> it tends to favor the narcissist and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else
While this is a great point, I wouldn't say it is just narcissists and egoists. I spent quite a lot of meetings before being the "Jane" or just sitting waiting for people to end until I learned to cut off and intersect at a point, but I spent quite a lot of the time wondering why some people keep on talking and have noticed a few categories.
1. ) We got the narcissists and egoists. Some talk because they love to talk and hear themselves, some love the attention, some talk because they think only their opinion is worthy.
2.) We got "look how smart I am" talkers - Wouldn't put them in the first category, but these people will usually take a point other participants make, say it differently then start explaining it to prove themselves smart. Fits more under the category below, but is a category of its own since it can also be not from insecurity, but "smarter than thou" attitude.
3. ) We got insecure ones - some people start talking with the good intent of trying to offer useful information, but due to their insecurities they start overly-explaining it and rambling off since they keep waiting for someone to intersect and give them approval. You can usually notice them by the anxious rush to talk and weird "uhhh..ah...and...umm" breaks where they are checking for feedback from the audience, and if they dont get it, they continue talking.
4. ) The "breadth-first explainers" - These people are trying to communicate their idea or vision, but their method of communication is breadth-first explaining. Unfortunately, instead of "We can do A and B" they wander of into explaining everything related to every point in-between A and B. Example:
"We just need to make a HTTP Request... So we can make a POST call here - POST is the type of request that creates data - like POST with the new name, surname, title or it can be anything like the whole model, a file... other request serve for other purposes, you have GET.... (10 minutes later).. So we will make the client - this can be the phone, computer, watch - send the data to the server.."
They suck to have in meetings when its all about ideating and innovating. They are great to have in meetings when stuff is known and needs to be explained to customers/people out of context.
5. ) The managers - I call them the managers because they either call the meetings to discuss nothing or make sure the meeting is spend discussing irrelevant or tangentially relevant topics instead of dealing with the actual topics. They usually take someones question or answer to go off into unrelated, often philosophical topics. Still not sure why some do it and is it insecurity, showing off or just the lack of social awareness.
6.) The sellers - I'd put them with narcissists, but they deserve a category of their own. These people usually have something they want to sell or a narrative they want to push. They will wander off into stories that support their cause, taking up as much time as possible of the meeting to minimise time available to resist the sell. A lot of these usually work as sales and when the meeting is over, it's either their way or "lets continue the discussion some other time".