the OP was using "compromise" in a way where he splits the two needs and focuses only on one. And while this example seems far-fetched, it is not unusual in the world of software :)