Sometimes what people think is quickness is actually extensive prep. I had a 30 minute meeting the other day to ask a team to do something I didn’t think they would want to do. It ended up going really smoothly and they just took my word for it, but had they not, I spend several hours preparing for that meeting, gathering data, preparing charts to illustrate the data, thinking of the possible objections and responses to said objections.
Many years ago my family was trying to see Letterman in NYC. I wasn’t old enough, and we knew that going in. The night before, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was going over what I thought I might need to know. When was my fake birthday, why don’t I have an ID, etc. On the day, I was asked these questions by security and gave a quick and natural answer. Afterword my dad commented that I was really quick and good at thinking on my feet, but the truth was that I prepared.
Agree - I find that I never really have a good answer on the spot, but I often have already been thinking about the problems around the workplace for long enough that I at least have a hunch or opinion. That's not quick-wit, it's just pre-thinking. But it works well enough for me.
One skill I learned during grad school was spending lots of time going over conversations or presentations or even upcoming meetings in your head. This "warms up" your cache, and helps you play out possible Q&A, so that you have more opinions ready.
And another skill I learned was actually learning to control the meeting to a certain extent. I'd come in with something like a limited "choose your own adventure" conversation tree in my head, and then I'd try to present choices or questions to those I was meeting or talking with, so that I could at least have a fallback.
And finally with experience comes wit. The 10th time you enter a situation you're much more likely to have something to say than the 1st time. And eventually, you'll start to recognize similarities in conversations.
But yeah, lack of quick wit makes social and work situations more challenging. It's just hard to make myself have strong opinions on the spot usually.
> Agree - I find that I never really have a good answer on the spot, but I often have already been thinking about the problems around the workplace for long enough that I at least have a hunch or opinion. That's not quick-wit, it's just pre-thinking. But it works well enough for me.
I did debating in school and a lot of the prep was like this too — once you have your position sketched out, you put on your 'opposition hat' and start to critique your own position for holes.
Also, where in the HN guidelines it says — Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. — when you're prepping, you tend to do just the opposite: assume that someone _is_ going to attempt to respond to a weaker version that's easier to criticize.
It can help you have a rebuttal on the ready if needed but regardless it also helps you to distill/reframe ideas in a way that's clearer from the outset (which is a good thing in & of itself, even if you don't have someone taking a counter position)
What happens if your working memory is so poor that by the time you’ve put on your opposition hat to scrutinize your original position, your brain is out of bandwidth and it forgets the details of original position, or it can’t scrutinize that position because there isn’t enough bandwidth to hold both the original idea and the counter position simultaneously? So now you’ve got a counter argument to a now forgotten original position.
Haha… Yes, I was being a bit cheeky but you’re right, in a case like this using notes is indeed the answer perhaps like Nathan Fielder in the show The Rehearsal, if you’re looking for a ridiculous and extreme example!
If you combine it with empathy skills: "What motivates this person", "What are their goals", "what are their interests/specialities" then you can work out a list of stock answers before hand, and alter them to suit the situation later on.
You still need to listen, as there is a non trivial risk of your mental model being wrong.
I loathe talking to people who rehearse the conversation ahead of time. They invariably don’t respond to what I actually said but rather change what I said to line up with what they practiced in the mirror. Or they say some version of “I expected you to say foo, to which I would have responded bar”. Cool story, but totally irrelevant.
If you don’t have an answer at the time just say so and follow up later. Waiting for your turn to talk is disrespectful and painful to watch.
Yeah, this is where empathy comes in. You need to read the person/people.
I should have been more clear, its more of a template, than a stock answer. Having a cache of information is not the same as "not listening". You still need to listen and respond to the subject at hand.
For example, you are having a meeting about door handles. You know there is a problem about the placing, but also one person is keen on changing the material because they like brass more. However brass is more expensive, so the team needs to agree a threshold at which it becomes practical to change to brass.
Now, if you had fresh in your cache a list of reasons why brass might be useful, and why its not, you can be prepared to counter or boost "that one brass Guy"'s point of view.
You don't go in and say "brass is shit yo" the subject might not come up.
> I should have been more clear, its more of a template, than a stock answer
That and also there's no rule that says a person who is generating responses ahead of time has to stick to exactly one possibility. When preparing for conversations it's important to walk down multiple paths at multiple branch points.
To the point you've been raising in this thread it is about being prepared to be sharp in a conversation, not to railroad the other person and/or come across like a politician on the Sunday AM talk shows.
I think you loathe talking to people who do it badly.
Doing it well is like playing live jazz. You can practice the song, but if you don't listen to what your bandmates are doing, your awesome rehearsed solo is going to be bad.
Years ago I went to a thinktank event on drone policy, and the congressmen they brought in spent 15 minutes saying that we needed to start discussing the important conversation of beginning to plan our policy creation dialog.
Many politicians over practice that. They need to have prepared talking points on everything. This often is different talking points on the same issue for different crowds: how you talk to religious fundamentalists about abortion is not how you talk to queer crowd - you will need to convince someone in one of the above crowds that despite one disagreement you are still worth voting for. Of course everything is impossible and you will offend someone (I used abortion as an example where you cannot win and so will want to skip), so it is tempting to avoid that: many politicians have plants who are asking a prepared question, always avoiding the hard issues while making a big deal about something small.
Sometimes you can tell that someone is not listening and thinking about what you said, but has their own statement ready and is simply waiting until they have a chance to say it.
100%. Preparation is key. I never walk into a situation that matters without going over a ton of different paths the conversation could go. Even if the conversation goes down a path I didn't prepare for, the preparation was still helpful. Preparation looks like quick thinking, but it's not. It also very valuable at keeping your emotions in check, avoiding one of the common reasons conversations go off the rails.
My favorite line lately is: "Fail to prepare? Prepare to fail."
Nothing against failing as both outcomes are good learning scenario, though I think, def favor preparing for the most interesting failure is probably the best outcome.
This is exactly the reason all meetings should have an agenda posted beforehand. Not everyone is able to make decisions on the fly, they need the chance to prepare first.
Agreed. IMO it's used as a tactic to catch people off guard, so the organiser can attend more prepared than anyone else, and get their way
But the person who could enforce that all meetings must have an agenda probably also uses the lack of an agenda to their advantage, so the status quo continues
This is so key. Ridiculous amounts of preparation is the only way I've mastered these critical conversations. I had to convince a bunch of cranky ski coaches to run a race in minus 30c weather at a team captains meeting before the race. I was able to recite the weather, time of sunrise, the exact time on the t bar, distance to the course, distance back to the lodge and so on.
Many years ago my family was trying to see Letterman in NYC. I wasn’t old enough, and we knew that going in. The night before, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I was going over what I thought I might need to know. When was my fake birthday, why don’t I have an ID, etc. On the day, I was asked these questions by security and gave a quick and natural answer. Afterword my dad commented that I was really quick and good at thinking on my feet, but the truth was that I prepared.