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The Church of Interruption

sambleckley.com

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Re: The Church of Interruption

#81

Post by quanticle »

Osiris wrote: post #72
sgentle wrote: post #70

I've noticed a pretty heinous conversational pattern develop out of interruption sometimes. In theory, the best way to conduct a church-of-interruption exchange of ideas is big-endian: you begin by summarising your idea and only then flesh out the details. That way if your conclusion is understood you find out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, if your conversational partner tends to interrupt incorrectly or in b…

That's an interesting approach. For me, the issue with that, is that I'm more of a "stream of consciousness" conversationalist, where I say things as they come to mind and rarely have time to parse them in the way you suggest. Maybe it's a matter of practice.

I find stream of consciousness rambling to be extremely irritating. Normally, I'm very much against interrupting, but I have been known to butt in to stream of consciousness speech, saying, "Okay, and what's your point?"

Re: The Church of Interruption

#82

Post by quanticle »

jacobolus wrote: post #31
dustinls wrote: post #14

This falls apart when you have an interrupter who thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue. They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it' and when they inevitably screw up its your fault for not explaining it right.

> thinks they know everything, but really doesn't have a clue This is a somewhat separate problem from whether someone is an interrupter or not, though conversational style can have an influence on when miscommunication is likely to happen. > They don't let you explain critical detail about something because 'they got it they got it' Well-meaning non-interrupters who “think they know everything but really don’t have…

It seems like it would be a separate problem, but in my experience, the two are linked. The person who is interrupting is interrupting because they're highly confident in their own viewpoint. We like to think that confidence must necessarily be correlated with how true our view is, but that isn't the case. There are some people who are equally confident of all of their views, no matter how much or how little evidence they have for those views. It's those people who interrupt, even though they don't have a clue.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#83

Post by freddie_mercury »

kranner wrote: post #66
freddie_mercury wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The research on the subject goes back 50 years to the 1970s and is essentially considered open and shut. As a rule of thumb, men will interrupt women 3x as much as women will interrupt men. You can Google and read dozens of studies over decades all repeatedly confirming it in various cultures, countries, and jobs. It applies to women Supreme Court justices and to women janitors. FWIW, instead of the confrontational "…

I'm well aware of the phenomenon but it is not the kind of interruption I'm talking about. To be clear, I'm talking about men-interrupting-men-and-women-because-they-are-interrupters vs women-interrupting-men-and-women-because-they-are-interrupters, and not men-interrupting-women-because-they-are-sexist. The context of the article is the former, clearly. Also, I don't consider "is there any reason to think" to be con…

I think you are misunderstanding the research. It shows exactly what you are talking about; the link discusses just one recent subset of the phenomenon.

Men interrupt men more than women do.

Men interrupt women more than women do.

Men interrupt more than women.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#84

Post by DoreenMichele »

andrewstuart wrote: post #34

I feel like I'm getting worse at communicating as I get older. My former partner kept telling me I don't listen. Which resulted in my thinking "What, what does that even mean?". To this day I am still trying to learn how to listen. I am also very much aware I am an interrupter. I know how bad this is and even so it is still hard to stop. I also interrupt when I am excited and enthusiastic and when I like the person I…

My former partner kept telling me I don't listen.

Which resulted in my thinking "What, what does that even mean?".

There can be just so very many reasons why people fail to communicate. I would be leery of chalking it up to any one thing.

As the article under discussion notes, interrupters sometimes do fine with some people and sometimes have tremendous problems with others. This is probably generally true of just about any communication thing you can name.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#85

Post by DoreenMichele »

otikik wrote: post #80

I'm a Meek and one of the strategies I have developed for dealing with more interrupt-based communicators is to rely on an asynchronous, written medium. Be it slack, a shared google drive doc, whatever. "Hey, can we have a meeting to discuss X" will often be answered by "here's my written opinion on X and the different options I see. If you still think we need to meet, here's my availability". If this doesn't remove…

I'm prone to interrupting people. It's worse if I'm not feeling heard, if I really feel they are missing a lot of important information and for a few other reasons.

I have found email and other forms of written communication wonderful for effectively sidestepping the worst problems. I can lay everything out that I think matters in an order that communicates effectively. It's much easier to do something like that in writing than in conversation, especially when there are time constraints and you don't know them that well or otherwise don't have the best rapport.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#86

Post by ummwhat »

closeparen wrote: post #44
dbcurtis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just hazarding a guess, I suspect women transfer out of the group at the first opportunity.

Alice makes a multipart statement about topics one and two. Bob replies to topic two and starts to segue to topic three. Carol has something important to say about topic one. What is Carol supposed to do? Let the entire chain play out, then transition back to topic one when there's an opening? I know people can be bitter about interruption, but in my experience you get a prompt and decisive smackdown for trying to ba…

I find when talking with computer people, just saying "if I could move a few layers back up the stack" let's you backtrack to problem 1 if you want. This only works if you have people who understand the idea of the conversation as a stack.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#87

Post by DoreenMichele »

closeparen wrote: post #44
dbcurtis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And just hazarding a guess, I suspect women transfer out of the group at the first opportunity.

Alice makes a multipart statement about topics one and two. Bob replies to topic two and starts to segue to topic three. Carol has something important to say about topic one. What is Carol supposed to do? Let the entire chain play out, then transition back to topic one when there's an opening? I know people can be bitter about interruption, but in my experience you get a prompt and decisive smackdown for trying to ba…

I think I would try to impose some structure and possibly have an actual moderator.

I basically moderate an in person meeting once a month (though my title is chair, not moderator). I'm supposed to keep things on topic, curtail problematic behavior and try to get us out of there on time. I also take written notes.

How you do that depends on a variety of factors, including the personalities involved.

So I would think about recurrent problematic patterns and try to resolve those.

Is the problem that Alice is prone to being long winded and talking about many things?

Is the problem that Bob routinely jumps in to say something about X, then just takes over the conversation, going wherever he so desires?

Etc.

So, some things that might help:

1. A written agenda for the meetings. You discuss topic A. Everyone gets their say. You check if everyone has said their piece before you move on to topic B.

2. You lay some ground rules that address specific problems you've noticed. Don't single anyone out, even if it's primarily one person guilty of doing it. Just write up a policy saying "We will not be doing x. We will do a, b and c."

3. Name a specific person who is supposed to keep the meeting on track. Part of that role includes helping make sure everyone gets to participate in a satisfactory manner.

4. Plan time at the end of the meeting for random comments, people returning to a point from earlier, etc.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#88

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Osiris wrote: post #72
sgentle wrote: post #70

I've noticed a pretty heinous conversational pattern develop out of interruption sometimes. In theory, the best way to conduct a church-of-interruption exchange of ideas is big-endian: you begin by summarising your idea and only then flesh out the details. That way if your conclusion is understood you find out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, if your conversational partner tends to interrupt incorrectly or in b…

That's an interesting approach. For me, the issue with that, is that I'm more of a "stream of consciousness" conversationalist, where I say things as they come to mind and rarely have time to parse them in the way you suggest. Maybe it's a matter of practice.

It is; I think a lot of people go for stream of consciousness speaking because they're afraid if they pause someone else will take over the conversation. But the reality is that people's attention span just drops down after a sentence or two, especially if it's stream of consciousness - they have to spend more and more energy to follow your thoughts. Which is absolutely fine in some situations, but it's not the most efficient.

Your message comes across a lot more clearly if you get your thoughts in order before starting to speak. This is difficult at first, because if you're not practiced the conversation will have moved on before you've got your thoughts in line, but it is a skill you can practice. Take one of your stream of consciousness statements, maybe write it down, and repeat it a dozen times, each time making it shorter and more to the point - assertive, definitive, without feeling like you have to expand on your every point. Assume that if something is unclear, the other party will ask. But also try and limit the amount of concepts in one sentence so you don't overwhelm the other party with new stuff. (assuming you're talking technology or something of course).

Re: The Church of Interruption

#89

Post by Cthulhu_ »

rgoulter wrote: post #7

This also supports that: if person A has the expectation "they'll interrupt/reply once they understand" and B has the expectation "let the speaker finish", this leads to A rambling. (A has no indication that things were understood).

I think in a lot of situations there needs to be one of the parties that steers the conversation a bit - interrupt themselves or the other party if they're going on a tangent. It takes some time and practice but it will pay off in the end.

Re: The Church of Interruption

#90

Post by steeveblack »

ummwhat wrote: post #86
closeparen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alice makes a multipart statement about topics one and two. Bob replies to topic two and starts to segue to topic three. Carol has something important to say about topic one. What is Carol supposed to do? Let the entire chain play out, then transition back to topic one when there's an opening? I know people can be bitter about interruption, but in my experience you get a prompt and decisive smackdown for trying to ba…

I find when talking with computer people, just saying "if I could move a few layers back up the stack" let's you backtrack to problem 1 if you want. This only works if you have people who understand the idea of the conversation as a stack.

I've had a group of colleagues where we would at a point say "ok, pop, pop, pop". That meant this same thing.
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