rebounding from your gervais principle posts, if you remember dwight’s refusal to smile; his reasoning was that that was how chimpanzees identified submission.

There is an extent to which the purpose of conversation is to coordinate different ways of acting; if you’re on a project that’s having trouble, everyone starts talking really fast to everyone else about everything: Just the sign that they’re doing a lot of that (and that people are doing lots of pausing or coming back to things people said earlier) implies that at the level of integration people are trying to pursue, their not meshing yet.

Giving someone a null line prematurely is like cutting them off with “I understand”, it’s saying that we don’t need to talk any more because we have enough to get on with what we’re doing. If that sounds too business focused and pragmatic, you can think of it as “we’ve done enough exploring our differences to have a stable relationship for now”. The reason it can be harsh is that you’re saying to them, at a very basic level, “You know enough about me, and I know enough about you to relate to you at this distance“.

It’s also harsh because sometimes people talk like new couples or people you will likely soon be a really good friend with; exploring the space for further cooperation (your value to each other and common interests) and getting a grip on how you relate to this person. If someone else is trying to do this with you, talking too long etc, then maybe they have more time to develop really overlapping relationships, and they may just expect to live in a more tangled way. If you pull back to formalities or echoing, then your saying that you have reached stability, and your relationship with them is settled for now as far as your concerned.

Here’s an alternative you might like, which sometimes works and sometimes fails; if they’re not directly working with you, take a short amount of time and a small amount of brainpower (if you have it) to ask them about what else they were doing when they bumped into/phoned you etc. This will remind them of the differences in what your doing, and they’ll either try to involve you (have some polite rebuffs ready or accept if it’s actually useful), or move back onto thinking about their own projects and leave you be (beware that if you refocus them on their own work too well they may phone you back as their guru!).

Alternatively, if you already have a defined relationship, pull the conversation round to that. For the reasons suggested above, that should encourage them to leave you be, because you’ve orientated yourself according to your business relationship, which is presumably reasonably defined, and that is the same stable point you imply with the null signals.

As far as power and sentence length go, I’ve always thought that the less important someone is to you, the less you need them to understand you, and the more important you are to someone, the more they have to understand you. So powerful people can just talk crap and force everyone else to divine meaning from it. Of course they do actually need those people somewhat, so they are shooting themselves in the foot! Power delays the consequences of being lazy, but that doesn’t mean you should default to it.

My instant guess for the reason of this feeling is that since you normally use language to transmit information, intentionally transmuting a null line feels repetitive and meaningless, so you don’t like to do it.

Of course, in this case the null line itself contains meaning. You want to finish the conversation.

Buy xanax. Xanax overdose. Xanax. Xanax during pregnancy….

It’s about how people initiate the “goodbye” conversation…

But I don’t know really. I would guess it has to do with what you pay attention to and get sensitized to for a long time. Like wine enthusiasts after years being able to tell differences that others can’t detect.

Venkat

Just let me in on one thing (perhaps a secret:)) that has always made me curious about your thought pattern:
How do you identify these subtleties & then extend these as ideas to work on? Is that how most of the “innovation champs” work?

How do ideas emerge from the recesses of our minds? Which are the triggers that cause us to think of something and extend it as an abstract, solution, hypotheses etc? Is it really only practice or is there that one extra neuron that results in more engaging thoughts to develop and branch out?