59. Occupying Both Sides of a Conversation 🔗

People really like to have both sides of conversations. You’d think this is a sort of stylized performance element but it isn’t. Many people have a real style that a,punts to: have both sides of a conversation, get mad when live counterparty goes off script, to force them back on tweet^[1]

It’s like a telemarketer script but with every alternate layer modeling their response being a Procrustean bed:

Q: Have you thought about wage theft?

A1: [Procrustean bed 1]
A2: [Procrustean bed 2]

Q2.1: [GET BACK ON THAT BED!]

Q2.2: [GET BACK ON THAT BED!]

A failure mode in any helping profession with a principal-agent asymmetry (lawyers etc) is being so script-locked you can’t hear. Good ones rise above, viewing the (procedurally necessary) script as an eventual compile target rather than a way to confine a free-form conversation.

Where this asymmetry is lacking because there is no significant procedurally defined expertise on the helping side (consulting, many types of therapy), the lack of scripted leverage and steering authority can be anxiety provoking. So people make up bullshit processes.

I’m convinced half of all business consulting “process” models are just ways to avoid the real stress of live play sparring conversations. Any actual content in say “lean startup” can be made prerequisite pre-reads so the actual conversation can stay unscripted.

A lot of things that aren’t really education get cast in educational molds simply to provide conversational control. The OP is an obvious example. It’s indoctrination pretending to be education. A lot of business “courses” fall into the same trap cough lean six sigma cough

If you do solve the problem in the immediate conversation, you still have to solve it one degree removed. In consulting, you are forced to operate on the evidence of one side of the story: your client’s. And immature ones will often report stylized scripts+diffs.

The “data” of the consult will be one-sided highly unreliable hearsay reports of conversations *they*had. Unconsciously these reports will have

a) caricaturing of counterparty
b) consistency editing removing the revealing glitches
c) embellishments to make themselves look good

It’s not a court so you can’t get testimony from other side.

They’re unconsciously looking for validation but if you cave and supply it, you’re useless and they’ll eventually realize it and end the gig

You can’t cross-examine like they’re a hostile witness: you’re on their side

This problem is hard. My solution is to...

1. Only work with people mature enough to be above this dynamic, or to at least want to be above it

2. Work long-term (> 4-5 meetings over 6 months) so you can reinforce better self-witnessing behaviors

The way this works is: when somebody reports a scripted-sounding conversation ask diagnostic questions they’d only know answers to if they were listening in free-play mode”

Eg:

Client: “I called him out on project delays but he just made excuses”

Me: “what’s on his plate?”

If they can’t answer, you simply set conversation-data aside as insufficient/incomplete and say “maybe we can table this item until you’ve had a chance to talk with them again and figure X out”

It’s an informal version of disallowing inadmissible evidence. Or down-weighting it.

For a sufficiently mature person, a word to the wise is sufficient. They instantly get why hearsay of anything other than properly witnessed free-play conversations is basically noise as consulting input. Or that at best it reveals stuff about projection tendencies.

Once you get it it seems like a superpower.

“Oh wow you can actually use conversations to discover new info if you allow other side to own their side of the conversation. It doesn’t have to be a Sisyphean struggle of hostile universe repeatedly knocking your story off-script.”

People who resist the allure of this discovery potential are attached to the world being the way their scripts validate. They literally want to hear nothing except confirmation. When I sense this (if it gets this far) I tell them they need a therapist not a consultant.

Though usually I can tell from the initial email or exploratory call.