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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Meetings are bad but no meetings are even worse...

Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.

- 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.

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.

This happens in Zoom meetings and phone calls all the time too. It’s even worse in remote land when it happens.

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.

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.

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".

Discussion in meetings has felt mostly useless to me over the years for the exact reasons that the parent pointed out. On the other hand, some of the best work I've done was at a job where the person I worked with most had the same train ride home as me, so we'd just chat for half an hour 2-3x a week. It allowed both of us to work through ideas, and come to much stronger conclusions.

Face-to-Face conversation can also happen remote synchronous.

In addition, while whiteboards can still be nice for certain things, over the past few years I've also come to realize that collaborative docs (e.g. Google Docs) are actually as good or better for a lot of purposes.

Not sure if this is due to something I lack, or if (some) people are less attentive/perceptive/focused in phone/video calls.

- it's easier to be distracted - it's harder to read gestures and expressions, worse with group meeting - with normal keyboard and mouch / touchpad even touchscreen, it's harder to sketch - while small, there is latency and it can be distracting enough

IMO it's easier if the communication is one way at a time, not both at the same time.

In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.

I think the reality of face to face meetings is that the result is often almost predetermined based on the existing group dynamics. How many people are turning up to the meeting feeling their input will make a difference versus people with (probably) the dominant personalities who are happy their established conclusion is chosen. And seeing the later as naturally coming to a better conclusion, faster.

As a dominant personality in meetings I definitely think about the effects of that a bunch.

> In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.

Why is face-to-face required for "group reasoning"?

Because it raises the bar on starting a meeting. And it keeps half the meeting from being muted/camera-off and totally zoned out.

Why is Slack “better” than physically mailed correspondence? It’s roughly the same phenomenon, just on an even shorter timescale (including that Slack isn’t better for everything).

But there are situations where speed of alignment matters more than the specific direction of alignment and other situations where the nature of humans requires a live, synchronous discussion. I couldn't build a relationship with my family using only written feedback and requests.

Me writing something in my cocoon for 15 minutes, then someone reading that and replying what is wrong with that is not very efficient.

Just throwing some thoughts in the open air and others responding to that, crystallizes much faster.

Same with giving feedback about user interfaces. It's so much easier to just walk to someone's desk and point at what you think should be changed. You can interact instantly.

That is not to say that I don't see the value in written communication, documentation and having a log of what happened. It's very much a trade-off.

Then there is also the hierarchy of expert advice to consider where a room of experts some who are more senior (or louder or more convinced about their rightness) might push you towards a worse outcome than a well thought through option.

I feel a decision taken “live” with the help of experts needs to be viewed with more skepticism than less.

Maybe we are talking past each other, because in that case I might agree.

I'm talking about the case with only experts present. I know about A but not so much about B, the other person knows about B but not so much about A. We sit together and try to come up with the best technical solution.

I've felt like "group reasoning" in person is more like getting people on the same page to execute on an idea, which doesn't equate with the merit of that idea.

Once that discussion kicks off in a large-ish group, I've found it hard to pivot the direction of that conversation - if you think there's a better, independent solution that's not aligned with the group train of thought.

I think it works best when there needs to be a solution where no single expert knows enough to come up with the best idea. So a group of complementary experts where the solution is more important than individual ego's :).

But when it's kind of decided already, so more 1 way, written communication works better.

I was in some situations where there was long emailing back and forth between people. Then it was decided "to just have a call on this", and came to a solution in 15 minutes.

It's definitely about trade-offs, and I can see benefits in both. So I wouldn't just throw away the power that "a bunch of people in a room" can have.

...then you have an organizational problem that should be solved.

Speed is not a proxy for decision quality. It's almost always the opposite.

Very few technical topics require quick forth and back. Writing is more effective communication.

For example, our team used to have a 15 minute standup meeting every day, where we would go around and give our status updates. Many people complained that most of the time, the information being shared wasn’t relevant to them. We replaced it with a daily Slack thread where people could share their updates. Then, in the 15-minute meeting people could ask any questions they had or bring up anything they wanted to discuss more. This resulted in the daily standup meetings becoming a much more effective use of everyone’s time.

That and to me at least almost more important is the ability to refer back to history.

You have a little oral discussion with your co-workers about an issue, or maybe ask for some clarification on something etc. Then a few days later when you think you need that info again, it's gone.

Having a discussion in Slack, Mattermost, email, etc allows me to always refer back and see what we've been talking about. Which can be vital especially in those situations where we're talking about complex issues with complex answers. The fact that I can a week later go back and see the same clarification again, is definitely helpful