Two levels of a conversation

Huh I never thought about this before —

There are 2 completely different kinds of iteration in any kind of work. There’s rework loops wired to internal standards and expectations and rework loops wired to external tests and risks.

Each loop you have to choose which kind it is

— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) April 28, 2019

Click to read the thread.

I work with a parallel model in terms of communication.

There are a range of two-direction communications ranging from stripped down basics - all that is said is what needs to be said in order to accomplish the shared objective - all the way up to complex conversation where the structure of the conversation is purposeful but the destination is not necessarily known.

In the latter conversations, usually between bright social people with relatively high levels of trust and openness, there is a two layer dynamic that is always going. Sort of a bifurcated attention to the tactical conversation and the strategic conversation.

People do this naturally and I suspect do not frame it consciously in the way I am doing, but none-the-less, I think this is a pretty good representation of what I think is going on.

In these high-trust, high-content conversations, there is usually always some element of purposefulness. People may be participants because they are cementing a relationship or some other reason, but they are always investing in the conversation in order to get something from it, if even only an aesthetic appreciation.

The wheel within the wheel model, not dissimilar to what Rao is describing, has to do with the ebb and flow of the conversation. There are two parties, both participating on equal footing.

There is a tactical level of the conversation - the story you are telling now, why it is relevant to the conversational flow, making sure it has pertinence to the conversational partner, addressing the performance art of the storytelling, etc. That is a lot to keep track of but with practice it becomes second nature.

And then there is the strategic level of the conversation - you want it to go someplace constructive without necessarily knowing where that is. You know that emergent order will throw something up. However, because you have to yield the floor to your conversational partner, you cannot tell the whole story from start to finish. You have to plant ideas and markers to which you can come back to naturally as the conversation unfolds. You have to have a sense of where the conversation might go and plant these things as options. You might never come back to them because the conversation zigs when you thought it was going to zag. No matter. It is just an unexercised option.

But what it means is that you always have two levels of conversation going simultaneously - the tactical and the strategic. Most conversationalists do this naturally from practice, but in terms of a model, I think that two level iteration is what is happening.