Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

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!

I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really positive vibe that fed on itself. I mentioned in the post that I think I enjoyed watching the warmup episode far more because I was surrounded by other people enjoying it.

This got me thinking this evening about other examples. I watched The Matrix on opening night in a sold-out theater, and it blew my mind. I watched the Blair Witch Project at a midnight showing on its opening night in limited release, and it was a far more compelling experience than when I saw it a month later in a multiplex. The Steve Reich concerts were spine-tingling. It happens when watching sports where the buzz is truly infectious - I even found myself momentarily rooting for the Yankees once this summer. Even a non-interactive experience like watching a movie or concert or a game is profoundly different with a sympathetic audience.

But why? If I enjoy something, why should it matter whether other people around me do as well? My theory of the evening is that it has to do with flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (which I’ve never read, so the following discussion may be inaccurate), where the general idea is that we’re happiest when we can reach a state of flow, where there is nothing impeding our progress in our task. Books like Peopleware emphasize the importance of giving people good tools to do their job, as that keeps them in the state of flow. A bad tool distracts people, keeps them from concentrating on their task, and breaks their attention out of the flow.

I think that a similar thing happens in groups of people. Books like The Society of Mind or Cognition in the Wild suggest that our minds act like groups of people, so perhaps groups of people may work like minds in this instance. When people are getting excited about something, that excitement feeds on itself, as if the whole group is getting into a state of flow (I’ve covered this in the context of conversations). But all it takes is one person to be negative to destroy the flow, and force the momentum to start over. The colloquial term is “party pooper”. It may seem as if they’re just one person, but by interfering with the network and multiplier effects of group enthusiasm, they can have a disproportionate negative effect.

To use pseudo-math for a second, if you have four people, and they’re all psyched about something, and they feed on each other’s excitement, the end result of excitement is probably exponential - it’s more like sixteen (four squared) units of excitement rather than four. If one person is negative, then you have either two or three units of excitement, depending on whether the negativity is a actively negative (a -1) or indifferent (a 0). Flipping the effect of one person doesn’t just reduce the excitement by one, it reduces it by thirteen! Obviously, the numbers are made up, but it illustrates the idea that I’m trying to get across.

I think this idea also applies in business. One bad apple in a company, especially in a startup, is a disaster. One of the priorities listed in Good to Great is to get the right people on the bus. Get the wrong people out of there. And I think one of the reasons that is so important is because of these multiplier effects. The wrong people don’t just drag down their own performance, they destroy everybody else’s productivity and enthusiasm. But when everybody is on the same page, and they’re excited and they’re psyched, amazing things can happen.

How do we get people into that state? Still working on that one. I’ve got a post on management somewhere in the pipeline that may discuss this. I’m pretty pleased with extracting all of this from the Buffy singalong, though.

P.S. Missed last night’s post because of class and homework. Oh well. The daily posting was more of a guideline. Maybe I’ll try to double post this weekend to “catch up”.

P.P.S. It’s only halfway through the month and I’ve already equalled my typical monthly output of posts. Goals help! Of course, I may be overwhelming my poor readers with verbiage, but they can always skip a post or three.

A few months ago, Wes made a comment about my post about good conversations where he linked the idea of flow with what I was looking for in conversation. I’ve been meaning to follow up on that comment for a long time, and tonight’s the night.

Conversation is a topic near and dear to my heart. Besides the post listed above, I have posts about the recipe for a good conversation, a late-night conversation with a friend, a surprisingly stimulating conversation at a party, thoughts on conversational alignment, and thoughts on the connections necessary for conversation. And those are only the posts I can remember off the top of my head. I would obviously love to understand better what leads to a good conversation. And looking back over those posts, I think perhaps the concept of flow is a good place to start.

The concept of flow at work has been described by many people such as the Peopleware guys. In particular, they emphasize how important it is for there to be no interruptions, nothing to break you out of the state of flow. Looking at those conversations, one was a late night conversation, and one was at a party where I didn’t know anybody so I didn’t feel compelled to circulate. Others were at people’s houses sitting around the living room, so there wasn’t the distractions of public places like restaurants or bars. In all cases, there was time for the conversation to develop, to take on a momentum of its own, to carry us all away with it.

Such momentum can seldom be achieved in other environments. There have been several promising proto-conversations I’ve had at work which were interrupted by a customer calling in; the moment was lost, people dispersed, and the conversation was over before it had really begun. I also find it very difficult to have good conversations at bars or parties; it’s generally too loud, so you have to shout to be heard, and people have to repeat comments several times, which destroys the flow of thoughts. Also, people circulate, wander off to get drinks, etc.

The other issue with bars and parties is something I touched on in the mysterious connections post, where I said “If I have to spend several sentences explaining each of my references, then the conversational momentum is disrupted and it’s hard to achieve that sense of flow in conversation”. It’s also linked to the idea of language alignment. If I don’t know people well, as is common at parties, then there are more opportunities for friction between realities to interrupt the flow of conversation. Combine that with the inhospitable (to conversations) physical environment, and it’s no wonder that I don’t enjoy either bars or parties.

Another aspect of good conversation flow is something I touched on in the recipe post, which is the idea that people need to work together for it to happen. We’ve all had conversations where things are starting to roll and gather momentum, and then everything comes to a screeching halt because some egotist in the room starts (figuratively) jumping up and down yelling “Look at me!” Good conversations require a sense of selflessness, of putting the needs of the conversation above one’s own needs. In the cases where ideas are getting kicked around, it means not getting emotionally invested in an idea, or outraged that somebody would challenge that idea. As soon as somebody decides that he won’t accept alternative viewpoints, the conversation becomes a battlefield, rather than a collaboratively constructed work. It reminds me of the book Getting to Yes, where negotiations are much more productive once they are viewed collaboratively rather than as zero-sum positional negotiations.

So what makes for a good conversation in my eyes? Good people, obviously, who trust each other, and have interesting ideas to exchange. A shared idea of the conversation as a collaborative inquiry, rather than an opportunity to enhance egos or flaunt closed-mindedness. An appropriate environment, with minimal distractions to disrupt the flow and momentum of the conversation. Oh, and the time necessary for conversational momentum to build.

I really like the concept of flow to tie all of these ideas together. Thanks Wes!

P.S. Now I just need to figure out how to set up these conditions for a good conversation here in New York. I might have to start throwing dinner parties or something. Yeesh. Or find a good cafe, I suppose. Hrm.

Amazon link

I read this book once long ago, but Joel insisted I re-read it after starting last week. So I took it home for the weekend and read it while taking breaks from unpacking. It’s a quick read, with short chapters. And it’s excellent.

What’s interesting to me is that I totally didn’t appreciate the book the first time I read it. It seemed like a bunch of obvious platitudes which didn’t really matter. Upon revisiting it, though, I realized that this book contained many lessons that I had had to learn by doing things differently and suffering through the consequences.

To take a couple obvious examples, it took me many years to figure out that the best way to seem interesting is to ask open ended questions about things other people are excited about. Everybody likes talking about stuff that excites them. Carnegie laid it out for me, but I didn’t really understand. Or how offering genuine specific praise is always appreciated - I used to feel weird about bothering folks just to tell them they did something well (e.g. Telling guest soloists with the chorus how well they sang). But then I realized I always get a thrill out of such recognition (like when somebody cites one of my blog posts), so now I try to demonstrate my appreciation when I can. Another good example is Carnegie’s admonition to avoid arguments, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you still lose because you haven’t convinced them, just browbeaten them into submission. As those who know me can attest, my affection for confrontation and argument got me into all sorts of trouble at work for a while before I realized that perhaps arguing wasn’t the best strategy.

So I’m glad Joel suggested I re-read this book. My friend Adam who I had dinner with last night said that a friend of his recommends reading a chapter a day, and trying to apply it to one’s life; when he reaches the end, he goes back to the beginning and starts over. I’m not sure I’ll go quite that far, but it does have a lot of good advice that I can learn from. And having confirmed some of his observations the hard way, I value the others more.

One observation about myself is that although I recognize how well these techniques work and have even adopted several of them myself, they still don’t come naturally to me. I use them because they work, not because they’re how I actually feel; I haven’t really internalized them. For example, I know that showing interest in others is the best way to sustain conversation. And I can do it. But I’m sometimes not actually interested in what they’re saying. Carnegie would claim that if I continue to use the techniques, the attitude will follow, just as the best way to be happy is to force oneself to smile. We’ll see. I may just be a cynical cold-hearted manipulative person by nature.

Speaking of which, next up on Joel’s re-reading list is Cialdini’s Psychology of Influence.

P.S. Completely unpacked, pictures up, trash taken out. Visited Whole Foods yesterday and stocked up on fresh produce, yay! Started answering tech support emails today, and also helped to debug the office VoIP system at the end of the day. Tomorrow night I’m going to go check out an architect duel in Tribeca, cuz that seems like a wacky New York thing to do.

A couple days ago, I was trying to explain to my friend Wilfred the ideas of Latour; in particular, the notion of an iterative reality constructed via consultation. As a scientist, he was somewhat distressed by this idea, given that he believes in a Platonic reality, where there is a “real” world that we are discovering through science. But then we wandered off into talking about how it applies to what we see of each other, because our “self” has no Platonic counterpart. There is no objective self that we can “discover”. The way I see myself is different than the way Wilfred sees me, and both are different than what some stranger on the street sees. Is there truly a “me” that stays constant through all of these interactions? I argue against the idea in this post.

But it gets even more interesting because my “self” that emerges in a social interaction is intricately bound up with what the other people involved bring to the interaction. I am a different person when I’m by myself, when I’m with different groups of friends, and when I’m with strangers. And that person evolves differently depending on those interactions. In some sense, my “self” is a collaborative process. Which really hurt my brain, so I decided to write a blog post on it.

Wilfred pointed out that the rise of celebrity, where people are famous for being famous (of which he pointed out Paris Hilton is the iconic example), provides another facet of this. Paris Hilton, the celebrity, is undoubtedly different than Paris Hilton, the person. Her celebrity persona has been constructed via an interaction between her, her agents, the media, and her audience. Wilfred also pointed out that this fracturing of identity was one of the bases for postmodernism and deconstructivism.

One of the other aspects that I find interesting about this idea of the collaborative self is that I think it relates to the idea of the conversational interface. We “reveal” (construct?) different aspects of ourselves depending on who’s asking (as a side note, I originally wrote reveal, and then realized that betrayed a Platonic belief that there was a “true” self that could be “revealed”, so I changed it to construct).

Jane Jacobs had an interesting take on this in her book The Death and Life of American Cities (which I still haven’t written up because I’m lame). She pointed out that one of the advantages of cities was that it allowed for a managed transition of identity between public and private, because there are multiple venues for interaction, from acknowledging a familiar stranger on the sidewalk or at the store, to grabbing a cup of coffee with an acquaintance, to saying hi in the lobby of a shared apartment building, to inviting people into your actual home. In smaller towns, without as many possibilities for public interaction, you have to graduate to the invitation into the home much more quickly, leading to a much more rapid breakdown of barriers. There are advantages to both methods; one could argue that small towns have the advantage of building up social capital in the Bowling Alone sense, whereas cities are more about the development of weak ties in the Granovetter sense.

As another side note, this is probably why the cities are where the disaffected congregate. As I wrote once, small towns are great for those that fit in; “However, such a community serves its misfits poorly. If somebody didn’t mesh with the community for whatever reason, they were doomed to a lifetime of ostracism”. There is no place to hide in a small town. So they leave for the city, where they can manage their identity, revealing only bits at a time, until they find a community within the city where they won’t be ostracized for being who they are (interestingly, I’ve fallen back into using “reveal” rather than “construct” for identity - some habits are hard to break).

Okay, this post has suffered a severe coherence breach (substitute a sci-fi-esque “containment breach” to make that phrase make more sense). I’ll have to worry at it a bit more and come back to it when I actually have a theme rather that just some random thoughts. Mostly I just wanted to title a post “Collaborative selves”, cuz it’s a cool phrase.

I mentioned in my comment on yesterday’s post that “the user interface is a negotiation between the designer and user”, an idea which was definitely inspired by reading Dourish, who makes a similar point in saying that “Computation is a medium”. An interface can also be seen as a conversation, as Suchman describes. So the real question is, what is your interface communicating to the user?

There are a variety of ways to approach this question. One way is to look at it purely from a user perspective, which is the approach Don Norman takes in focusing on affordances - what does the user perceive as ways to interact with this interface? The designer’s intent is lost, and the interface has to stand on its own. This only embraces the surface level of the interface, though, and I’d like to probe deeper.

I’m going to take a step back here to introduce Garfinkel’s concept of “accountability”, which I read about in Dourish. Accountability in this case has to do with an entity being able to account for its behavior, in that it is possible for others to discover its tendencies by observation. Dourish points out that the use of abstraction as a building block in computers has destroyed the accountability of software. He uses the example of networked file systems on an operating system. Because the operating system treats local folders and networked folders as equivalent, both conforming to the abstraction of a “file folder”, it doesn’t warn the user when they start copying a file to the networked folder, even though a network copy will take longer and is more prone to failure. If the user could look inside the folder and discover that it is implemented differently, then the user could make a more informed choice. As he writes, “The features that matter to me as a user are ones that have been hidden by the interface and by the abstraction that it supports.” (p.84) The interface is not accountable; it is not possible to discover through observation what is going on.

How does this apply to the idea of conversational interfaces? An interface which is accountable is open to a deeper exploration than one which is restricted to the top abstraction layer. The user can query it to find out details as needed, much like we query others when they make a conversational reference with which we are unfamiliar. An un-accountable interface, like the file folders, is restricted to the most shallow of interactions, because it can not reveal what is going on underneath. It’s the equivalent of a conversation with a monomaniac, who keeps on repeating the same thing over and over again, regardless of what you ask them. This inability to reframe what it says in response to our query is part of what makes technology alien to us. Humans will try all sorts of different ways to communicate, to get their point across. Technology often only knows one.

So a conversational interface must be accountable in that its internal behavior must be observable and discoverable by the user. Let’s extend the concept of a conversational interface by saying that it should be able to be experienced at multiple levels: a surface level where the user is just getting acquainted (equivalent to sharing nods with your new neighbors in the apartment building), a deeper level where the user starts to figure out some of the more expert details (acquaintances who you share a meal with occasionally), and even deeper levels where the user ascends to guru-hood with the system (equivalent to your closest friends). The user can “converse” with the interface at multiple levels, depending on their needs for the interface.

We can extend this concept further, by introducing the notion of charm. I really liked this quote by Kunstler in his book Home from Nowhere: “charm is the quality of inviting us to participate in another pattern, for instance, to glimpse the pattern of another personality through the veil of manners, customs, pretence.” A charming interface is one that not only can be experienced on multiple levels like the conversational interface, but actively invites the user to explore the deeper levels. Not all users will take the challenge, of course, but none should be so intimidated as to give up because it’s too hard.

I think really great interfaces possess this quality of charm, of invitation. Computer games are a good example of this. They start off with easy levels, building up one’s mastery of the controls until the controls themselves fade to “ready-to-hand” status. Then they continually challenge the user with goals that are just out of reach, inviting the user to explore the world and the interface more deeply. Computer games can be tremendously addictive due to this nature; there’s always one more challenge, one level deeper to go. But it provides a good model for what a charming interface would be.

I’ve wandered a bit afield from my original question: What is your interface communicating to the user? But I think the concepts of accountability, conversation and charm provide a framework for analyzing such communication. An accountable user interface answers the user’s questions as to whether the interface fits the user’s needs. A conversational interface is one that can be used at several different levels, depending on the comfort of the user with the interface. A charming interface invites the user to interact with it, to explore its capabilities, to ask it questions. Each of these lets us go beyond the surface level of affordances, and start to have real conversations with the designer via the medium of the interface.

I think this concept of conversational interfaces is interesting because it frames the question of interface design at multiple levels. How does the interface invite a novice user to try things out without fear of breaking anything? How does the interface indicate to the user what is going on underneath to help them make better choices? How does the interface encourage the user to find more expert methods within the interface? These are all good questions to ask when designing an interface.

I think I’m going to leave it at that for the evening. There’s definitely more to be explored here. Some loose ends I had jotted down from a previous attempt at this article include looking at the Internet and open source software as an example of how open and transparent interfaces lead to diversity and innovation, Jane Jacobs coining of the term “border vacuums” to illustrate how closed, opaque borders shut off diversity, and giving Don Norman more of a fair shake in looking at how affordances can invite interaction. Some neat stuff here. And it’s good that it’s letting me introduce concepts from the Dourish one at a time, because there’s a lot packed into that book and my review’s going to be long enough as it is.

Amazon link

Subtitled “The problem of human-machine communication”, this book debunked the prevailing philosophy in artificial intelligence at the time it was written in 1987, which was the belief that people worked by making a plan, and then executing it. Suchman examines this seemingly common-sensical idea and pointed out several of the flawed assumptions associated with it. In particular, she notes that we never fully specify a plan, because to do so would involve an excruciating level of detail. She quotes from Boden’s article “The structure of intentions”:

If one intends to buy bread, for instance, the knowledge of which bakers are open and which are shut on that day of the week will enter into the generation of one’s plan of action in a definite way; one’s knowledge of local topography (and perhaps of map-reading) will guide one’s locomotion to the selected shop; one’s knowledge of linguistic grammar and of the reciprocal roles of shopkeeper and customer will be needed to generate that part of the action-plan concerned with speaking to the baker, and one’s financial competence will guide and monitor the exchange of coins over the shop counter.” (Boden, p.28, cited on Suchman, p.44)

All of this detail is included in some sense when we make a plan to buy bread, but we rarely go into such a level of detail, because we don’t need to. It’s assumed by our familiarity with our surroundings that we understand the process of navigating through our neighborhood, of negotiating with the shopkeeper. In fact, the only time we even think about this level of interaction is when we are trying to explain it to somebody who is unfamiliar with the situation, whether a stranger or a child. These details are evoked for us by the environment.

Suchman contrasts this sense of embedded detail with how people were trying to program robots at the time. She uses the example of a robot designed to “navigate autonomously through a series of rooms”, where the robot would first observe the rooms, plot a course through them, and then follow that course. Of course, if obstacles were moved after it had plotted its course, it didn’t take that into account. As humans, we take for granted our ability to continually evolve our plans in response to our situation, but computers illustrate how difficult such situation awareness is to describe. She points out that plans, rather than being a blueprint of action, make more sense as a resource for action. The idea is that we make plans before entering a situation, and we draw upon those plans while in the situation, but if circumstances change, we obviously do not continue blindly following the plan. They are a resource, not a complete description. The similarities to Klein’s Naturalistic Decision-Making are apparent.

Similarly, the specification of plans makes more sense after the action has occurred, because afterwards we can figure out what actions were relevant to the goal which we were trying to achieve:

Instructions serve as a resource for describing what was done not only because they guide the course of action, but also because they filter out of the retrospective account of the action, or treat as “noise,” everything that was actually done that the instructions fail to mention. (p. 102)

Because instructions (or plans) only mention the parts that are considered relevant at any given point in time, they provide an extremely filtered world view that depends on the reader sharing a similar situation. For example, a set of assembly instructions can refer to a specific screw and assume that the assembler will find the right screw, because it came with the kit. As a total aside, it seems like the field of studying instructions can be philosophically fruitful; I seem to remember that Pirsig rants about instructions for several pages in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which spurs him on to making the classic/romantic split. Anyway.

Suchman also draws on the study of ethnomethodology, a branch of sociology. Mainstream sociology made the assumption that there was an objective social order, which could then be observed and described by trained sociologists. Ethnomethodology, as founded by Harold Garfinkel, insisted that social order was constructed, and that studying how that construction occurred should be the goal of sociologists. As Suchman notes, “The interest of ethnomethodologists … is in how it is that the mutual intelligibility and objectivity of the social world is achieved. … the objective reality of social facts is not the fundamental principle of social studies, but social studies’ fundamental phenomenon.” (p. 58)

She uses these concepts to study the art of conversation and communication. The thing I found interesting about her take on conversation is that it is not a simple transfer of information, where one person says something, and the other hears it. Because what is said is only the smallest part of the conversation, the listener must actively try to construct meaning from what the speaker is saying. The listener constructs a model in their head, using cues from the conversation to build that model. This can lead to unfortunate misunderstandings if the mental models of the speaker and listener diverge, despite both of them participating in the same conversation. I use the example of people talking past each other in meetings in this post. However, when it is working well, the meaning of the conversation is continually being constructed by its participants.

She points out that the advantage of having such a conversation with humans is that eventually inconsistencies in shared meaning become apparent and the listener stops and says “Wait a second, what do you mean by ?” Then the conversationalists can review their assumptions and confirm that their mental models are consistent. Computers do not have the same capability for mental model repair; they get stuck in a state, and have no way of exiting, so the human has to do all the heavy lifting of mental model adjustment (a.k.a. trying to figure out what the heck the computer is doing).

Yikes. This post is completely out of control. Obviously, there’s lots of good stuff in this book. I actually read the first half of the book while up in Portland, and then when I dug it out for my vacation a couple weeks ago, I tried picking up where I left off and couldn’t, so I ended up re-reading the first half and taking a whole new set of notes. It’s tough sledding in spots, but ultimately rewarding. Although I wouldn’t blame anyone for skipping straight to Paul Dourish’s book, which builds on Suchman’s work and describes her work in a couple concise pages. Mad props to Jofish for recommending both books.

I was at a dinner party last night and had a great time. It was a good mix of people, with good conversation ranging over a variety of topics. Afterwards, my friend and I were discussing what made for a good conversation. I’ve pondered this before, because I really like good conversations, and I previously came up with one semi-bogus theory that it had to do with world-view alignment. After throwing some ideas around with my friend, I have a new idea to toss out, so here we go.

The idea came up in relation to conversational synergy. Conversations among any pair of people in a group may not work particularly well, but when you put the right set of people together, all of a sudden the conversation takes off. Our theory is that you need the right mix of conversational styles. Each style alone may not work, but mix them together in the right proportions, and you have the recipe for a great conversation.

So to take my personal conversational style, I don’t feel like I can carry a group conversation. I don’t like being the center of attention. What I like to do in conversations is riff off of other people, occasionally taking center stage when I have something to contribute, and then fading back into the background when I don’t. Obviously, this is a conversational style that doesn’t work very well in a one-on-one conversation, because such conversations rely on both people taking the lead and working together. But in a group setting, it works great - I can sit back and be quiet, jump in when I have something to say, and then fade back while other people take over.

Other people are more comfortable being the center of attention and can drive the conversation. But everybody can’t be that way, or they’d all be competing for attention. Some people are great conversationalists and have a knack for asking good questions of others to draw them into the conversation. Others are like me, contributing in small bursts. It’s always good to have one person who likes to make completely outrageous statements, because it often drives the conversation forward in unexpected directions. It seems like a good group conversation needs all of these aspects mixed together.

An analogy I came up with while trying to describe this was comparing a group conversation to a jazz combo. You can’t have everybody be lead in a combo. You need somebody who likes to be out front, playing the sax (equivalent to the conversation drivers I mentioned). You have the combo leader, throwing out solos to each of the members (the good conversationalist). You have, say, the trombone, who’s lurking in the background, but occasionally comes out for the solo (that’d be me). The outrageous person is probably the equivalent of the trumpet, able to take over the center of attention anytime they please, but doing so judiciously. And when it all starts to work together, it can really fly.

I think one of the other aspects that applies to good conversations (and jazz combos) is trust. Trust that when you throw the lead to another member, they will take it for a while, but eventually return to the group. Trust that you can put yourself out there, and the rest of the group will be there to support you. This idea came up in the comments to my conversational alignment post, but I like it a lot, and I think it’s relevant here. If you don’t have that element of trust, then everybody starts competing for control of the conversation, and it becomes too directed.

A great conversation flows from one place to the next, guided collectively by the interests of everybody involved. Sometimes you miss a chance to contribute because the conversation has drifted on. But that’s okay, because there will be other opportunities. Trying to wrench it back is like trying to move a river upstream. You just have to go with the flow.

So trust, flow and the right mix of conversational styles. It’s a theory. It gives me the vague desire to start throwing dinner parties in an attempt to figure out the recipe. But I probably won’t.

I’d been meaning to follow up on last week’s post on conversational alignment but hadn’t gotten around to it. As I admitted in the livejournal comments on that post, I may have over reached in saying that reality coefficients had to be aligned to have a good conversation, because, as Dan pointed out, we can have good conversations with people with whom we disagree. I think the reality coefficient alignment is still relevant, because if the members of a conversation don’t agree that something is worth discussing, there won’t be a conversation, but it distracted from my point about language.

Aligning language is a painfully slow process. It’s a negotiation as we figure out that what we mean when we say something may be very different than what somebody else hears. As I mentioned in one of my comments, after our research group of 12 got re-hired by Sciex, we spent a full week in a conference room trying to get our language and expectations aligned between the biologists and the engineers. 9-5 every day in that room arguing, because when the biologists said something like “platform” they meant something completely different than what the engineers meant. It was an excruciating, and yet utterly necessary, process. And even now, such differences in language continue to arise. We’ll spend an hour arguing and realize that, after stripping all of the language connotations away, we are in “violent agreement”.

But while it’s painful and slow, aligning language is also essential to communication. As I put it in that comment thread, “Without investing the time to align language, people will often talk right past each other, and it’s not a conversation, it’s just noise - no information is getting transferred.” The excruciating nature of language alignment shows up all around us. The pages of legalese necessary to express a simple concept, because everything has to be spelled out with no chance of misinterpretation. The thousand-page contracts for government work, as every detail has to be annotated such that there can be no disputes later over the scope. We sweep all of that context alignment under the table in our everyday conversation, but it’s always lurking unless we have invested the time with our friends to be fairly confident that they will extract what we mean from what we say.

As an aside, I realized this also means that my dream piece of social software is basically impossible, where that dream is of software that essentially enables mind-reading, by translating between one person’s mental structure and context and another’s such that they always get what is meant. It would be the ultimate achievement of collaboration software. It’s alluded to in this post, where I talk about the idea as expressed in a sci-fi novel, and in this comment thread. But what I’ve now realized is that such software would have to have achieved artificial intelligence in order to negotiate the complex context alignment necessary to do such a translation. It would have to understand fully the set of previous experience and history that a participant brings to the conversation, and be able to place the conversation into that context. And that seems pretty unlikely.

As an aside to the aside, it does give me hope that this is a really hard problem. Hope not in the sense that I could solve it, but hope in realizing that this is a possibly rare skill that I believe I possess, where I have a flexible enough mindset to be able to translate between different groups of people. One of my main roles right now is to translate the requirements of our scientists and biologists into requirements that our production software group can understand. And it’s not something many people can do, because one has to understand the needs and desires of both sides very well. I haven’t quite figured out what such a role should be called (technical interpreter?), but I think it’s a valuable skill, and one I should be able to leverage in future career opportunities.

Back to my original thread about language alignment. One of the interesting things I realized after thinking about the work example was that language alignment happens in every arena of life where groups of people interact. Within fields as varied as computers and poststructuralist criticism, you have to learn the jargon to participate, because the jargon is a powerful language structure, used to compress conversations into a manageable size. On a sports team, you have to know what all of the different cries mean (I had a friend once stop by to watch me in an ultimate game, and they were utterly baffled by people shouting things like “Up!”, “Force away!”, “Strike!” and “Switch!”). Such language is essential for groups to function together, because describing what is meant at length every time a topic comes up is unsustainable. The group has to develop its own language such that its members can work together without spending all of their time arguing about what things mean.

This leads to another idea - can any group form without developing its own language? I’m beginning to think the answer is no. The hip kids, the sports fans, the computer hackers, the lawyers - each group has their own language that you have to learn to be accepted as a member of the group, whether it’s the visual language of fashion, or the highly technical language of the hacker. Even within an organization, the different groups will have their own specialized sub-branches of language. What implications does this have for team building? How do we encourage new teams to develop their own language that will help them bind together even closer? Does this get back into some of the issues of trust that I mention in that team building post?

Despite all the difficulties in achieving conversational alignment, I think it is an essential process, partially because groups can not function without such alignment, and partially because it’s just cool. Getting to know somebody well enough that you can essentially read their mind is a great experience. I recently re-read Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and think that his description of how the Second Foundation folks interact is the apotheosis of conversational alignment as I’ve described it, where a quirked eyebrow can convey a whole world of meaning. To some extent, we all aspire to know another that well - our closest relationships strive towards such a mind-meld.

Okay, this post got completely out of control. I’ll leave it here for now, and mull things over a while longer.

This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, partially wrote, but never got around to finishing. And I’m only finishing it today because I want to write another post that refers to it. Welcome to the wacky world that is my mind.

Here’s the question of the day: why is it that we have better and longer conversations with people that we know well? It seems like it should be the other way around - with people that we don’t know, there’s endless amounts to talk about, since no history is shared. With our good friends, we know all of their stories, we know all of the inside jokes, things that would otherwise take thirty minutes to explain can be referenced in a single word. And yet I can often find myself talking for hours with my best friends, whereas with people I don’t know, the conversation dies out in minutes, if not seconds. So understanding what the difference is matters to me, because I like good conversations.

After thinking about it for a while, I decided that it is not despite, but because of, those hours and hours that I have invested learning all of my friends’ histories and inside jokes that we have good conversations. We have invested that time in developing an understanding of each others’ mindsets. We can move past surface issues like definitional considerations and on to the really interesting idea cracking that lies underneath. We can use those inside jokes and references to skip over the boring parts and get to the heart of philosophical issues.

Essentially, all those hours we’ve spent learning about each other has let us align our reality coefficients, so that we are living in the same reality when we speak. As that footnote suggests, there has to be an initial similarity of reality coefficients to make conversation possible at all, but I think that reality coefficients can be jostled into closer alignment by steady application of conversation. The more we talk with somebody, the more we learn to view reality through their eyes, understanding why they place the values on things that they do. And by doing so, we can get to the core value differences and start exploring why those differ, which is often really interesting.

Meanwhile, with people we don’t know, we can start talking, but the conversation will often get hung up on very shallow things like a sharing of history (”Where’d you go to school? Oh, MIT? Wow, you must be smart!”). And there’s nothing wrong with that - you have to go through that stage to get to the more interesting stuff. But often, when faced with the effort of trying to get to know new people and put in the work necessary to get them aligned with my internal cognitive structure, I throw up my metaphorical hands in despair, and either go find some of my good friends or come back home and spew on my blog.

I guess this whole post is a restatement of the idea of exformation from The User Illusion, where exformation is the context that we use to interpret incoming communication. Since all incoming communication, whether speech or text, is relatively low bandwidth, it is up to our brains to unpack the coded information, using the “exformation” context, to make sense of it. I think the bit that is new here (although I haven’t read that book in years so it’s possible he talks about this) is the idea that a greater familiarity with somebody leads to a context that is more shared, and therefore communication that is less likely to be misinterpreted.

Huh. Just pulled out the book, and Norretranders doesn’t quite make the point, but has an apropos quote:

The least interesting aspect of good conversation is what is actually said. What is more interesting is all the deliberations and emotions that take place simultaneously during conversation in the heads and bodies of the conversers.

With people we don’t know, “what is actually said” is pretty much the same as “all the deliberations and emotions”. Because there is no shared context, we are forced to communicate through the narrow bandwidth of speech. With good friends, a shared context of “exformation” has been developed so that we can transmit much higher volumes of information through speech because a few words will evoke whole sets of memories. As I said earlier, “things that would otherwise take thirty minutes to explain can be referenced in a single word”. So our greater familiarity with each other allows us to have much broader exchanges of ideas because we are leveraging that familiarity to exchange vast swathes of information. Or to tie it into my recent line of thought, greater familiarity means building up similar cognitive subroutines, such that the same stimuli evoke the same reactions.

Anyway. More thought required. I think there’s some interesting stuff here, especially in the idea that becoming better friends is a re-alignment of reality coefficients. And that leveraging those reality coefficients is why we have better conversations with our friends than with strangers. But I’m getting tired, and I have one more quick post to write, so I’ll stop here for now.