The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating. I don't have a polite way to stop that one yet. I think some of it is just that we all pick up traumas and trigger words, and you've gotta recognize when someone said "banana" that doesn't actually mean "the thing I slipped on five years ago."
Selective doses of being impolite can be extremely effective, especially when you're otherwise very polite.
(One of several variants: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/21/offense/>)
The most effective method I've found is making that person responsible for resolving whatever the issue is. Not always possible, but especially when it happens in group settings, some verbal judo can work even if you can't "officially" task them.
(Make sure to memorialize that in an email afterwards, or it will probably retroactively never have happened.)
"So, I see your business model is to make widgets. But ... uh... I don't really understand these ideas but that's called capital intensive, right? So, you're gonna have a factory, with a bunch of workers... in San Francisco? Won't that be really expensive, and ... uh, I guess that means your profit margin will be small? Could you put your factory in Kansas?"
(paraphrased but essentially accurate question I asked when being pitched by a hardware startup at a major VC that I advised)
But more to the point, I find that asking for clarification is the best tactic in the aforementioned circumstances. That way, you avoid having to make accusations. It removes all pretext for getting defensive and focuses the discussion on the substance and merit rather than the character flaws and lack of speaking skills of the other. If the other person starts to get unjustifiably angry, this reflects poorly on them, not you, so there is no need to feel any guilt. Be honest and never lie. Do not pretend to understand someone just because you think asking for clarification will make you look less competent. Maybe you are less competent, in which case pretending to competence you don't actually have is dishonest and unjust. You also close off the doors to learning. And if you are competent, then there's nothing to worry about. Bullshitters feed off pretense, and honest people are dismayed by it.
A few suggestions for getting more value out of your observations:
* in the moment, particularly if it's heated, you won't make a ton of headway unless you really know the parties involved and know how to frame "i think you agree with each other" well enough to be heard over the argumentative mindset. Instead pointing it out to each party individually in a later/follow up discussion can help a lot!
* If you have a good "people person" mentor or manager, just pointing it out to them can often result in positive outcomes, because they can take it on themselves to have the discussions in the background or if you ask for it, mentor you in how to get that across in a well-received way.
* sometimes when people are arguing with each other in agreement, the issue is usually semantics and someone (or everyone) has a different take on some word/phrase/name whatever being used. A good tactic is to try and identify where that bit of disagreement is and play dumb (it works best when you're in a "junior" position but can work in any situation) and say something like - "wait, sorry to interrupt but I don't quite get the difference between foobar and barfoo can you help me understand?" and then when they explain to you, the neutral third party, they'll come to the realization that they are arguing in agreement after all.
I've been in your shoes before and the above advice helped me get going so I'm passing it along. For me the difficulty in relaying the info came from a couple places:
* I was afraid of speaking out of turn, or looking dumb. It turns out that the "dumb look" i was afraid of is often interpreted as "wow this guy is asking smart questions", and at worst it's interpreted as "this guy needed a bit of a different explanation to grok it".
* I didn't realize that people don't need to understand that I was seeing them argue in agreement or avoid the question. I just needed to ask my own clarifying questions until everyone got the info/agreement they needed. If they get that I was driving at "arguing in agreement" or if they think I resolved a conflict, it doesn't matter - the goal of "we're all on the same page" was successfully reached.
I've still got a lot to learn in this whole area, but even trying to address those things often helps smooth out the rough bits and is useful. HTH!
If you ask a question and someone is scornful ("you should know that already!"), First time it's on them, second time it's on you, third time update your resume.
I don't use it so much for the teasing out agreement or highlighting problems angle though - one of my goals is setting the accepted threshold for dumb questions low enough that junior/newer or less confident team members aren't afraid to ask their own "dumb questions". Those questions are usually more important than mine, and teams that don't have that "no question is too dumb" culture are often dysfunctional or heading that way.
The "pet peeve" thing in particular I catch myself in regularly, where I realize I didn't actually answer someone's question, instead mapping their meaning to my preferred topic. It's interesting how just listening is a skill.
The Communications class I attended early in my career has been incredibly useful.
Setting aside the communication skills of specific engineers, various stakeholders can still have both wildly and subtly different senses of what they mean by common terms.
For example, I find there's a fair amount of chaos surrounding very common terms like "product" and "content" that tend to mean different things in different systems and to people in different roles/departments.
I get a similiar kind of kick from observing people communicating technically and precisely to complete a task-- launching rockets, doing performing surgery, controlling air traffic, etc.
It really makes a difference in everyday life. It prevents so many arguments with my wife: we agree on most things, when we don't it's usually because we disagree on the meaning of the words we're using. At work I have far less misunderstandings with coworkers, I understand expectations better and I don't get caught out by people using vague language to hide or gloss over major problems. Last month I was evaluating a contract and it took me a week to get a clear answer about terms. I suspect the people involved subconsciously knew that if they gave a clear answer the contract would be deemed unecessary and cancelled. It was.
I love her dearly, but I cannot count the number of times I have enraged her by asking her to elaborate or seeking clarification by asking questions she believes "I should know the answer to because I'm too smart not to know"
We're getting there, though :)
Something that young children have to grow out of is assuming that "if they know it, their parents must know it too", such as where they put (not hid, because "the parents know") the phone or the keys. As a child they haven't yet developed the, obvious once developed, concept of the individuality of knowledge and experience.
It does feel as if this regresses for long-term partners. The volume of shared experience must blur the boundaries of individual experience, or something.
My wife will often blurt out something totally incomprehensible to anyone but her, but since she's spent the previous 5-10 minutes reading / watching all the context leading up to it, she expects the rest of us (who may have only just strolled into the room) to know it to its core.
A punchline without context is nothing!
I do like the sideways glances my kids give me when it happens though. That's a shared understanding :)
Anecdotally, I wonder if/ to what degree this has been affected by increased job specialization, where a person who spends all day working (and perhaps socializing after) with folks who share their particular knowledge and jargon will then err when interacting with folks outside of that bubble.
This is so true, and painfully so. I was fortunate to have an epiphany a few years ago when I realized I was failing regularly to see my wife as a separate individual and part of the whole of "us."
More accurately, there were times when I probably viewed her merely and extension of myself. It honestly changed the way I view the world, and I somehow managed to extrapolate that understanding to life itself. It was a glorious dose of ego death, and one I sorely needed.
> “The cardinal difficulty,” said MacPhee, “in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, ‘Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you’ll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.’ The female for this is, ‘Put that in the other one in there.’ And then if you ask them, ‘in where?’ they say, ‘in there, of course.’ There is consequently a phatic hiatus.”
Indeed. The author seems to imply that men are so bad at understanding contextual clues that communication with them is virtually impossible, almost as if they were primitive machines and not full-fledged human beings capable of observing and thinking. Even worse, when confronted with this uncomfortable truth, instead of learning how to communicate properly, they react with frustration, almost as if they were primitive animals driven by instincts and emotions and not full-fledged human beings capable of learning.
Still, I find it hilarious, even though I am a man myself!
And on a more serious note – why, when presented with two different phenomena (in this case: men and women, but there are many more cases, like "SQL" and "NoSQL", or "Rust" and "Clojure", or "GUI" and "CLI", etc., etc.), so many people automatically assume that one must be somehow strictly "better" and the other somehow strictly "worse"? Of course, it's sometimes (maybe even often) the case, but neither "sometimes" nor "often" does not mean "always"!
I love your rhetorical twist on sexism, which exposes a harmful aspect of stereotypes. The positive stereo type, "all X are good at Y, or naturals at Z"
We both know people who are dogmatically over precise in their language, it has its use, but becomes exhausting after while, esp where not needed. Here comes the generalization, but the use of overly pedantic forms of communication come from either an environment with high complexity, or a person using another as an extension of their own self and that manipulator (the assistant) literally has no context, so everything has to be over explained. When your groovin, all you need is a look.
This approach is harder on you… but easier on her. And that is a sort of gift that one can choose to give to a spouse. Allow them to be quick and vague sometimes, and choose to invest effort to pick up some of the slack they drop.
Not all the time, but some of the time.
You have fewer* misunderstandings ;)
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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/po...
If someone finds that their team keeps getting in trouble or failing due to mis-communication as a pattern, then something deeper is wrong.
I will never forget attending an science/art symposium where the guest speaker was an artist. I quote them verbatim: 'Art can exist without science, but what happens if science tries to exist without art? Hiroshima!' Never in my life have I felt so ashamed of being an artist.
I dual majored CS and History. Computer Science got me in the door and provided core skillsets, but reading and writing, analysis skills really made me a better and more effective person.
Yet, sending is easier than receiving, just as generating is easier than parsing.
The most key skill in this sport of paintball is communication. Among the highest circles of ability communication is understood to mean: "receiving information and repeating it until confirmed by first party"
A lot of wasted effort, needless mistakes, can be eliminated by confirming your understanding. Communication is not speaking, it is not listening, it is both at once.
Generating data is easier than generating useful data or easily comprehensible data; time spent generating good data can reduce time spent parsing it.
In a communication context, I don't think sending is necessarily easier than receiving, I think it's that we've ignored the sender's responsibilities and put the obligation on the receiver. (This should be expected when organizations reward the quantity of sent information over the quality of sent information.)