There’s a small subgenre of writing online that treats small talk as something to be overcome. Better questions. Deeper conversations. Skip the surface stuff. The implication is that the small chat is the failure mode and the deep chat is what calls are supposed to be aiming for.
I’d push back on that, gently.
Most of the good calls on XES aren’t deep. They’re conversations about nothing in particular that happened to be fun. Two people talking about their week, comparing notes on what they’d had for dinner, getting sidetracked into a debate about whether pineapple belongs on pizza, ending up somewhere unrelated. The call didn’t resolve anything, didn’t teach anyone anything, didn’t produce any insight either party would later quote. It was just fun. They got off the call slightly happier than they got on.
That’s the entire point of a lot of social interaction. Friends don’t spend most of their time having profound conversations either. They mostly mess about. The profound bits show up occasionally, often when nobody’s trying for them, and the rest of the time it’s just being around each other.
The aim-for-deep advice gets the failure mode of small talk wrong. Bad small talk isn’t bad because it’s small. It’s bad because neither person is curious about what the other is saying. Good small talk — where both people are actually listening and reacting — is one of the better things humans do.
If you’re on a call that’s just chatting, that’s probably the call working. You don’t need to escalate it. You don’t need to find the deeper question. You can just keep chatting. The end of the call will come when it comes.
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