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“Hello, can I interrupt you to ask how things are going?”

25 July 2025

When is it a good time to interrupt someone? Questions are essential to good communication and teamwork. But when we get the timing wrong, we risk irritating people with unwanted distractions.

Technology development is a complex process – it is a collaboration between different people with different roles coming together around a common project. The engineering work is typical deep and requires constant focus. It can take an engineer several hours, several days or even several weeks to get fully into a task, loading up their brain with all of the information needed to complete the work. It’s a bit like a stack of blocks – building up steadily and carefully, whilst hoping that nothing breaks your concentration. One badly timed interruption risks interrupting the flow – it can disorder these thoughts and scatter the stack of blocks. As a project manager, a key learning for me was to schedule my project messaging and project meetings for the start of the day. With a smaller team on a fast-moving project, you can get everyone together for a quick “stand-up” meeting to start the day. This leaves the bulk of the day clear for uninterrupted engineering work, trusting that the team will work most efficiently if I leave them alone to work on a problem for an extended time. Another key behaviour is (as much as possible) letting engineers complete the whole of each task before switching them on to other tasks. However short, an interrupting task destroys continuity and productivity.

Technology management is also difficult, but the key skills for managers are about handling more interruptions. The marketplace can bring an overwhelming number of simultaneous demands. A good manager should seek to deal with lots of interruptions during their day, shaping them into a consistent story. Like a young person on their phone frantically juggling multiple social media accounts, reacting quickly to assert some level of control by jumping on new opportunities and squashing new threats. The challenge for a business development manager is to be a smart bridge between the dizzying world of the market, and the carefully constructed work of the engineer. Standing in the gap, to avoid crossing the working styles. The tool I found most helpful was to keep lists of everything – logging the status and next steps for every relationship and every issue. It allowed me to respond instantly to any market-facing questions, and to respond consistently in engineering discussions. I liked Microsoft Excel which is a useful way to create my own searchable list – which can be sorted to highlight key issues for management reporting and action planning. I also liked Atlassian Jira which is a great way to check on engineering progress without having to physically interrupt someone whilst they are working.

If you’re still with me, there’s a difficult point coming up. Personalisation of interruptions can unlock the next level of productivity. Not everyone is the same, and we’re smart if we treat people as individuals, talking with them in a way that best matches their own style of working. Some people will be living with a constant stream of interruptions generated inside their own brains. Like someone picking balls from a Tombola at a fair, that is constantly throwing random new ideas at you. Ask that person how it’s going, and they will always say “busy”; ask them when the current task will be done, and it’s always “soon”. They can leap onto something with high energy and big enthusiasm, which feels great, but that focus can easily be overtaken by a new interest. This behaviour is common in business development and can be very useful when building up a new opportunity from a standing start. However, what caught me out is that some engineers also have this type of brain wiring – I didn’t expect it, and I didn’t always adapt my style to get the best from these people. The key here is to tap into that person’s ability to jump into new pieces of work that interest them. Using their hyper-focus for genuinely urgent and difficult tasks – like responding to a sudden request from a customer for a new proposal, a product demonstrator, or a critical bug fix. And when following up this work, to be unashamed about interrupting to stop the focus from moving on to something new before that urgent job is done.

Key points

• Good Project Management plans interactions to avoid random interruptions for engineers that might disturb their internal “stack” of information.
• Business Development stands in the gap between the broad, fast-moving marketplace and the specific, consistent world of engineering development.
• Personalise your interactions with the people in your team that like to move from one focus to another.

References:

• The image of an interrupt disrupting work stored as a stack of blocks is an analogy based on the way that a micro-processor unloads its “stack” to handle a physical interrupt. It is an analogy commonly used by software engineers to describe the way they that feel when their personal workflow is interrupted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrupt_handler
• I borrowed the “Tombola” analogy from Chris Packham’s excellent series on neuro-divergence for the BBC. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002c6bb/inside-our-minds-inside-our-adhd-minds

• Listening in Business Development

  27 June 2025

The key to successful business development is listening to your customers and finding out what they really want. But listening to what people want turns out to be a skill that needs some practice to get right, especially if you’re in front of an important customer that has only grudgingly given you a short meeting. The temptation is to start quickly pitching your clever solutions to get your point across with the greatest impact, before you have even started to understand the problem that the customer perceives.
One of my favourite interviewers is Simon Mayo. When he’s interviewing a director or actor, he’s often under a strict time limit but will still start with an open question about their film and let them talk. If the answer hasn’t gone well, if they were brief and defensive in their comments, he’ll sometimes pause and ask the same question again in a calmer tone of voice. It’s a big risk because you might lose all of your time getting two defensive answers and just annoying a someone who was already tense. However, what tends to happen is that the interviewee takes a breath and then gives a much sharper and more thoughtful answer at the second attempt.
I was taught to use a similar approach in business development. The technique is to ask an open question and listen attentively to the answer. At the end of that answer, have the presence to pause, ask another open question, and then listen again, and then again. Gradually, the guarded customer can relax and (hopefully) starts to enthuse about what they are trying to do with their business. I found that the short, high-pressure meeting that I was offered would often run wildly over time, and you’d get into a discussion about new business opportunities. Though never along the lines that I’d anticipated and prepared.
The summary: listening can be a creative power.