We Interrupt - A Podcast

Episode 14: On Conversational Style with Deborah Tannen

We all want to be heard and understood for what me mean by what we say.  But the style in which we converse flavors all of our interactions.  How we participate.  How we perceive others, and how others perceive us. Join us for a conversation with Deborah Tannen, Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University and author of many books and articles about how the language of everyday conversation affects relationships.  We dig into interactional sociolinguistics:  how our skills at interacting depend on our conversational style rituals and habits, and how what we mean is often missed or misinterpreted when people with different styles interact. When I originally conceived of this podcast series on interruption, this was the interview at the top of my wish list!  Please check the show notes at www.weinterruptthis.com for links to all of the resources mentioned.

Episode 13: Tabea Soriano and the Past, Present, and Future Craft of Work

Meetings are a microcosm of organizational culture where all social dynamics are in play. Join us as we talk to Tabea Soriano, Partner at The Ready, for an exploration of organization design. We talk about the past, present and future of work, and how process, practice, and principles are the core of creating the meaning of work. How, by making the implicit explicit – like who talks when, how agendas are assembled, and what meetings are actually about – we can experiment with small changes and create trusting workspaces where people can participate, contribute, and make more time for the craft of their work, ultimately reshaping how organizations work. For more about We Interrupt, please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes, links, credits, and other episodes. Contact me on Twitter @HaakYak to recommend topics or speakers for the series.

Episode 12: Earl K Miller on Cognitive Capacity, Multitasking, and Wisdom

Oh, you are in for a treat! In this episode I go back to my neuroscience roots with Earl K. Miller, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Earl studies the neural basis of executive brain functions, the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes. We talk about learning, memory, and cognitive capacity. How wisdom is our brain encoding our experiences into principles, categories, and concepts using data compression. How sleep and anesthesia are similar and so very different, both invoking full-brain oscillations but one producing memories and the other amnesia. We dig into executive function, multitasking, switching costs, and sensory overload, and how these are manifested in autism, attention deficit disorder, and depression. What is interruption in this milieu? Listen in to find out! For more about We Interrupt, please see our website at www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes, links, and other episodes.

Episode 11: Michael Karson on Creating Conversation Spaces that Foster Curiosity and Participation

Welcome to We Interrupt, a podcast that explores the ins and outs of interruptions. In this episode, we talk with professor and clinical psychologist Michael Karson (michaelkarson.com) about personality and societal rules for what is deemed “acceptable” behavior – and how these are normalized, tested, and evolved over time. We discuss the use of performance as a means of exploring – and challenging- roles and rules, as well as the use of interruption in therapy and teaching contexts, as a means to create safe spaces that engender trust and caring.

Episode 10: Lorraine Segal on Transforming Conflict Through Story

In this podcast we explore the ins and outs of interruptions to understand more fully what interruption is and how it may be useful or even necessary for enhancing creativity, connection, reducing power imbalances, and building inclusive communities. In this episode, we explore interruption in the context of conflict transformation with Lorraine Segal, founder of Conflict Remedy (https://conflictremedy.com/). Disagreement is a natural part of human relationship, but as we discuss, you don’t have to stay stuck in conflict! We explore interpersonal conflict, what we bring to our workplaces and what our workplaces bring to us, and we tell stories, share mishaps, and dream about what can be if each of us could learn and implement conflict transformation in our own lives.

Episode 9. Jason Barkeloo on Creating Inclusive Pathways to Innovation

In this episode, we explore innovation and interruption in the research community with Jason Barkeloo, founder of the open science platform Therapoid. We talk about building a parallel pathway for innovation, one that provides open technologies, lab equipment, and microgrants and builds reputation through blockchain technologies, with the goal of providing more researchers access to scientific resources. We get a bit nerdy and dig into persistent identifiers, cryptocurrency, open regulation, mitigating exploitation. And I push back about the practicalities of adopting Web 3 when Web 2 is still incompletely integrated into scholarly workflows. Join us for a delightful conversation about opening up science!
To learn more about We Interrupt and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.
You can find more about Jason on LinkedIn, and explore the Therapoid open science ecosystem at https://therapoid.net/.

Episode 8: Andrea Michalek on When Everything Changes

In this episode, we explore interruption with Andrea Michalek. A serial entrepreneur, Andrea started her career as a software engineer working on innovative search algorithms. Early on, she was tapped to lead a spin-out, and she was hooked. Andrea has led spin-outs, start-ups, and a major acquisition (twice), all in the space of search technology, research literature, and more recently in scholarly reputational management. All that stopped abruptly in 2020, when Andrea suffered a traumatic brain injury from which she emerged over the course of three years. Join us as we talk about her career of interruptions and diversions, and her experience re-starting her own life.

Episode 6: Hanne De Jaegher and the Experience of Interacting

In this conversation with cognitive scientist and philosopher Hanne De Jaegher, we explore interruption in the context of participatory sense making – how we understand the world and ourselves is affected by inter-individual coordination. Participatory sense-making relies on the capacity to flexibly engage with your social partner from moment to moment. It involves emotion, knowledge, mood, physiology, background, concepts, language, norms, and, crucially, the dynamics of the interaction process modulates the sense-making that takes place. How we navigate and participate in these “spaces between” may be our most sophisticated form of knowing: love, a never-ending balancing act. We touch on implications for scientific objectivity, neurodiversity, and dementia. And how this sense-making framework is interrupting cognitive theory, moving us from thinking about self-in-isolation to self-in-connection. From individualism to love, really. In this framework, interpersonal communication and connection can be seen as a series of interruptions, as we perceive, engage, learn, adjust, and through experience develop our sense of self-in-relation.
To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.
You can find more about Hanne on her webpage at www.hannedejaegher.net, including links to papers and videos. If you’d like to dive right into enactive cognitive theory, a good place to start is her 2007 paper with E Di Paolo, Participatory Sense-Making: An enactive approach to social cognition, published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and her 2021 paper Loving and knowing. Reflections for an engaged epistemology published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

Episode 7: Emily Russo on Neurodiverse Workplaces

In this episode, we talk with Emily Russo about talent management, and how interruptions in workplace culture are facilitating an increasingly neurodiverse workforce. Join us as we dig into job crafting, the pros and cons of self-disclosure, and the critical importance of workplace conversations, managing strengths, and training in neurodiversity for managers and team members. Emily does research in the areas of talent management, neurodiverse talent, organizational gender diversity and talent in multinational corporations. She brings to this work a wealth of academic and practical experience: a Masters in International Management from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in International Business Strategy from University of Queensland Business School, as well as service as a Director at CEO Forum Group, and work at KPMG Consulting in both Australia and in the USA. She also serves on the Board of Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect).
To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.

Episode 5 : Diane Finegood and Learning in Relation

Teaching – and learning – how to be in dialogue is both fun and complex. Join us as we talk with Diane Finegood about building scaffolding for effective conversation. How to foster an ethic of care so that we can practice active listening. We talk about the challenges of power differentials in the classroom and her iterative approach to devolving power through self disclosure and ungrading. How group size matters. And how online and in person classroom settings and tools can be blended to facilitate transparency, respect, and trust-building. How does interruption fit? Diane is both interrupting the “sage on the stage” mode of teaching as well as developing spaces where interruption in dialogue is no longer offensive but more like an orchestra playing.
To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics you think we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak. You can find more about Diane on the Simon Fraser University Morris J Wosk Center for Dialogue webpage, here: https://www.sfu.ca/dialogue/about/fellows/diane-finegood.html/ More information about the Semester in Dialogue program is available here: https://www.sfu.ca/dialogue/semester.html