physically separate the group. Go into another room or at least corner. Signal that you’re not seeking additional participants.
When you notice this, make it explicit—“I’m really enjoying the depth of this conversation, should we move into the lounge for a brandy and a little more quiet?”
Admit (to yourself) that others may feel excluded, because they are. At many gatherings, such discussions/situations are time-bound and really can’t last more than 10-45 minutes. The only solution is to have more frequent, smaller gatherings.
Get good at involved listening—it’s different than 1:1 active listening, but has similar goals: don’t inject any ideas, but do give signals that you’re following and supporting. This is at least 80% as enjoyable as active participation, and doesn’t break the flow when you join a clique in progress.
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
[EDIT, was intended as a response to Raemon, not Dagon.]
Maybe it’s the way you phrase the responses. But as described, I get the impression that this norm would mainly work for relatively extroverted persons with low rejection sensitivity.
I’d be much less likely to ever try to join a discussion (and would tend to not attend events with such a norm). But maybe there’s a way to avoid this, both from “my side” and “yours”.
Hmm, seems like important feedback. I had specifically been trying to phrase the responses in a way that addressed this specific problem. Sounds like it didn’t work.
There is some intrinsic rejection going on here, which probably no amount of kind wording can alleviate for a rejection-sensitive person.
For my “sorry, we’re keeping the convo small” bit, I suggested:
smile warmly and say “hey, sorry we’re kinda in a high context conversation right now. Listening is fine but probably don’t join.”
The Smile Warmly part was meant to be a pretty active ingredient, helping to reassure them it isn’t personal.
Another thing that seems pretty important, is that this applies to all newcomers, even your friends and High Status People. (i.e. hopefully if Anxious Alex gets turned away, but later sees High Status Bob also get turned away, they get reassured a bit that this wasn’t about them)
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
FYI, the actual motivating example here was at a party in gather.town, (formerly online.town, formerly town.siempre), which has much more typical “party” dynamics. (i.e people can wander around an online world and video chat with people nearby).
In this case there were actually some additional complexities – I had joined a conversation relatively late, I did lurk for quite awhile, and wait for the current set of topics to die down completely before introducing a new one. And then the conversation took a turn that I was really excited by, and at least 1-2 other people were interested in, but it wasn’t obvious to me that it was interesting to everyone else (I think ~5 people involved total?)
And then a new person came in, and asked what we were talking about and someone filled them in… …and then immediately the conversation ended. And in this case I don’t know if the issue was more like “the newcomer killed the conversation” or “the convo actually had roughly reached it’s natural end, and/or other people weren’t that interested in the first place.”
But, from my own perspective, the conversation had just finished covering all the obvious background concepts that would be required for the “real” conversation to begin, and I was hoping to actually Make Real Progress on a complex concept.
So, I dunno if this counted as “an interesting conversation” yet, and unfortunately the act of asking the question “hey, do we want to continue diving deep into this, or wrap up and transition into some other convo?” also kinda kills the conversation. Conversations are so god damn fragile.
What I really wished was that everyone already had common knowledge of the meta-concept, wherein:
Party conversations are particularly fragile
Bringing a newcomer up to speed is usually costly if the conversation is doing anything deep
We might or might not want to continue delving into the current convo (but we don’t currently have common knowledge of this in either direction)
And if everyone (newcomer included) had those concepts, and new everyone had those concepts, then I feel like I could have asked more gracefully “hey, I’m kinda interested in continuing to hash out some ideas here. Are people up for taking this high context”, and had people give their honest answer.
+lots. Some techniques:
physically separate the group. Go into another room or at least corner. Signal that you’re not seeking additional participants.
When you notice this, make it explicit—“I’m really enjoying the depth of this conversation, should we move into the lounge for a brandy and a little more quiet?”
Admit (to yourself) that others may feel excluded, because they are. At many gatherings, such discussions/situations are time-bound and really can’t last more than 10-45 minutes. The only solution is to have more frequent, smaller gatherings.
Get good at involved listening—it’s different than 1:1 active listening, but has similar goals: don’t inject any ideas, but do give signals that you’re following and supporting. This is at least 80% as enjoyable as active participation, and doesn’t break the flow when you join a clique in progress.
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
[EDIT, was intended as a response to Raemon, not Dagon.]
Maybe it’s the way you phrase the responses. But as described, I get the impression that this norm would mainly work for relatively extroverted persons with low rejection sensitivity.
I’d be much less likely to ever try to join a discussion (and would tend to not attend events with such a norm). But maybe there’s a way to avoid this, both from “my side” and “yours”.
Hmm, seems like important feedback. I had specifically been trying to phrase the responses in a way that addressed this specific problem. Sounds like it didn’t work.
There is some intrinsic rejection going on here, which probably no amount of kind wording can alleviate for a rejection-sensitive person.
For my “sorry, we’re keeping the convo small” bit, I suggested:
The Smile Warmly part was meant to be a pretty active ingredient, helping to reassure them it isn’t personal.
Another thing that seems pretty important, is that this applies to all newcomers, even your friends and High Status People. (i.e. hopefully if Anxious Alex gets turned away, but later sees High Status Bob also get turned away, they get reassured a bit that this wasn’t about them)
FYI, the actual motivating example here was at a party in gather.town, (formerly online.town, formerly town.siempre), which has much more typical “party” dynamics. (i.e people can wander around an online world and video chat with people nearby).
In this case there were actually some additional complexities – I had joined a conversation relatively late, I did lurk for quite awhile, and wait for the current set of topics to die down completely before introducing a new one. And then the conversation took a turn that I was really excited by, and at least 1-2 other people were interested in, but it wasn’t obvious to me that it was interesting to everyone else (I think ~5 people involved total?)
And then a new person came in, and asked what we were talking about and someone filled them in… …and then immediately the conversation ended. And in this case I don’t know if the issue was more like “the newcomer killed the conversation” or “the convo actually had roughly reached it’s natural end, and/or other people weren’t that interested in the first place.”
But, from my own perspective, the conversation had just finished covering all the obvious background concepts that would be required for the “real” conversation to begin, and I was hoping to actually Make Real Progress on a complex concept.
So, I dunno if this counted as “an interesting conversation” yet, and unfortunately the act of asking the question “hey, do we want to continue diving deep into this, or wrap up and transition into some other convo?” also kinda kills the conversation. Conversations are so god damn fragile.
What I really wished was that everyone already had common knowledge of the meta-concept, wherein:
Party conversations are particularly fragile
Bringing a newcomer up to speed is usually costly if the conversation is doing anything deep
We might or might not want to continue delving into the current convo (but we don’t currently have common knowledge of this in either direction)
And if everyone (newcomer included) had those concepts, and new everyone had those concepts, then I feel like I could have asked more gracefully “hey, I’m kinda interested in continuing to hash out some ideas here. Are people up for taking this high context”, and had people give their honest answer.