On conversations

At the beginning of a meeting I was in recently, the person who was acting as a moderator for that meeting said something that really resonated with me. He asked everyone to be conscious of not only what their words were contributing to the meeting, but also of the time that they might be taking away from other people who also have things to say. He brought attention to the fact that our contributions to discussions can be positive or negative, and come in the form of both what we bring to a conversation and what we take away from it.

I see talking in meetings as a zero-sum game of sorts - if I am talking at a given time, that is a time when nobody else can be talking (or shouldn't be, but if we're both talking at once neither of us is going to be heard or understood clearly and the end result is pretty much the same). Every minute I talk is a minute I take away from someone else to talk. Personally, I remind myself of this every time I'm tempted to say something snarky or make a joke - even if other people laugh along with me, that's still time I'm taking away from someone else. And because time is a finite resource, if a couple people dominate a meeting for the entire time, they might prevent other people from getting a chance to speak at all, taking away all the contributions those people might have made.

Conferences strike me as being very similar. Unlike a blog, where the presence of my blog doesn't take away anyone else's ability to have their own, there are a limited number of speaking slots at any given conference. A person speaking in a given slot means that slot is no longer available for someone else.

One of the benefits of conferences is getting to hear stories from people that you might not ordinarily get a chance to hear from in the normal course of your work. Conference speaking slots are opportunities for people to tell their stories, and in my mind the breadth and diversity of stories that we have a chance to hear is part of what makes some conferences so much more beneficial than hearing just the same stories over and over again. Even if they’re great stories, there’s only so much we can learn from hearing them multiple times, which is why it's frustrating to see so many events having the same (straight, white) dudes speak over and over and over and over.

I would love to see more conference organizers reaching out to groups and individuals who haven't gotten a chance to tell their stories yet, rather than inviting the same repeat speakers back year after year. Even if these dudes are great speakers, those are still speaking slots that they are making unavailable for other people in order to tell their own stories again, when there are so many people who haven't had a chance to tell a single story at all. I would love for these people who have had so many opportunities already given to them to think about what they are taking away from our collective conversations by continuing to dominate them, and to maybe take a step back and suggest someone else for that opportunity to speak instead.

The moderator’s thoughts at the start of that meeting can serve as a really good reminder for all of us to pay attention to how much space we are taking up, not just in terms of physical space but also the space of our words and voices. Whether it be the direct conversations that come from meetings or the indirect conversations that happen at conferences, we should all be aware of what we are bringing to the conversation and what we are taking away from it, of who we are listening to and who we are talking over. Let’s invite more voices to the conversation!