Communicating and leading, one lesson a day

Imagine you volunteer at a community kitchen that prepares meals after storms. Over the summer you built the kitchen a new system for scheduling volunteers and tracking donations. The kitchen's founder loves it. She is the sharpest person in the building. She remembers every donor from the last twenty years, and she sees problems a week before anyone else does.

Talking with her is hard work. You start to answer her question about the donor list, and halfway through your second sentence she asks whether the delivery van is insured. Before you get there, she is on the volunteer rota for the holidays. By the end of the meeting she has asked nine questions, and you have finished answering two. She leaves frustrated that nothing got settled. You leave feeling four answers behind.

Most people who have worked with someone like this will recognize it. Many will also recognize themselves in it. A fast mind that runs ahead is not a character flaw, and it is often what makes the person valuable. The goal is not to slow her down. It is to get the right information into a mind that is already on the next thing.

Start with why it happens. The linguist Deborah Tannen recorded a Thanksgiving dinner conversation among six speakers and studied how they talked. In a nineteen seventy nine talk to the Linguistic Society of America, published the next year, she described what she called the machine-gun question. It is fast, short, and timed to land on top of the other person's last words or right as they end, and it can come in a series. Among people who share that style, the hidden message is: I am so interested that I cannot wait for you to finish. Among people who do not share it, the same question feels startling, even rude. Tannen called the first style high involvement. So the founder cutting in is usually a sign of interest, not disrespect.

Tannen noticed something else. The machine-gun question has a partner, which she called the machine-gun answer. Short, fast, in kind. In her example, one person asks, what does your brother do. The other answers in one word: lawyer. Both said afterward that the exchange felt good.

A second reason comes from research on turn-taking. Stephen Levinson at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics reviewed it in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The usual gap between turns in conversation is about two hundred milliseconds, while preparing even one word to say takes six hundred milliseconds or more. So listeners build their reply while the other person is still talking. Everyone does this. In a fast mind, the next question is half built while you are still explaining the first answer.

A third reason is memory. The psychologist Nelson Cowan made the case that people can hold only about four chunks of information in mind at once. A question that has not been answered holds one of those slots. If you open with background, you fill the other slots with context while her question is still waiting. She cannot let it go, so she cannot take in the rest.

And a fourth. E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister found that an unfinished goal keeps intruding on a person's thoughts. What quieted it was not finishing the goal. It was making a specific plan for when it would get done. An unanswered question works the same way. Once it is written down with a when beside it, the mind can set it aside.

Here are five moves.

One. Answer the question she asked, first, in one sentence. Then offer the rest. Barbara Minto, whose pyramid principle is taught across the consulting world, built her method on putting the single main point at the top, with the support underneath. It works out loud as well as on paper. Yes, the donor list is up to date, and I can show you how if you want. Then stop. If she wants the how, she will ask.

Two. When three questions arrive at once, do not try to answer all three. Ask which one matters most right now. It gives her the choice, and it tells you which answer she will actually hear.

Three. Keep a list of open questions where she can see it, on a shared screen or a whiteboard. When she jumps to a new topic, write the old question down out loud. Got it, the van insurance is on the list. Now she can let go of it, because it is safe. Meeting leaders call this a parking lot, and the research on unfinished goals suggests why it works.

Four. Keep answers short and end with a check-in. Does that answer it, or do you want the detail? When you are not sure what she is really asking, say back what you heard. The question I am hearing is whether we have enough drivers for the holidays. Is that right? It takes five seconds and can save ten minutes of answering the wrong thing.

Five. Send the detail in writing afterward. Whatever you cut from the conversation goes into a short note that day, one numbered answer per question. Detail that is not heard in a meeting can still be read, and the note shows that nothing she asked was lost.

A few things to avoid. Do not say let me finish. To a high-involvement speaker, that is a fight over the floor. Do not start with how you reached the answer, even when that is the interesting part. And do not answer the question you think she should have asked before the one she did ask.

Return to the kitchen. At the next meeting you open a note titled open questions before she arrives. You answer her first question in one sentence. Each time she jumps, you add the old question out loud. In the last two minutes you read the list back, say which ones you will answer in writing that day, and send the note that afternoon. Nothing about her has changed. The meeting has.

Here is the practice. At your next conversation with the fastest mind you work with, keep a visible list of open questions, answer each question in one sentence before adding anything, and send the detail in writing afterward.

That is the lesson. A person whose mind runs ahead is not failing to listen. They listen the way their mind works. Short answers, one priority at a time, and a list they can trust let you meet them there. And if you notice that you are the one four questions ahead, use the same moves on yourself. Ask the one that matters most, write down the rest, and let the other person finish.

Sources for this lesson: Deborah Tannen, Toward a Theory of Conversational Style: The Machine-Gun Question, and her book Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends; Stephen Levinson, Turn-taking in Human Communication, Origins and Implications for Language Processing; Nelson Cowan, The Magical Number Four in Short-Term Memory; E. J. Masicampo and Roy Baumeister, Consider It Done; and Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle.