Imagine that Alice is talking to Bob. She says the following, without pausing.
That house is ugly. You should read Harry Potter. We should get Chinese food.
We can think of it like this. Approach #1:
At t=1 Alice says “That house is ugly.”
At t=2 Alice says “You should read Harry Potter.”
At t=3 Alice says “We should get Chinese food.”
Suppose Bob wants to respond to the comment of “That house is ugly.” Due to the lack of pauses, Bob would have to interrupt Alice in order to get that response in. On the other hand, if Alice paused in between each comment, we can consider that Approach #2:
t=1: Alice says “That house is ugly.”
t=2: Alice pauses.
t=3: Alice says “You should read Harry Potter.”
t=4: Alice pauses.
t=5: Alice says “We should get Chinese food.”
then Bob wouldn’t have to interrupt if he wanted to respond.
Let’s call Approach #1 an inverted interruption. It forces the other person to interrupt if they have something to say.
I think inverted interruptions are something to be careful about. Not that they’re always bad, just that they should be kept in mind and considered in order to make communication both fun and effective.
Another example I ran into last night: at around 42:15 in this podcast episode, in one breath, Nate Duncan switches from talking about an NBA player named Fred VanVleet to an NBA player named Dillon Brooks in such a way that it didn’t give his cohost, Danny Leroux a chance to say something about Fred VanVleet.
Is there anything stopping you from commenting on ticket ABC-501 after the speaker stopped at t=3? “Circling back to ABC-501, I think we need to discuss how we haven’t actually met the user’s....”
That should only be awkward if your comment is superfluous.
I think that sometimes that sort of thing works. But other times it doesn’t. I’m having some trouble thinking about when exactly it does and doesn’t work.
One example of where I think it doesn’t is if the discussion of ABC-501 took 10 minutes, ABC-502 took another 10 minutes, ABC-503 takes another 10 minutes, and then after all of that you come back to ABC-501.
If you have a really important comment about ABC-501 then I agree it won’t be awkward, but if you have like a 4⁄10 importance comment, I feel like it both a) would be awkward and b) passes the threshold of being worth noting.
There’s the issue of having to “hold your comment in your head” as you’re waiting.
There’s the issue of lost context. People might have the context to understand your comment in the moment, but might have lost that context after the discussion of ABC-503 finished.
I think I notice that that people use placeholder words like “um” and “uh” in situations where they’d otherwise pause in order to prevent others from interjecting, because the speaker wants to continue saying what they want to say without being interrupted. I think this is subconscious though. (And not necessarily a bad thing.)
Inverted interruptions
Imagine that Alice is talking to Bob. She says the following, without pausing.
We can think of it like this. Approach #1:
At
t=1
Alice says “That house is ugly.”At
t=2
Alice says “You should read Harry Potter.”At
t=3
Alice says “We should get Chinese food.”Suppose Bob wants to respond to the comment of “That house is ugly.” Due to the lack of pauses, Bob would have to interrupt Alice in order to get that response in. On the other hand, if Alice paused in between each comment, we can consider that Approach #2:
t=1
: Alice says “That house is ugly.”t=2
: Alice pauses.t=3
: Alice says “You should read Harry Potter.”t=4
: Alice pauses.t=5
: Alice says “We should get Chinese food.”then Bob wouldn’t have to interrupt if he wanted to respond.
Let’s call Approach #1 an inverted interruption. It forces the other person to interrupt if they have something to say.
I think inverted interruptions are something to be careful about. Not that they’re always bad, just that they should be kept in mind and considered in order to make communication both fun and effective.
Can you describe a real-world situation where this sort of thing comes up? The artificialness of the example feels hard to engage with to me.
Another example I ran into last night: at around 42:15 in this podcast episode, in one breath, Nate Duncan switches from talking about an NBA player named Fred VanVleet to an NBA player named Dillon Brooks in such a way that it didn’t give his cohost, Danny Leroux a chance to say something about Fred VanVleet.
Certainly! It actually just happened at work. I’m a programmer. We were doing sprint planning, going through tickets. The speaker did something like:
t=1
: Some comments on ticket ABC-501t=2
: Some comments on ticket ABC-502t=3
: Some comments on ticket ABC-503If I wanted to say something about ABC-501, I would have had to interrupt.
Is there anything stopping you from commenting on ticket ABC-501 after the speaker stopped at t=3? “Circling back to ABC-501, I think we need to discuss how we haven’t actually met the user’s....”
That should only be awkward if your comment is superfluous.
I think that sometimes that sort of thing works. But other times it doesn’t. I’m having some trouble thinking about when exactly it does and doesn’t work.
One example of where I think it doesn’t is if the discussion of ABC-501 took 10 minutes, ABC-502 took another 10 minutes, ABC-503 takes another 10 minutes, and then after all of that you come back to ABC-501.
If you have a really important comment about ABC-501 then I agree it won’t be awkward, but if you have like a 4⁄10 importance comment, I feel like it both a) would be awkward and b) passes the threshold of being worth noting.
There’s the issue of having to “hold your comment in your head” as you’re waiting.
There’s the issue of lost context. People might have the context to understand your comment in the moment, but might have lost that context after the discussion of ABC-503 finished.
I think I notice that that people use placeholder words like “um” and “uh” in situations where they’d otherwise pause in order to prevent others from interjecting, because the speaker wants to continue saying what they want to say without being interrupted. I think this is subconscious though. (And not necessarily a bad thing.)