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One reason I have found real-time communication ineffective is that it favors the narcissists and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over e

One reason I have found real-time communication ineffective is that it favors the narcissists and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else. Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept. Oh, and did I say that this interruption and talking for a long time seems to get ten time worse over video calls for some reason – perhaps because Bob finds it easier to pontificate while in his pajamas compared to having to stand up and talk in front of his peers in the office. Yeah, I know the standard retort for this is "your meeting must have an agenda" et cetera. Guess what, look at the last 5 meetings on your calendar and tell me truthfully how many of them have a real agenda (mindlessly repeating the title as the description doesn't count). People don't want to do it, because, guess what, it adds an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time. So, I have found that just going the whole way and just having the entire communication asynchronously is often better at ensuring more equitable participation.

tristor 5y ago
Assume good intent on the part of others. This is generally good advice, but especially true in the work place. I have been “Bob” some times, but it was not out of ego. Sometimes a meeting is called because there is a problem that doesn’t fall neatly into existing organizational buckets and the company is doing a scavenger hunt to identify existing domain experts. If you’re that domain expert, your role in that meeting is to quickly establish that fact and work to bring everyone to a shared understanding of the issue, possible causes, and possible solutions. Also, sometimes meetings are not called for a conversation, they are called for an information broadcast that requires people’s undivided attention because alignment and understanding needs to be established before work can continue. I have been on both the receiving end of “Bob”, and stuck being “Bob”. But, to your point having a good agenda is crucial, partly to frame things ahead of time so meeting participants know if this is a broadcast, a conversation, or a scavenger hunt. For the latter, most importantly because maybe “Bob” knows that “Linda” is the foremost expert on X and should have been invited.
EliRivers 5y ago
it puts an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time. Oh, the difficultly of getting people to think about things in advance. The number of meetings where it's clear that basically nobody has actually put any thought in, done any research, even read the entire meeting invitation. Meetings become a way to force people to spend time on a topic, and the act of being there where everyone can see them means they can't goof off and do something else again.
- blablabla123 5y ago
  Also sometimes there is a situation where several people are involved and then it's necessary to forward the arguments back and forth. Better to get those people who don't talk to one another synchronously in a meeting agree/disagree on something without getting all the flak as the intermediate hop. Meetings are bad but no meetings are even worse...
- nobrains 5y ago
  I remember reading about a company (maybe Amazon?) where they spend the first minutes of the meeting reading the agenda and other reading pre-requisites for the meeting, then start the actual meeting
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    one of their few good culture ideas.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Hallway track and socializing more generally aside, this is one of the advantages of in person events as well. You may dip into an online event for a couple hours and mean to watch some other on-demand video--but I'm guessing most of us never do.
fps_doug 5y ago
It sounds like it's a workaround for dealing with bad co-workers? You can still have these in async communication and others will just give up eventually. And then the guy who gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly. Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  Great point! I think I briefly mentioned it in my post, but I think that maybe there's three separate categories that I'm talking about. - Real-time communication in person (face-to-face) - Real-time communication remotely - Asynchronous communication remotely The scenario you mention "gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly” seems to be in the category "Real-time communication remotely" (phone is real time, but remote). I think that area is problematic too, as my post points out. Overall, I guess my experience has been that asynchronous communication remotely and real-time communication in person are both better than real-time communication remotely (aka "endless Zoom calls"). Real-time in person seems to have more feedback loops where someone who is badly behaved faces social consequences (e.g. not invited to lunch, etc.); and asynchronous remote seems to prevent it a little by giving everyone an equal amount of space to express their thoughts. But overall, yep, I think all of these are assuming less-than-ideal coworkers. But...that's reality, isn't it? With perfectly behaved coworkers, all three options can work perfectly.
  - captainredbeard 5y ago
    Nonsense, asynchronous / remote comm just optimizes for people who live online. They can respond faster leading to an initiative advantage which was previously restricted to “egoists”, as you put it.
Hoasi 5y ago
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept. True story. I've seen it happen over and over again, and it's one of the many reasons why I would be very reluctant to become an employee ever again.
- mgkimsal 5y ago
  Doesn't matter if you're strictly an employee or not. I find myself doing this sometimes myself, as an external contractor. It's more about the dynamics of who you're working with and how you communicate. And... I'm now more aware than ever about how I can talk over others and possibly be suppressing input/ideas from others. Remote meetings are a mixed bag, because sometimes there's legitimate "talking over/past" others due to audio delays (vs POTS).
brtkdotse 5y ago
There’s a deeper aspect to this and that is that meritocracy is a fantasy. People skills trump almost _everything_ else, including black hat people skills like dominating a room.
- arethuza 5y ago
  What I sadly learned years ago is that a bad idea presented with absolute confidence and certainty will pretty much always beat a good idea presented with caveats and answers to questions that start with "It depends...". The other thing I've noticed is that people who have good ideas are usually all too aware of the limitations and corner cases so will never present something with absolute confidence.
  - belval 5y ago
    Similarly in research group the easy way to prevent criticism is to make your approach look as complex as possible, with as many math equations as you can cram and a healthy dose of lingo. That way people are too confused to ask relevant questions and management usually lacks the background to form an opinion so they will take the team silence as an endorsement.
thecupisblue 5y ago
> 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".
another-dave 5y ago
Maybe we need more structural hurdles than just the agenda — e.g. everyone gets an egg timer that refills more slowly than it empties. You flip it when you start talking.
- timezap 5y ago
  I’m developing a tool along this line of thinking - providing light structure to meetings, currently at https://timezap.io https://timezap.io.
- newsclues 5y ago
  Need more social cohesion.
technofiend 5y ago
It's no fun if you don't enjoy confrontation but interrupting the interrupters a few times will eventually send the message you won't tolerate that kind of behavior. They will eventually learn it's not tolerated or accepted. One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking. Then he would reintroduce the subject and if they again tried to take over this boss would literally say "We've heard what you had to say, but XYZ wanted the say something as well". More than just stopping the disruptive behavior you have to acknowledge it and make it clear something else will happen now.
- rmdashrfv 5y ago
  > One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking This is what people need to learn how to do. And I think this is the biggest issue I have with WFH is that it puts people in a position where they don't have to develop the skills necessary to resolve conflict. They can just leave a call or ignore an email. I had a conflict with one manager while working remotely at one job and rather than even address the issue with me, she just removed me from the team Slack channel. I sent a very apologetic and peacemaking message, which she proceeded to ignore. Although I don't work there anymore, we do live in the same city. So if I do see her and she tries to pull a fake smile, I hope she's ready to address that immediately. However you feel about interpersonal communication, I think I speak for everyone when I say: I don't want to be part of any organization where people can rise up to positions of leadership or decision-making without having any capacity or tolerance for conflict.
sbarre 5y ago
Bob sounds pretty annoying, but I would also say that this team has a leadership failure if this is what happens regularly. If I was Bob's manager I would have a clear conversation with him about his behaviour, and I would - at minimum - make sure that everyone on the team has a chance to present their ideas without interruption.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Indeed. And this is also one of the things that would most quickly lead to a firing if the behaviour doesn't change at companies I have worked at (much quicker than poor output).
ericmay 5y ago
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. This happens in Zoom meetings and phone calls all the time too. It’s even worse in remote land when it happens.
- StevePerkins 5y ago
  I have had great experiences over the past two years with the "Chat" box in Zoom (where introverts have the power to asynchronously "talk over" the blowhard extrovert!). And with the "Raise Hand" option in Microsoft Teams (which feels like less of an escalation than literally raising your hand in a physical meeting). As someone who is accustomed to getting steamrolled in office meetings, the past two years have been life-changing. I actually feel like a member of a team for the first time in my career.

tristor 5y ago

Assume good intent on the part of others. This is generally good advice, but especially true in the work place. I have been “Bob” some times, but it was not out of ego. Sometimes a meeting is called because there is a problem that doesn’t fall neatly into existing organizational buckets and the company is doing a scavenger hunt to identify existing domain experts. If you’re that domain expert, your role in that meeting is to quickly establish that fact and work to bring everyone to a shared understanding of the issue, possible causes, and possible solutions. Also, sometimes meetings are not called for a conversation, they are called for an information broadcast that requires people’s undivided attention because alignment and understanding needs to be established before work can continue. I have been on both the receiving end of “Bob”, and stuck being “Bob”. But, to your point having a good agenda is crucial, partly to frame things ahead of time so meeting participants know if this is a broadcast, a conversation, or a scavenger hunt. For the latter, most importantly because maybe “Bob” knows that “Linda” is the foremost expert on X and should have been invited.

EliRivers 5y ago

it puts an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time. Oh, the difficultly of getting people to think about things in advance. The number of meetings where it's clear that basically nobody has actually put any thought in, done any research, even read the entire meeting invitation. Meetings become a way to force people to spend time on a topic, and the act of being there where everyone can see them means they can't goof off and do something else again.

blablabla123 5y ago
Also sometimes there is a situation where several people are involved and then it's necessary to forward the arguments back and forth. Better to get those people who don't talk to one another synchronously in a meeting agree/disagree on something without getting all the flak as the intermediate hop. Meetings are bad but no meetings are even worse...
nobrains 5y ago
I remember reading about a company (maybe Amazon?) where they spend the first minutes of the meeting reading the agenda and other reading pre-requisites for the meeting, then start the actual meeting
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  one of their few good culture ideas.
ghaff 5y ago
Hallway track and socializing more generally aside, this is one of the advantages of in person events as well. You may dip into an online event for a couple hours and mean to watch some other on-demand video--but I'm guessing most of us never do.

fps_doug 5y ago

It sounds like it's a workaround for dealing with bad co-workers? You can still have these in async communication and others will just give up eventually. And then the guy who gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly. Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.

quadrifoliate 5y ago
Great point! I think I briefly mentioned it in my post, but I think that maybe there's three separate categories that I'm talking about. - Real-time communication in person (face-to-face) - Real-time communication remotely - Asynchronous communication remotely The scenario you mention "gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly” seems to be in the category "Real-time communication remotely" (phone is real time, but remote). I think that area is problematic too, as my post points out. Overall, I guess my experience has been that asynchronous communication remotely and real-time communication in person are both better than real-time communication remotely (aka "endless Zoom calls"). Real-time in person seems to have more feedback loops where someone who is badly behaved faces social consequences (e.g. not invited to lunch, etc.); and asynchronous remote seems to prevent it a little by giving everyone an equal amount of space to express their thoughts. But overall, yep, I think all of these are assuming less-than-ideal coworkers. But...that's reality, isn't it? With perfectly behaved coworkers, all three options can work perfectly.
- captainredbeard 5y ago
  Nonsense, asynchronous / remote comm just optimizes for people who live online. They can respond faster leading to an initiative advantage which was previously restricted to “egoists”, as you put it.

Hoasi 5y ago

> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept. True story. I've seen it happen over and over again, and it's one of the many reasons why I would be very reluctant to become an employee ever again.

mgkimsal 5y ago
Doesn't matter if you're strictly an employee or not. I find myself doing this sometimes myself, as an external contractor. It's more about the dynamics of who you're working with and how you communicate. And... I'm now more aware than ever about how I can talk over others and possibly be suppressing input/ideas from others. Remote meetings are a mixed bag, because sometimes there's legitimate "talking over/past" others due to audio delays (vs POTS).

brtkdotse 5y ago

There’s a deeper aspect to this and that is that meritocracy is a fantasy. People skills trump almost _everything_ else, including black hat people skills like dominating a room.

arethuza 5y ago
What I sadly learned years ago is that a bad idea presented with absolute confidence and certainty will pretty much always beat a good idea presented with caveats and answers to questions that start with "It depends...". The other thing I've noticed is that people who have good ideas are usually all too aware of the limitations and corner cases so will never present something with absolute confidence.
- belval 5y ago
  Similarly in research group the easy way to prevent criticism is to make your approach look as complex as possible, with as many math equations as you can cram and a healthy dose of lingo. That way people are too confused to ask relevant questions and management usually lacks the background to form an opinion so they will take the team silence as an endorsement.

thecupisblue 5y ago

> 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".

another-dave 5y ago

Maybe we need more structural hurdles than just the agenda — e.g. everyone gets an egg timer that refills more slowly than it empties. You flip it when you start talking.

timezap 5y ago
I’m developing a tool along this line of thinking - providing light structure to meetings, currently at https://timezap.io https://timezap.io.
newsclues 5y ago
Need more social cohesion.

technofiend 5y ago

It's no fun if you don't enjoy confrontation but interrupting the interrupters a few times will eventually send the message you won't tolerate that kind of behavior. They will eventually learn it's not tolerated or accepted. One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking. Then he would reintroduce the subject and if they again tried to take over this boss would literally say "We've heard what you had to say, but XYZ wanted the say something as well". More than just stopping the disruptive behavior you have to acknowledge it and make it clear something else will happen now.

rmdashrfv 5y ago
> One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking This is what people need to learn how to do. And I think this is the biggest issue I have with WFH is that it puts people in a position where they don't have to develop the skills necessary to resolve conflict. They can just leave a call or ignore an email. I had a conflict with one manager while working remotely at one job and rather than even address the issue with me, she just removed me from the team Slack channel. I sent a very apologetic and peacemaking message, which she proceeded to ignore. Although I don't work there anymore, we do live in the same city. So if I do see her and she tries to pull a fake smile, I hope she's ready to address that immediately. However you feel about interpersonal communication, I think I speak for everyone when I say: I don't want to be part of any organization where people can rise up to positions of leadership or decision-making without having any capacity or tolerance for conflict.

sbarre 5y ago

Bob sounds pretty annoying, but I would also say that this team has a leadership failure if this is what happens regularly. If I was Bob's manager I would have a clear conversation with him about his behaviour, and I would - at minimum - make sure that everyone on the team has a chance to present their ideas without interruption.

nicoburns 5y ago
Indeed. And this is also one of the things that would most quickly lead to a firing if the behaviour doesn't change at companies I have worked at (much quicker than poor output).

ericmay 5y ago

StevePerkins 5y ago
I have had great experiences over the past two years with the "Chat" box in Zoom (where introverts have the power to asynchronously "talk over" the blowhard extrovert!). And with the "Raise Hand" option in Microsoft Teams (which feels like less of an escalation than literally raising your hand in a physical meeting). As someone who is accustomed to getting steamrolled in office meetings, the past two years have been life-changing. I actually feel like a member of a team for the first time in my career.