Dilbert Discovers Conversation Rules
Posted by Jill • Wednesday, 11-August-2010
Dilbert, creation of Scott Adams
Just before he turned 40, Scott Adams became a full time cartoonist. His most famous creation, Dilbert, satired the corporate 1990s with its focus on big business and white collar workers, making some of us feel less alone until The Office came along in the noughties.
Recently, Scott Adams published a piece called Conversation. I encourage you to read the entire piece in its entirety. He starts off by talking about aliens watching humans dancing. Then he moves onto watching aliens watching humans conversing. Gives you a tiny sliver of a clue into how Adams’ mind works.
The final part is what struck me like a brick to the head. Adams says:
“You might think that everyone on earth understands what a conversation is and how to engage in one. My observation is that no more than a quarter of the population has that understanding. I was solidly in the conversationally clueless camp until I took the Dale Carnegie course, in which one small part of the learning dealt with the mechanics of conversation. It was a life-changing bit of knowledge.
“Prior to the Dale Carnegie course I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored. I figured it was the other person’s responsibility to find some entertainment in the conversation. That wasn’t my job. Yes, I was that asshole. But I didn’t know it. The good news is that once I learned the rules of conversation, I was socially reborn. It turns out that active listening is more fun than talking, although sometimes you need to guide the conversation toward common interests.
“Three-quarters of the people reading this post just thought “Uh-oh. I didn’t know conversation had rules.”
What amazed me was Adams’ admission of his loose grasp of the fundamentals of conversation. That he had thought listening equated with being bored. That the purpose of a conversation was to demonstrate his cleverness and show up other people’s weaknesses. Astounding that a man so intelligent could be missing something so fundamental. Then I thought about it for a minute longer.
Adams is a man who’s accustomed to having if not the intellectual upper-hand, then at least the sarcasm upper hand. He’s what I think of as confidently subversive. I say this with great respect, too, having known and worked with more than a few confidently subversive people in my career.
Adams once impersonated a management consultant and convinced the CEO of one of the world’s largest technology companies to hold a brain storming session with his top executives to create the firm’s mission statement (you can read about that here). He enjoyed putting the joke on them and possibly thought they deserved it. Adams came from the corporate world and maybe he felt that Dilbert, and jokes like the one he played on Logitech, was appropriate payback for all the nonsense he witnessed and no doubt had to endure.
So maybe it’s not so surprising that a man who spent over a decade poking fun of white collar environments had such trouble with sincere and ‘straight’ conversation. Being clever and amusing is addictive, but it can keep you separate. We might enjoy you poking fun, even at us, but we probably wont think of you as being one of us. Your cleverness amuses us, it may even impress us. But the fact that there’s an “us” means that there must be a “them” – and you sure aren’t one of “us”.
Being amusingly clever may not be the best path to creating genuine human connection. And life’s a pretty lonely place without that. I admired Scott Adams for sharing his candid thoughts on conversation. He made himself vulnerable, and not a single sarcastic comment in sight. And that’s gotta take some guts.
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