I think you’re omitting one of the most important nuances in the article: Wait (interrupt-averse) culture works well when turns speaking have short time spans. It’s effectively built in interruption.
What’s interesting about your preference—that’s what it is, none of this is objective—is how much it reinforces my own interruption aversion, and how much that reflects your preconditions. I just generally prefer communicating with the yields being the prevailing assumption and that the interruption signals deviate to make them more rare.
It’s not, to me, a question of efficiency but with the question posed, I find communication much more efficient when there aren’t N+1 speakers (the interruption queue being the additional participant), particularly when N queues get saturated.
Granted all of this, either approach or any blend of both, takes patience and active effort when preferences don’t match. And granted my preference is also just that, it’s not objective. But I definitely have better communication with people who generally agree to yield communication space without prompting and who generally agree that not yielding automatically is a good indicator that their thoughts are more complex than fit in a tiny contained space.
In contrast to your last paragraph, I get frustrated until I let myself get bored when I’ve got a stack of interruption-paused thoughts that might have addressed any dozens of things said, but which I’ve lost track of entirely by the time the stack unwinds.
And… that was a lot of words, sorry about that. I yield both implicitly and explicitly.
> I just generally prefer communicating with the yields being the prevailing assumption
I may be misunderstanding but in what I describe in my post above, yields are the prevailing assumption: I describe them as a critical component that makes this kind of interrupting possible.
> ... and that the interruption signals deviate to make them more rare.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. (This is a point where I would've attempted an "interrupt-request" to get clarification, if we were speaking in person.)
> I get frustrated until I let myself get bored when I’ve got a stack of interruption-paused thoughts that might have addressed any dozens of things said, but which I’ve lost track of entirely by the time the stack unwinds.
It sounds like this may be central to why your preference is interrupt-averse: it sounds like your model of What Needs To Be Said is not updating in response to interruptions, which could be because A) you planned out everything you want to say before, so regardless of the content of interruptions you still think it needs to be said, or B) you find in your experience that the content of interruptions is typically independent of what you're saying, so of course your model of What Needs To Be Said doesn't update, and you have to keep queuing things.
In the case of B, you are communicating with someone who is not cooperatively interrupting to expedite communication; you are dealing with someone interrupting for their own benefit.
In the case of A, you may be pre-deciding that interruptions are useless and won't affect your model of What Needs To Be Said, so you queue things up and say what you were originally going to say anyway.
I don't know which case you are dealing with. I can say in my own experience though that a queue beyond 1 or 2 items is rarely necessary because cooperative interrupts tend to modify what I was going to say as my understanding of our shared informational context evolves, so things I previously was going to say are more frequently discarded rather than queued.
> I may be misunderstanding but in what I describe in my post above, yields are the prevailing assumption: I describe them as a critical component that makes this kind of interrupting possible.
The distinction is that I prefer communicating when the yielding itself is the prevailing assumption, that it doesn’t need to be requested or accepted. That’s what the article describes too. Not yielding to interruption, yielding to other participants and their participation.
> I'm not sure what you mean by this. (This is a point where I would've attempted an "interrupt-request" to get clarification, if we were speaking in person.)
I mean that if a conversation already leaves places for people to enter and yield without interruption, interruption itself is a correction but one you don’t need often. And that’s my preference.
> It sounds like this may be central to why your preference is interrupt-averse: it sounds like your model of What Needs To Be Said is not updating in response to interruptions
I can see why you might think so, but it’s actually the opposite. It’s reacting to too many dangling threads which gets hard to track. Each thread produces a new subqueue of things which could have been addressed in turn if the conversation wasn’t a stack of competing What Needs To Be Said. Sometimes I had something to say that wasn’t readily discarded and sometimes the pile of interruption tangents produces more unsaid things which all could be addressed by just not being interrupted in the first place, or by having a fellow conversation partner inviting me to remain uninterrupted. Even the most cooperative interruption conversations I’ve had tend to pace ahead of that and create related tendrils of topic which can’t be connected at the same pace and produce fractals or misunderstanding.
> I mean that if a conversation already leaves places for people to enter and yield without interruption, interruption itself is a correction but one you don’t need often.
Ah I think I might see what you're getting at here. I have seen a certain dynamic in group conversations where a subset of the group kinda gets locked into making exchanges, then other participants can't get a word in, so they'd be forced into interrupting as the only recourse. Maybe? In that case I agree, it's good to keep an eye out and make sure everyone is able to participate through a certain amount of conscious turn-taking.
> It’s reacting to too many dangling threads which gets hard to track.
> sometimes the pile of interruption tangents produces more unsaid things
I think we are talking about two different things. You seem to be referring to topic-switching interruptions; I'm specifically referring to interruptions which engage with what the speaker is saying, requesting info that's needed to make any sense of what's being said (e.g. they are talking about Zoikbugs but you don't know what a Zoikbug is, and they thought you did, so you need to ask for a quick definition and then let them resume), or, to let them know it's unneeded to continue on a particular strand because you already have the info (in this second case it's possible for the would-be interrupter to be incorrect, but that's why "interrupt-denies" are so critical: in less then a second, via eyes, hands, posture etc. you can have one person communicate, "Gotcha, I see where you're going, now lemme respond" and for the other person to reply "I know why you think that, but just hang on", with no actual, or extremely brief, interruption to speech; or there can just be a light confirmation: you, as the original speaker, yield to your interlocutor and allow them to speak and for the conversation to move along its natural course; if it turns out they didn't anticipate you correctly after all, you counter-interrupt and if they're "playing fair", they should desist).
If someone is interrupting to talk about something different, adding tangents or disallowing you from completing an idea, that's another matter entirely.
> Ah I think I might see what you're getting at here.
Yep! And it’s what the article was getting at too. I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate it as well without that.
> I think we are talking about two different things.
I could go into the details of the rest of what you said here, but I’m going to yield because we’ve both perfectly demonstrated one another’s points without either intending to do so. :)
What’s interesting about your preference—that’s what it is, none of this is objective—is how much it reinforces my own interruption aversion, and how much that reflects your preconditions. I just generally prefer communicating with the yields being the prevailing assumption and that the interruption signals deviate to make them more rare.
It’s not, to me, a question of efficiency but with the question posed, I find communication much more efficient when there aren’t N+1 speakers (the interruption queue being the additional participant), particularly when N queues get saturated.
Granted all of this, either approach or any blend of both, takes patience and active effort when preferences don’t match. And granted my preference is also just that, it’s not objective. But I definitely have better communication with people who generally agree to yield communication space without prompting and who generally agree that not yielding automatically is a good indicator that their thoughts are more complex than fit in a tiny contained space.
In contrast to your last paragraph, I get frustrated until I let myself get bored when I’ve got a stack of interruption-paused thoughts that might have addressed any dozens of things said, but which I’ve lost track of entirely by the time the stack unwinds.
And… that was a lot of words, sorry about that. I yield both implicitly and explicitly.