Yeah, the violent agreement is usually a big tell. I've gotten much better at throwing the flag in meetings to have that conversation - "Hey, when you say X, do you mean <what I'm hearing>? Can you expand on that?". I think people are hesitant to do it out of fear of sounding stupid; I think I'm lucky enough to be far enough into my career that I don't really worry about that anymore.
The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating. I don't have a polite way to stop that one yet. I think some of it is just that we all pick up traumas and trigger words, and you've gotta recognize when someone said "banana" that doesn't actually mean "the thing I slipped on five years ago."
One of the best advices I got: "stop acting like you're the smartest person in the room, even if you are" so I started acting like the stupidest person in the room. Often times, by asking the dumbest question in the naivest way possible, you can expose a lot of bad ideas.
A thousand times, yes. They're not dumb questions, of course. They're pure, simple, and relevant. They're the strongest questions one can ask. The best.
Well... it's more like by asking an extremely dumb question helps other people in the room know when they're being bullshitted.
"So, I see your business model is to make widgets. But ... uh... I don't really understand these ideas but that's called capital intensive, right? So, you're gonna have a factory, with a bunch of workers... in San Francisco? Won't that be really expensive, and ... uh, I guess that means your profit margin will be small? Could you put your factory in Kansas?"
(paraphrased but essentially accurate question I asked when being pitched by a hardware startup at a major VC that I advised)
I think we could benefit from more directness and bluntness of the right kind. To a large degree, what is considered "polite" is conditioned. I don't say absolutely conditioned (there are absolute limits), but cultural conditioning can either blunt perception to the impolite, or oversensitive us so that we interpret normal things as impolite. Gen Z in the US, for example, seems hypersensitive compared to prior generations, though it didn't begin with them. It is not unexpected that correcting someone's bad behavior, even in normal speech tone, will be seen as "yelling". This is very bad because an inability to receive feedback, let alone survive impropriety, essential to adulthood. Softness suffocates reason and weakens action, and it softens the person who wants to avoid perturbing the softness of another. Hemming and hawing and hedging, too, is an enemy of clear communication.
But more to the point, I find that asking for clarification is the best tactic in the aforementioned circumstances. That way, you avoid having to make accusations. It removes all pretext for getting defensive and focuses the discussion on the substance and merit rather than the character flaws and lack of speaking skills of the other. If the other person starts to get unjustifiably angry, this reflects poorly on them, not you, so there is no need to feel any guilt. Be honest and never lie. Do not pretend to understand someone just because you think asking for clarification will make you look less competent. Maybe you are less competent, in which case pretending to competence you don't actually have is dishonest and unjust. You also close off the doors to learning. And if you are competent, then there's nothing to worry about. Bullshitters feed off pretense, and honest people are dismayed by it.
> The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating.
The most effective method I've found is making that person responsible for resolving whatever the issue is. Not always possible, but especially when it happens in group settings, some verbal judo can work even if you can't "officially" task them.
(Make sure to memorialize that in an email afterwards, or it will probably retroactively never have happened.)
The "reframe the conversation to the thing I want to talk about" - man, that one's frustrating. I don't have a polite way to stop that one yet. I think some of it is just that we all pick up traumas and trigger words, and you've gotta recognize when someone said "banana" that doesn't actually mean "the thing I slipped on five years ago."