Dealing with interruptions

A participant in a recent workshop interrupted me while I was in full flow on the subject of 'challenging conversations' to ask me for any tips I had on dealing with interruptions. As a piece of faintly surreal improvisation by both parties, it appealed to my sense of the absurd. I think I responded something along these lines:

On the whole I find that interruptions when I'm speaking can be characterised as either helpful or unhelpful. There's the short, helpful variety that buys you time to think, allows you to re-focus, gives you confirmation that you are getting your point across or a vital clue that you are not. Then there's the longer, rather less helpful kind that demonstrates that your conversation is a long way from closure, there are whole mounds of unshared assumptions between you and that there's still much hard work to be done in building any form of consensus. And of course we have all experienced and launched the frankly subversive interruption which is an ill-disguised takeover bid - a not so subtle conversational coup d'etat.

Interruptions are frequently culturally conditioned and significant. In many situations youth will not interrupt age; subordinates will not challenge power by speaking up before they are invited to do so and women will defer to men in sustained, pained silence. To interrupt is to disrupt the social order and disturb much more than a train of thought.

So when it comes to 'dealing with interruptions' as a team leader, technical expert, subject presenter or workshop facilitator, it's useful to have a small tool-kit to hand which can mean that a far greater percentage of the inevitable quota of interruptions that you will experience can become useful ones and not roadblocks, threats or mere irritants. Here are a couple of the tools I use:

When the interruption comes, resist the urge to fight it by simply raising your voice, your speed, your tone and probably your blood pressure. Roll with the interruption early, like a martial artist embracing its momentum. Use the pause in your own broadcast to ask yourself the question, "what's the purpose of my presentation or conversation - what does a successful conclusion really look like, sound like, feel like?" This of course works best with the short, helpful, clarifying or generally supportive interruption.

If the interruption persists or sounds as if it is never going to stop, you may have to get back into the conversation using the "blinking word" technique. This is a simple process of waiting long enough to hear a particular word on which the speaker is laying great emphasis by repeating it or using it in a exaggerated manner, at which point you are at liberty to counter-interrupt with "what exactly do you mean by...(and quote the "blinker")?" This helps to re-balance the conversation and may even take it down a surprisingly useful path.

If neither of these tools is sharp enough to do the job, you may have to use a more emotionally charged and thus dangerous tool. First ask yourself, 'what am I feeling about this interruption right now and why?" If the answer is one of the negative, destructive emotions, you need to move rapidly to the moral high ground of tolerance, good humour, genuine curiousity or gracious humility. After this brief internal examination, you should be ready to deploy one of the big guns in dealing with interruptions. "wait a minute, this isn't working" or "ok, we'll have to agree to disagree here' or something similarly hard-edged and definite.

Ands then of course you're right in the middle of yet another 'challenging conversation'... and so, back to my subject. Thank you.