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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

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.

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

We generally think of interruptions in the context of human conversation. One voice, speaking words, interacting with another. Music is another form of conversation, with instruments (including voices) interacting and purposefully building upon one another, melodies to harmony to counterpoint and fugue. In this podcast, we talk with piano teacher and professional accompanist Doris Mattingly about her perspectives on interruption. We journey through the interruption of the COVID pandemic on teaching and how she has adjusted her listening in “virtual studio” lessons. We explore what interruption means during a lesson, and also listen to music – Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Beethoven, Bartók, Bach – to understand how musical interruptions may be the same and different as those in spoken conversation. Join us for an audio feast! To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast and to suggest people we should talk to and topics we should explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak. Information about Doris and her piano studio is at https://www.mattinglystudio.com/.

Can interruptions be a positive force in transforming violence to peace? We can use specific breathing patterns to pause, bring our mind and bodies into the present moment, and “turn question marks into exclamation points”. Join our conversation with Mandar Apte, a petroleum engineer whose career and purpose evolved into social innovation. We talk about how daily inner recalibration through breathing techniques can connect our emotions, feelings and actions and help us manage conflict by peaceful means. Mandar’s current work on interrupting violence at Cities for Peace draws upon his time at Shell creating and managing their GameChanger program to foster clean energy startups – one of the early corporate social responsibility efforts. A recognized practice leader, Mandar brings nearly two decades of studying, practicing, and teaching meditation to thousands of leaders across four continents (including over 2000 colleagues while an engineer at Shell). 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. Learn more about Mandar and his work interrupting violence at Cities for Peace at https://cities4peace.org/.

We were curious about consciousness and interruption. How we can view interruption as a destructive distraction in some settings, but we can also benefit from interruptions when we are in intentionally crafted creative spaces. When we are paying attention, conscious of the thriving of the people we are with, interruption can be a positive motive force. Join us as we talk with Marti Spiegelman and explore disjointed career paths, coming to wisdom about consciousness, connection and fluidity, energy and purpose. When applying principles of awareness and negotiability we can achieve nothing less than an interruption in our worldview, in which we embrace change as a reconnection with the world around us and appreciate the constancy of human and ecological relationships. Marti Spiegelman is a training professional, mentor, speaker, and founder of Awakening Value™: Technologies of Consciousness. Marti holds a BA in biochemistry from Harvard University, an MFA in graphic design from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and has advanced training in neurophysiology, psychology, and anthropology. She was president of her own design firm for 20 years. She is also an initiated wisdomkeeper, with over four decades of specialized training in Indigenous technologies of consciousness and related scientific, economic, and sociological fields. To learn more about We Interrupt this Podcast, read the show notes, and suggest people we should talk to and topics to explore, please see our webpage at: https://www.weinterrupthis.com or contact us on twitter at @HaakYak.

We have deep-seated questions about “interruption” as a concept and social construct. In this podcast, we ask what is interruption and how might it be useful. Our goal is to start evocative conversations across a diverse set of perspectives — and thank Josie Gibson and The Catalyst Network for hosting our launch episode. Please see www.weinterruptthis.com for show notes and content links.