Team Dynamics and Splitting
How to divide arguments effectively between two speakers, maintain team coherence, and avoid the common pitfalls of poor splitting.
The Art of the Split
In BP, each team has two speakers, and how they divide the case between them dramatically affects their ranking. A well-split case sounds like a coherent narrative told in two chapters. A poorly-split case sounds like two unrelated speeches that happen to be on the same side.
The fundamental principle of splitting is that each speaker should cover distinct analytical ground while building toward the same conclusion. The first speaker establishes the foundation — defining terms, setting up the case, and running the arguments that logically come first. The second speaker extends the case into new territory — different stakeholders, different time horizons, deeper mechanism analysis — while also responding to opposition material.
The worst split is a content split where both speakers simply divide a list of arguments arbitrarily: 'I will do arguments one and two, you do three and four.' This produces two disjointed speeches with no narrative flow. Instead, split by analytical dimension — one speaker handles the economic dimension while the other handles the social dimension, or one speaker covers short-term effects while the other covers long-term consequences.
