Small Talk! business edition

Just got a massive lurch of anxiety as I’ve got a confirmation email through for a research trip to Germany with a group of people I’ve never met before. 8 of us on the booking…all on the same flight. I was really really hoping I’d be flying alone and just seeing people out there. Going to need some great tips on how to make business small talk, please!

(We’re going to see playground equipment, any good slide chat?)

All swings and roundabouts isn’t it?

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Well, this trip will have its ups and downs.

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Get everyone together and ask for some blue sky thinking on the trip

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All excellent so far, now I just need enough of this to last me for 48 hours please.

In Germany, they call a seesaw ‘die Wippe’. I don’t think you’ll be needing any more than that.

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Take some icebreaker questions and they’ll leave you alone for the journey, sorted

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Just talk for 48 hours and then you don’t have to ask questions or listen

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I have no actual advice. Sorry. I’ve got to sit in a colleagues car for and hour each way on Wednesday afternoon and thats worrying me enough. And I know them.

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Feels like it’s going to be fly together, work together, dinner together. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

Might just up my weirdness even more which has been my tactic for most of this last year.

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Say you’re a nervous flier and then plonk some headphones on.

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Email them all in advance and explain that staying completely silent on planes is a key part of your research.

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Things I know not to work: saying I don’t like networking: “oh me neither! networks effusively

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Thought I was losing my mind, so many people say this

Make me feel like some sort of a “bad networking snob” or something

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I worked with a professional networker who keeps winning international young scmoozer of the year type awards, and I never had an exchange with her that wasn’t dreadful and awkward so I know that I’m a lost networking cause.

Actually, I once asked her, for the sake of pretending to be a normal person, where her dress was from and that seemed to work until I was like FAST FASHION IS FOR NARCS or something like that I guess.

Ask them how many holes a straw has

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Oh yes, I’ll save this sort of gold for the evenings!

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if someone gets up to use the loo you should put your arm around their shoulder and say lets walk and talk as you march up the aisle

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Get that Richard Herring Emergency Questions book and just bombard them all with questions and get them chatting with each other and don’t actually answer any questions or take part in the chat yourself

They won’t notice your absence from the chat. They will think that you were the fount of all the witty repartee plus they will have revealed their innermost selves while you’ll still be an inscrutably charming enigma

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When my colleague drove us on a four hour trip to a factory, his tactic was to tell me how much he liked jazz, put on a jazz-heavy playlist, and then proceed to guess literally every artist incorrectly.

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