When the ground shifts beneath us during a conversation

What happens when someone’s intentions shift during the conversation itself? What happens if we realize that we’ve misread other’s intentions?

In any conversation, our intention matters. The quality of our conversations depends on our intentions—whether or not we state them explicitly—and on whether our intentions are compatible with our conversation partner’s. Significant differences in intentions leads to awkward and difficult conversations.

No one wants to have a conversation where everything goes exactly as expected. No one wants to have a conversation where everything is already known. The key is that alignment. If we get everyone’s intentions and expectations reasonably aligned, then we create the opportunity for surprise and delight.

I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. […] the most interesting and most revealing comments have come not as a result of a question at all, but having set up a situation where people actually want to talk to you, and want to reveal something to you.

~ Errol Morris from, https://web.archive.org/web/20191113033751/https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-transcript-bannon-the-f-you-presidency-with-errol-morris/

What happens when someone’s intentions shift during the conversation itself? What happens if we realize that we’ve misread someone’s intentions? What happens depends on what you do in those moments. There are many way to slide into an adversarial conversation, but the easiest one is to stubbornly stick to your original intentions. In the moment, we need to find some guides, so we can quickly decide what, if anything, to change. The first guide I look to is…

Is this conversation for me, or for the other person?

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