Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

A few months ago, I read a post calling for authors for a book called The Age of Conversation. It sounded interesting, so I put in my name and will be one of 275 people (listed below) contributing a single page 400-word essay on the theme of “Why Don’t People Get It?”

Here’s where I need your help. When I signed up several months ago, May 15th, the deadline for contributions, seemed eons away. But May 15th is suddenly next week, and because I’ve been distracted by finishing up my degree, I haven’t started on my essay yet. I signed up to write on the topic of Business Model Evolution, and could use some help in brainstorming. I have the noodlings of some ideas, but I’m sure I can do better with the help of another few people.

Also, if anybody is willing to be an editor, that’d be great as well. I would just post drafts here on the blog, but the organizers have requested that essays not be posted before the book is released.

Thanks!

P.S. Following the lead of other authors, here’s the list of all 275 contributors with links to their online presences: Adam Crowe, Adrian Ho, Aki Spicer, Alex Henault, Amy Jussel, Andrew Odom, Andy Nulman, Andy Sernovitz, Andy Whitlock, Angela Maiers, Ann Handley, Anna Farmery, Armando Alves, Arun Rajagopal, Asi Sharabi, Becky Carroll, Becky McCray, Bernie Scheffler, Bill Gammell, Bob Carlton, Bob LeDrew, Brad Shorr, Bradley Spitzer, Brandon Murphy, Branislav Peric, Brent Dixon, Brett Macfarlane, Brian Reich, C.C. Chapman, Cam Beck, Casper Willer, Cathleen Rittereiser, Cathryn Hrudicka, Cedric Giorgi, Charles Sipe, Chris Kieff, Chris Cree, Chris Wilson, Christina Kerley (CK), C.B. Whittemore, Clay Parker Jones, Chris Brown, Colin McKay, Connie Bensen, Connie Reece, Cord Silverstein, Corentin Monot, Craig Wilson, Daniel Honigman, Dan Goldstein, Dan Schawbel, Dana VanDen Heuvel, Dan Sitter, Daria Radota Rasmussen, Darren Herman, Darryl Patterson, Dave Davison, Dave Origano, David Armano, David Bausola, David Berkowitz, David Brazeal, David Koopmans, David Meerman Scott, David Petherick, David Reich, David Weinfeld, David Zinger, Deanna Gernert, Deborah Brown, Dennis Price, Derrick Kwa, Dino Demopoulos, Doug Haslam, Doug Meacham, Doug Mitchell, Douglas Hanna, Douglas Karr, Drew McLellan, Duane Brown, Dustin Jacobsen, Dylan Viner, Ed Brenegar, Ed Cotton, Efrain Mendicuti, Ellen Weber, Emily Reed, Eric Peterson, Eric Nehrlich, Ernie Mosteller, Faris Yakob, Fernanda Romano, Francis Anderson, G. Kofi Annan, Gareth Kay, Gary Cohen, Gaurav Mishra, Gavin Heaton, Geert Desager, George Jenkins, G.L. Hoffman, Gianandrea Facchini, Gordon Whitehead, Graham Hill, Greg Verdino, Gretel Going & Kathryn Fleming, Hillel Cooperman, Hugh Weber, J. Erik Potter, J.C. Hutchins, James Gordon-Macintosh, Jamey Shiels, Jasmin Tragas, Jason Oke, Jay Ehret, Jeanne Dininni, Jeff De Cagna, Jeff Gwynne, Jeff Noble, Jeff Wallace, Jennifer Warwick, Jenny Meade, Jeremy Fuksa, Jeremy Heilpern, Jeremy Middleton, Jeroen Verkroost, Jessica Hagy, Joanna Young, Joe Pulizzi, Joe Talbott, John Herrington, John Jantsch, John Moore, John Rosen, John Todor, Jon Burg, Jon Swanson, Jonathan Trenn, Jordan Behan, Julie Fleischer, Justin Flowers, Justin Foster, Karl Turley, Kate Trgovac, Katie Chatfield, Katie Konrath, Kenny Lauer, Keri Willenborg, Kevin Jessop, Kris Hoet, Krishna De, Kristin Gorski, Laura Fitton, Laurence Helene Borei, Lewis Green, Lois Kelly, Lori Magno, Louise Barnes-Johnston, Louise Mangan, Louise Manning, Luc Debaisieux, Marcus Brown, Mario Vellandi, Mark Blair, Mark Earls, Mark Goren, Mark Hancock, Mark Lewis, Mark McGuinness, Mark McSpadden, Matt Dickman, Matt J. McDonald, Matt Moore, Michael Hawkins, Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Michelle Lamar, Mike Arauz, Mike McAllen, Mike Sansone, Mitch Joel, Monica Wright, Nathan Gilliatt, Nathan Snell, Neil Perkin, Nettie Hartsock, Nick Rice, Oleksandr Skorokhod, Ozgur Alaz, Paul Chaney, Paul Hebert, Paul Isakson, Paul Marobella, Paul McEnany, Paul Tedesco, Paul Williams, Pet Campbell, Pete Deutschman, Peter Corbett, Phil Gerbyshak, Phil Lewis, Phil Soden, Piet Wulleman, Rachel Steiner, Sreeraj Menon, Reginald Adkins, Richard Huntington, Rishi Desai, Beeker Northam, Rob Mortimer, Robert Hruzek, Roberta Rosenberg, Robyn McMaster, Roger von Oech, Rohit Bhargava, Ron Shevlin, Ryan Barrett, Ryan Karpeles, Ryan Rasmussen, Sam Huleatt, Sandy Renshaw, Scott Goodson, Scott Monty, Scott Townsend, Scott White, Sean Howard, Sean Scott, Seni Thomas, Seth Gaffney, Shama Hyder, Sheila Scarborough, Sheryl Steadman, Simon Payn, Sonia Simone, Spike Jones, Stanley Johnson, Stephen Collins, Stephen Cribbett, Stephen Landau, Stephen Smith, Steve Bannister, Steve Hardy, Steve Portigal, Steve Roesler, Steven Verbruggen, Steve Woodruff, Sue Edworthy, Susan Bird, Susan Gunelius, Susan Heywood, Tammy Lenski, Terrell Meek, Thomas Clifford, Thomas Knoll, Tiffany Kenyon, Tim Brunelle, Tim Buesing, Tim Connor, Tim Jackson, Tim Longhurst, Tim Mannveille, Tim Tyler, Timothy Johnson, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Toby Bloomberg, Todd Andrlik, Troy Rutter, Troy Worman, Uwe Hook, Valeria Maltoni, Vandana Ahuja, Vanessa DiMauro, Veronique Rabuteau, Wayne Buckhanan, William Azaroff, Yves Van Landeghem

I just got back from two weeks of vacation with an inordinate amount of socializing. In addition to the normal catching up I do with friends in the Bay Area, I also attended a wedding which brought many friends from out of town. It was delightful to hear what everybody is doing, and to pick the brains of the smartest and most wonderful people I know.

In all of the talking I was doing, I noticed that I felt that I had the most interesting conversations when I was just talking to one or two other people for an extended period of time. After some reflection, this shouldn’t have surprised me. It’s another version of the communication catastrophe that companies face as they grow. When in a party atmosphere at one of the wedding events, everybody’s time is spent giving the “two minute recap” of their life. You form a group of a few people, each person gives their recap, and by the time you start talking about something else, the group has broken up and reformed with different people. The conversation flow is constantly being interrupted.

But during the times when I reserved a few hours to go hang out with specific people, I had some great conversations where we dug into some really interesting ideas that will inspire several blog posts going forward. I’ve discussed the idea of better living through conversation before, and those ideas were reinforced here. Spending a few hours with the same person or people allowed us to get past the two minute recap, and into the life issues confronting us. It also allowed the conversation to drift to topics of mutual interest, which were specific to the people involved in the conversation. The conversations I have with Person A will be different if we are alone, if we are with Person B, or if we are with Person C, because the overlapping interests will differ. In a party environment, the groups shift too fast to discover those overlaps.

I need a balance of both kinds of interactions. While I was in the Bay Area, I was generally structuring my day with a few hours of one-on-one time with people before heading out to a big group dinner or event. The deep meaningful conversations are inspiring but somewhat exhausting, whereas the shallower social interactions provide the phatic communication that maintains social connections. I think either one alone would be unfulfilling, but the mix works for me.

I wonder if there are ways to structure our environments to encourage that sort of mix. Perhaps a workplace with an open cubicle plan to enable background social awareness that also offered plenty of small meeting rooms for one-on-one conversations. Getting this mix right may be one of the reasons I loved living at TEP - the boisterous dinners where all were present contrasted with the late-night conversations in various rooms. I’m not sure how to change my living environment, so for now, this post is a reminder to make sure I don’t fall prey to thinking that socializing only means going out with a crowd.

P.S. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but one of the great benefits of writing this blog is that it lets me launch into those deeper conversations more quickly, both because it lets me skip the two minute recap, and also because it enables others to find the areas of overlapping interest. I’ll be chatting with somebody and they’ll say “Oh, I read this post of yours and it got me thinking…” Sometimes it won’t even be that direct - just an awareness that I think about these sorts of things and bringing up issues of concern to them. So I appreciate the conversations this blog spawns both directly and indirectly.

I had a minor epiphany last week after my friend Jocelyn posted a quote from our conversation at dinner on my Facebook wall. For those of you not on Facebook, the wall is a single-threaded discussion board, where people can write comments to you that are visible to others. One of the reasons I didn’t “get” Facebook was that observing something like the wall from outside a community was meaningless. The comments were disjointed and without context, and I didn’t see how they were interesting… until I got one myself. Jocelyn’s comment preserved our conversation in a more substantial form, but it will only have meaning to those of us who were at dinner - it requires knowledge of a separate context to make sense of the comment.

This is part of a larger trend in society to expand our conversations and communities across multiple forms of media. This post is informed by having read the Transmedia Storytelling chapter of Convergence Culture, by Henry Jenkins, where he describes The Matrix as follows:

The Matrix is entertainment for the age of media convergence, integrating multiple texts to create a narrative so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium. The Wachowski brothers played the transmedia game very well, putting out the original film first to stimulate interest, offering up a few Web comics to sustain the hard-core fan’s hunger for more information, launching the anime in anticipation of the second film, releasing the computer game alongside it to surf the publicity, bringing the whole cycle to a conclusion with The Matrix Revolutions, and then turning the whole mythology over to the players of the massively multiplayer online game. Each step along the way built on what has come before, while offering new points of entry.

What Jocelyn’s wall post made me realize is that conversations in general can no longer “be contained within a single medium”. We have so many options for expressing ourselves, and for having conversations with our friends, that restricting ourselves to a single medium no longer makes sense. We might start a conversation by phone, follow up by email, use instant messaging to arrange a meeting, have a conversation in person, and recap the conversation in Facebook.

One possible disadvantage of such transmedia conversations is that it requires carrying our context with us. I can’t depend on the media to give me cues about how the conversation has developed when the conversation has spanned across several forms of media. So when I get a text message on my phone, I have to remember what I was last talking to this person about, and figure out the frame of context myself, whereas on the phone I could ask for clarification, or in email, my previous email might often be quoted. This may be a generational thing, though, as I think that younger generations growing up in a world of transmedia will have less difficulty with keeping track of their various contexts, as they will not know a world where it could be otherwise.

A similar constraint on these conversations is the lack of traceability and history. I really like email because I can use quoting of an incoming message to frame my reply, and keep a stored digital copy of what was said for future reference. I often get frustrated when looking at an old email that refers to an IM or an offline conversation because I can’t reconstruct what triggered the reference - the conversation that was part of my context at the time is long since forgotten and I have no way of recovering it. I can see advantages to this form of built-in information decay, but I also think we will lose our history. I can’t imagine future historians being able to track their subject’s thoughts and conversations in the way they could fifty years ago by reading their subject’s letters, as so much context will be lost.

Another disadvantage is that these conversations are impenetrable to outsiders. They don’t make sense from outside the community, because only the community is following the conversation across all media (one might call it “media hopping” in analogy to frequency hopping). This may be an advantage in some ways, especially for teenagers trying to develop and assert a new identity without interference from their parents and community, but it makes the barrier to entry into the community higher. One has to earn the trust of everybody in the community to get included in the conversation. Otherwise, one suffers from the experience we’ve all had where somebody says “Don’t you remember what they said? Oh, right, you weren’t there.” where “there” can be a place, a mailing list, a web-based discussion board, an IM chat room, a friends-locked LiveJournal post, etc.

Understanding the transmedia nature of the conversations helps because it makes me realize that it’s not that I’m “old” in not “getting” a new medium, it’s that I’m not part of a community conversation using that medium. New communities are springing up around each form of social media, and many communities are spanning across several media. Having a surfeit of media options provides people with more options for expressing themselves. People that like to write essays can have a blog, people that express themselves through pictures have Flickr, people who think in one-liners have Twitter, people that represent themselves through their networks have LinkedIn or Facebook, etc. And communities can integrate all of these to express themselves. Much like I might represent myself by a particular combination of fields, a community might define itself by the media it uses to trace its connections.

Of course, the next step is to think about how one might try to design the form a community will take by the media used to maintain it (e.g. mailing list vs. web discussion board vs. closed Facebook group), but I’ll leave that to someone smarter than myself.

I’m a couple weeks late in commenting on the post where Joel explains why he doesn’t let people comment on his posts:

When a blog allows comments right below the writer’s post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody … nobody … would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.

I tend to agree with Clay Shirky’s response, which Joel mentioned, where he says:

…the sites that suffer most from anonymous postings and drivel are the ones operating at large scale. If you are operating below that scale, comments can be quite good, in a way not replicable in any ‘everyone post to their own blog’.

As I wrote in what I know about blogging:

Having comments is a good sign. It means that the blogger is trying to start a conversation, and is interested in more than just hearing themselves speak. One of the great achievements a blogger can attain in my eyes is to be the seed around which a community forms.

When a blogger is starting out, comments are wonderful. They indicate that people are reading, and that people care enough about what they’re saying to respond. That’s obviously not an issue for somebody like Joel, who’s got hundreds of thousands of readers. But for those of us that are nowhere near the A-list, comments are a great way to see what our readers are thinking.

I also disagree with Joel’s contention that all comments should be placed on one’s own blog, rather than with the post in question. I much prefer seeing all the discussion on the post in one place, rather than trying to follow a conversational thread all over the Internet. I’m also more likely to contribute to the conversation via a comment. I often leave paragraph length comments on other blogs that I would never post to my own blog, because setting the context for my reply would be annoying, and I don’t feel the paragraph response deserves its own post.

The usefulness of comments depends on whether one is looking to create a conversation or a community with one’s blog. If so, making it easy to continue the conversation is essential - that means keeping all the comments in one place, not scattered across the web, and not requiring registration to post a comment. On the other hand, if one is blogging to express oneself, perhaps comments are not appropriate because they might create an environment where one feels uncomfortable saying what one wants. I personally love getting comments - comments have spurred some of the best posts I have done on this blog, as the commenter extended my ideas into new and interesting directions.

Separating the comments from the post also makes it impossible for those who arrive at a post much later (as often happens in Google-world) to see what has already been suggested. For instance, if I post a question asking for advice about a topic, I’d prefer not to be getting emails two years later saying “Did you think of X?” when X was suggested by the first responder. When I was using blogging software that did not support comments, I actually had a year where I asked people to comment over on my LiveJournal, and it was a mess. I regret not being able to go back and easily associate the comments with the posts.

That being said, Shirky’s point that scale matters is a good one. Once the audience size reaches a certain point, the community experiences what he calls The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons, where the temptation to hijack the audience for one’s own purposes overcome normal communitarian tendencies. Preventing such hijacking requires immense resources - think of the security present at sporting events and how it’s ineffectual at preventing streakers.

At small scales, one can manage such antisocial tendencies by careful curation of comments. I obviously remove all spam comments with the help of the Akismet plugin for Wordpress, which intercepts hundreds of spam comments a day. I haven’t had to remove any “real” comments, but if a discussion degenerated into flaming and personal attacks, I would have no hesitation in deleting those comments.

I find it interesting that the appropriate comment policy flip-flops when the blog reaches a certain scale. The behavior feels like that described by Inside the Tornado, where the perfect strategy for one business development phase is a disaster in the next one. When a blog is small and struggling to gain an audience, engaging the audience and providing them a voice is essential in building a community of readers. At some point, the blog goes through a phase transition where no amount of curation can keep up with the chaos of the audience rampaging through the conversational commons, and at that point, comments become a detriment.

Issues like this make social software very difficult to write. The appropriate behaviors in one situation don’t match the appropriate behaviors in another, and social software is not currently able to handle such nuances. Perhaps the software tools have to change between the small scale of bloggers like me and the A-list bloggers like Joel. The designers of such software also have to identify what people are trying to do with the software, which will be difficult since the reasons people have for blogging are as varied as the bloggers. I’m enjoying watching as these social software tools evolve, in addition to being co-opted and adapted, to meet the needs of people.

I went to the nextNY happy hour last week, which got me thinking about the different ways in which people network.

This list is by no means comprehensive, but lists a few of the archetypes I have come across at such events.

What interests me is finding an event structure that can accommodate all of these different networking styles and goals. Different event formats lend themselves to different networking styles, as I discussed in my post about Meta-Brainjamming. A happy hour is great for the connector or the “personal relationship” networker, but it’s less amenable for the agenda networker, who’d prefer to break off conversation if it’s not useful. Conferences might work better for that type of networking as there’s always the excuse of a session to attend. Round robin one-on-ones like the BrainJam had would be great for the Rolodexer, but annoying for others.

What kind of networking do you do? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in it? Before going to a networking event, do you assess what you are trying to get out of it, and whether your goals are compatible with the format of the event?

Feedback sessions are a powerful tool for generating forward progress in any aspect of life. Even though I determined that iteration and feedback don’t work as a management tactic, I still think feedback sessions are important.

One simple benefit is that regular feedback sessions force you to take action. It almost doesn’t matter what form the session takes - it could be a daily status meeting, a one-on-one with your manager or mentor, or even a journal update that you write for yourself. You can keep yourself moving forward by regularly being evaluated on what you’ve done since your last session, and what needs to be done for the next one. I feel like I have drifted less since starting the five minute daily journal report suggested by Gerald Weinberg. There’s no implied consequence in failing to accomplish my daily goals, but getting into the habit of setting goals and recording whether I reached them has kept me more focused and disciplined.

Another benefit of regular feedback sessions is to confirm which direction is forward. One tactic I use in rapid prototyping situations where direction is unclear is to create a first draft just to have something to criticize. I don’t spend a lot of time on that first effort because I’m not trying to solve the problem with it. Its point is to elicit criticism, and by analyzing and understanding that criticism, I learn where I should be spending my design efforts and what the final goal is as of today. By getting early feedback, I don’t waste time polishing a solution that doesn’t fit the situation. Because I intentionally didn’t spend much time on that first attempt, I’m not personally invested in it, so I am open to exploring other options in response to the feedback I get. With regular feedback sessions, I can work with my teammates in shaping our work even as goals change.

To take a specific counter-example, I once worked at a company where a software team interviewed end-users about what they needed, drew up a specification and disappeared for six months to code to that specification. They came back with software that did exactly what was requested and found that circumstances had changed drastically over the six months since the specification was written, making their software useless. But because they had spent six months writing that software, they were emotionally invested in finding a use for it, so they spent another couple months trying to fit it into what the end-users were doing. If they had re-evaluated the specification every two weeks with the end-users, they could have evolved the software in response to the changing landscape and not wasted their time or the time of the end-users.

Feedback sessions also allow us to overcome our innate desire to keep doing what we have always done. We humans are subject to the consistency principle described by Cialdini, where once we say we’re doing something, we become more committed to doing it. We don’t want to find out that we made the wrong choice, so we either don’t evaluate the results, or interpret the evaluation results in order to support the choice we made. Feedback sessions allow us to verify that our choice is having the intended effect.

In an environment where feedback is valued, the review informs what will happen next. If everybody involved has agreed to take action in response to feedback, designing the evaluation process is in some sense more important than designing the work itself, because the evaluation process will determine how the work evolves. This is the idea behind test driven development, where the evaluation (test) is actually written before any work starts on the software itself. This is also why students always clamor to know the grading scheme at the beginning of the term - they plan their work by knowing how they will be evaluated. A good evaluation process creates a good end result.

Feedback sessions play a large part in why I currently function better as a team player. I do not yet have the self-discipline to re-evaluate myself with brutal honesty on a regular basis. I’m working on that with exercises like the daily Weinberg journal. I’ve also started setting up regular phone calls with trusted friends to talk about my life goals, and even though they are friends, I feel a responsibility to have made some progress towards those goals between calls. These feedback sessions are increasing my ability to move forward and execute, and I think that is a good thing.

P.S. I wrote this post on a bus on the way to Cornell. Yes, the bus has wi-fi. Luxury!

I had a teddy bear moment today. I was trying to debug something at work, got stuck, asked one of my coworkers to help me, explained the problem to him, and said “Oh, I see what’s going on” without them saying anything. I guess I should bring a teddy bear into work so that I can explain problems to it before bothering my coworkers.

This incident is a reminder of my last post about conversation, where I realized I “only figure stuff out by talking about it” with other people rather than pondering it alone. It seems very similar to the classic extrovert/introvert divide, in that extroverts recharge with other people and introverts need alone time, and they have a very difficult time dealing with each other, as the article Caring for Your Introvert explains. Like the personality types, the different thinking types have fundamentally clashing assumptions which makes for wacky hijinks.

To make the rest of this post coherent, I will refer to people who think by talking as “talkers” and to people who think by themselves as “ponderers”.

One of the ways in which the thinking types clash is in how they approach conversations. For instance, because I am a “talker”, I often throw out completely unformed thoughts just to see what happens. I see ideas in conversation as being malleable; they’re batted around, and new ideas are constructed in a cooperative effort. My post about patterns and truth indicates my disdain towards absolute Truth when compared to the joy of following ideas where they lead.

“Ponderers” hate this because they treat conversation as a way to exchange information about what one already thinks, not as an opportunity to refine one’s thoughts. This doesn’t mean they are closed-minded; they will take in new input, but they will process it later on their own. To say something in public without having supporting evidence is anathema to them.

You can see why conversations between the two thinking types might cause problems (exaggerated for effect and from the perspective of a “talker”):
Talker: “Hey, so what about Idea A?”
Ponderer: “I don’t think that’s a good idea because of Reasons X, Y and Z”
Talker: “Oh, good point. Well, what if we modify the idea and try idea B instead?”
Ponderer: “Wait, that doesn’t match what you said before.”
Talker: “Yeah, I’ve moved on and I’m trying something new”
Ponderer: “You’re being inconsistent! What do you really think?”
Talker: “Well, I thought idea A, but that doesn’t hold up, so maybe idea B.”
Ponderer: “How am I supposed to talk to you when you can’t make up your mind?”

The two sides have differing assumptions about the purpose of conversation. “Ponderers” see conversation as akin to siege warfare, where they bring their ideas and their supporting evidence to bear, and try to discredit the other’s ideas. When they finish the conversation, they examine the damage done by the other side, figure out how to rebuild their ideas, and prepare for the next battle. Meanwhile, “talkers” like me are bouncing ideas around during the conversation, changing as we go, but have difficulty developing new ideas on our own.

So we both get frustrated at the next conversation. They come back to the conversation re-armed with reformulated ideas with new supporting evidence, and wonder why I’m wasting their time when I haven’t changed my ideas since we last talked. Then during the conversation, I start evolving my ideas, which frustrates them even more because they can’t bring their artillery to bear on the rapidly moving target. I get frustrated because they stick to their fortifications and refuse to change their ideas based on what we’re talking about together.

I’m projecting how “ponderers” think, but I can definitely see why I would drive them nuts with my constantly shifting thoughts. And I certainly have felt my own frustration at not being able to get people to go with my flow during brainstorming conversations. Just being aware of the differences may help me identify more constructive ways to make this interaction work in the future.

It’s also helpful to remind myself that when I get stuck, it’s probably not productive for me to continue bashing my head into the metaphoric wall. The best way for me to identify a new approach is to talk it through with somebody else. As the teddy bear story shows, it doesn’t have to be somebody that understands it and may work better if it isn’t - by breaking the problem down to try to explain it, I may figure out a new way of seeing the problem that provides a possible solution.

Do these archetypes of thinking make sense? How do you think?

I’ve been spending a lot of time on the phone recently with various friends talking about what I’m thinking and where I’m going with my life and my career. After one recent phone call, I realized that I value such conversations because each conversation is an opportunity for me to evolve my understanding of the world.

When I’m talking to friends, I’m not just reciting the events of my life. I’m struggling to put them into context, figuring out the narrative that ties them together, making sense of the chain of events so that I can understand what happened. In other words, I’m constructing my self-story. By telling it to somebody else, I’m explaining it to myself, but at the same time, the feedback that I get may encourage me to modify my understanding. For instance, if I’m talking about an interaction I had with a coworker, and I explain what they did and why I thought they did it, my friends will offer alternative explanations that may better explain the events. And I modify and retcon my story to incorporate that new interpretation.

What’s really interesting is that some of these reconceptions can then change my behavior. By bringing a new understanding to the world, I react differently when presented with a similar situation. I may even seek out new ways of interacting as a result.

What I find fascinating about the process is that it goes against my preconceived notions about making sense of the world. Our culture perpetuates the myth that we are lone heroes, each on our own journey. Our icons are tortured geniuses working alone, from Einstein in the patent office to novelists and poets whose work is only read posthumously. The spiritual journey involves meditation and solo hikes to the tops of mountains to consult gurus.

And I bought into all of that. For a long time, I felt that the best way to figure out what I wanted to do was to sit alone in a room and think about it. And it turns out that doesn’t work for me at all. I can only figure stuff out by talking about it. I started writing this blog because I needed a place to get ideas out of my head and onto “paper” so I could take a look at them and see if they made sense. I learn so much more in an hour of conversation than I do in an hour of thinking.

I think part of why it’s taken me a long time to accept this idea is my background. I started off in physics, which perpetuates the lone theorist myth, with stories of individual brilliance ranging from Einstein to Feynman to Schrodinger. After physics, I moved into programming, which also emphasizes individualism. My boss believes that private offices are essential for programming because it requires such high levels of concentration. So the idea that I could learn by talking really took some time before I could finally accept it.

I should also mention that such conversations aren’t entirely selfish on my part. By using my friends to help me make sense of the world, I’m promoting our ability to make sense of each other. Because they’re helping me interpret the events of my life, they gain a better understanding of how I think about the world. And their interpretations help me better understand how they make sense of the world. Plus, i can contribute my viewpoint to help them make sense of events in their world. It’s a two-way process that builds community and trust, and also increases our ability to function in a world that doesn’t always behave in an expected fashion.

Gosh, I’m really on a crusade for the power of conversation recently. First in my post on the importance of talking in management, and now here with the applications to personal growth. I suppose it’s not surprising. I fancy myself a conversationalist and would love to find more excuses to practice the art of conversation. So feel free to contact me with ideas that you want me to think about or if you need another perspective or anything like that. And maybe at some point, I’ll get around to organizing a fabulous New York conversation salon.

P.S. Posting will be down this month, as I’ve got three end-of-term presentations coming up in the last week of April for my program. So I’ve got some work to do.

P.P.S. I decided to create a blog category of conversation to make it easier to find such posts in the future.

One of the things that many of my friends have been struggling with is that managers don’t really do anything. These friends are highly technical people, so when they think of doing something, they think of time spent in the lab, or coding on a computer, or building something. When they see a manager spending all of their time in meetings or talking to various people while they are struggling to get their tasks done, it can cause resentment.

And they continue to hold onto these prejudices even when they become managers themselves. One friend gets frustrated because he doesn’t feel he’s getting anything done at work because he spends all his time talking. Another looks back longingly on the days when they could just code and not worry about dealing with other people.

So what are managers doing? What is it with all the talking?

Sometimes thinking through ideas out loud is the only way the next step can be identified. Just by forcing their team members to articulate what’s going on, managers can often move people forward when they’re stuck in “blank page” syndrome or are procrastinating. My best manager (the coworker mentioned in that post actually) dropped by my desk once a week, in classic HP “management by walking around” fashion, to review what I’d done the past week, where I was stuck, and what I should get done the next week. It wasn’t any sort of formal meeting, but it helped me stay focused and gave me a chance to get unstuck.

Sometimes they’re talking so you don’t have to. One of the primary responsibilities of the manager of a technical team is to protect their team from the rest of the organization. Other departments at the organization may be after the team to produce documents, fill out surveys, participate in training seminars, etc. The manager is intercepting those requests and fighting them appropriately so the team doesn’t have to spend time thinking about that stuff. Even when the manager loses those battles, they can at least present the busywork on their terms, rather than let their team be interrupted every day by such requests.

Sometimes they are keeping things coordinated. The larger an organization is, the more effort is necessary to keep everybody moving in the same direction. Even when everybody thinks they understand which way is forward, they may have different ideas. The programmer needs to be dissuaded from spending several weeks re-designing the infrastructure to make it “just right” because there are customer features that need to be implemented. In this scenario, the manager is like a sheepdog, identifying wayward wanderers and bringing them back to travel with the rest of the group. Occasionally, the wanderers are correct in trying to lead the group in a new direction, and then it’s up to the manager to communicate that understanding to the rest of the group.

Sometimes they are figuring out the direction themselves. Determining the priorities and which way the team should be heading is part of being a manager and leader. But it can’t be done autocratically or the team will just ignore the direction because of unrealistic expectations and go their own way. And if the manager sets priorities without consultation with the customers, the team could work for months and produce something that can’t be sold. Maintaining these lines of communication between the team and management and customers requires yet more talking.

Sometimes they’re just keeping tabs on what’s going on. To keep a team motivated requires knowing what each team member is working towards, and what they are inspired by. Figuring that out involves understanding them as people so you can determine how you can frame the company goals in such a way as to match their personal goals. People can be motivated by money, by recognition, by power, etc., and choosing the wrong method can be disastrous (as one manager memorably remarked “Oh, right, Eric needs the carrot, not the stick!” after he attempted to strongarm me into doing something and I reacted violently in a contrary fashion).

Of all of these, I think the most important is the direction and coherence a good manager can provide. I believe in the amplification of coherent effort (Work Amplification by the Stimulated Effort via Rewards (WASER?)) - that a team is greater than the individual sum of its parts. But the opposite definitely happens - if one person is going in the wrong direction, it destroys the coherence of the team effort, reducing the total output of the team by far more than that one person’s contribution.

I like to think of the effect of a good manager as being a force multiplier. They may not “do” anything themselves, but they make everybody around them more productive. For instance, if they can take a team where the team members are each going their own way and the team is performing at the equivalent of half the total of the individual efforts, and transform it into a coherent team which performs at the equivalent of double the total individual efforts, they have added an enormous amount of value despite doing none of the work themselves.

So even though they are “just talking”, don’t underestimate the value of a good manager. And for those of my friends who are moving into management and frustrated by not “doing anything”, maybe this will help you frame the contributions you are making to your organization.

One of the skills I continue to work on is the art of conversation. This seems to be key to so many things I’m interested in, from management to communication to cognitive science. And it has the added benefit of being useful at parties!

So what makes for a good conversationalist?

One of the qualities I try to cultivate in myself is broad interests. I like to know a little bit about a lot of things. This gives me an advantage in conversations in that no matter where the conversation goes, I am interested, and can often contribute some thoughts or experiences. Over the course of the past few months, I can recall conversations about motorcycles, sports of all sorts, management, investment, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, geek culture, programming, games, music, etc. The conversation about motorcycles particularly sticks in my brain because a friend of a friend had a Ducati and three of us were gathered around it ooh-ing and aah-ing, and my friend was completely bored and left out of the conversation for 15 minutes. I felt bad for my friend, but didn’t know how to steer the conversation back towards territory where he would be more comfortable.

Because I have broad but shallow interests, I have the advantage that I rarely have turf to defend in a conversation. As I mentioned in my other post, the flow of conversation requires a collaborative effort where people are looking to construct new understanding, not defend their existing position. Adversarial relations turn conversations into arguments. So my lack of expertise may actually contribute to me having better conversations, as I have no positions to defend, and I’m generally open to new viewpoints. I’m even learning to get past my ego and stop trying to use conversations as an arena to show off how clever I am. Mostly.

Those who have a deep but narrow focus can be interesting to talk to for a while, as they are passionate about their subject. It’s fun to get them talking about their research, especially if I can relate it back to topics that I find interesting. Unfortunately, once the conversation leaves their topic of expertise, they don’t have anything to say. If I’m on my game, I can serve as an impedance matcher, translating things into concepts they find interesting, but that’s a skill that I’m still working on.

I’m still figuring all of this out, of course. I am nowhere near as successful at talking to people as I’d like to be - there are many people with whom I fail to have even perfunctory conversations. But every now and then, I have moments of progress; last week, I went to a holiday party where I knew nobody but the host and managed to have several interesting conversations with people about various topics. Interestingly, I do best in one-on-one conversations because it forces me to take the lead. Small group conversations of a few people work as well, where I can lay back a bit but still contribute. Once the group size exceeds about 6 people or so, though, I’ll fade into invisiblity because I’m not yet assertive enough to assume anybody should care what I have to say.

Conversation as an art form continues to fascinate me because it’s a realm in which I feel relatively comfortable. I’m reading a book on leadership now, and its advice is to “discover and cultivate that authentic self, the part of you that is most alive, the part that is most you.” I sometimes wonder if conversation is my element. A good conversation can energize me for days. Great conversations stay in my thoughts for years (often aided by me writing them up). I love taking ideas out and bouncing them around and collaborating in the process of synthesis. I thrive in the interstices between other people. I’m still not quite sure what that adds up to as far as a career path, but I’ll keep on playing with it.

P.S. Ironically, I should be out at a nextNY holiday party having conversations right now, but I was too socially exhausted to go. After finishing off my master’s project proposal last Tuesday, I was doing something social for six nights straight, with a few of those nights double booked. I ended up coming down with a cold, and decided to stay in for a couple nights to recover. Tomorrow night, the big push to Christmas starts, though

P.P.S. In the spirit of starting conversations, the book I’m reading claims that Emerson used to greet friends with “What’s become clear to you since we last met?” What a wonderful question. I need to adopt it in my life. And I ask it of anybody reading this post!