This week we announced a cool new initiative in Pune - called 'Pune Knowledge on Tap' - wherein we invite some experts to speak about their topic of interest. The cool part - this happens in a relaxed brewery setting!

More details in the first tweet below.

And now, on to the newsletter.

Welcome to the hundred and sixth edition of '3-2-1 by Story Rules'.

A newsletter recommending good examples of storytelling across:

3 tweets
2 articles, and
1 long-form content piece

Let's dive in.

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

Super excited about this. For more details, you can read my LinkedIn post.

Fascinating stat. Wonder what the number would be for India.

Haha, that's crazy.

Reminds me of an old joke - "Punjab mein sabse zyaada barf kahan padti hai?

Whisky ke glass mein."

📄 2 Articles of the week

a. 'India will create AI middle managers' by Dharmesh Ba

In this insightful post, Dharmesh makes a provocative point - that AI would be useful to fill in the middle-management layer in small Indian firms.

Dharmesh starts with the story of a Y-Combinator backed startup which was in the news recently. It created an AI based software to monitor workers and put out a demo video:

Their demonstration showed two managers drilling into dashboard data to trace a production slowdown to a single worker who wasn't meeting targets. The concept feels eerily dystopian. While we've all understood such technology was theoretically possible, seeing it actually implemented is jarring - our instinctive response is rejection. What made the situation worse was how the video seemed filtered through a lens of privilege, lacking any empathy for the workers being monitored.

But Dharmesh feels that in India this would be welcomed. He cites the story of a small business owner who depends on his CCTV for supervision:

A year ago, while interviewing business owners across the country, I met a gentleman running a beauty products store in a small town near Nagpur. When I asked how technology had improved his productivity, he pointed to a CCTV camera and declared, "That camera is my brother."

Building on this, Dharmesh comes to his main insight - the use of AI as a middle management layer:

Larger businesses traditionally hire middle managers to address productivity challenges. These managers monitor ground-level staff and maintain operational order. Interestingly, this middle layer serves another critical function: it elevates the business owner's status. The hierarchical structure itself generates a certain fear and respect—the owner's words and instructions carry more weight when filtered through middle management. This supervisory buffer is a luxury many small business owners desire but simply cannot afford.

This gap creates a perfect white space for AI to occupy—monitoring employee productivity at both store and factory levels.

He then cites a few examples of this in action - check out some of the tweets he shares at the end of the post.

We live in fascinating times!

b. 'The inexhaustible kindness of strangers in Pakistan' by Andrew Fidel Fernando (ESPN Cricinfo)

Andrew (a cricket writer from Sri Lanka) is one of the shining stars in the bright Cricinfo galaxy. In this heartwarming piece, there'e very little about the cricket being played - but a lovely window into that complicated country called Pakistan.

Sure Indians have every reason to be angry with many of the actions taken by that country's leaders (and some citizens). But that should not stop us from admiring the tales of hospitality that emerge every now and then.

Andrew starts with a long story of many Pakistani folks coming together to solve a cash withdrawal issue.

He then shares some other stories of random acts of kindness:

Over my time in Islamabad and Rawalpindi I will experience the following:

- Three Pakistan army men insist that I sit with them for a chai while they ask me all sorts of questions, hanging on every word of my answers. Questions include: “What is Malinga doing now? Why is Sri Lanka not playing Champions Trophy? Who does Sri Lanka support in Pakistan vs India matches? Will you pretend to interview us since you are a journalist?” (That last one sounds too much fun not to do, obviously, and many chuckles are had.)

- A Careem (ride-hailing app) driver named Amir decides that it’s unacceptable that I should have to travel around the broad security cordon that Rawalpindi had set up around the venue, and so calling his “Rescuer” (emergency services worker) friend named Manzar, who works at the ground, asks him to escort me through a shorter route, on foot. Amir buys some roadside strawberries for us, washes them at a nearby tap, and serves them out of a plastic bag, which he describes as jugaad

Andrew realises that he does not need a SIM for data - since he can request anyone for a hotspot:

In just 72 hours, I become so accustomed, so deeply reliant, on this hospitality because it is in such exquisite abundance. My friend and colleague Danyal Rasool calls me to ask if I have managed to get a SIM card, in order to have internet access (in Pakistan, as in India, SIM cards are not easily sold to foreigners, so you have to go to an outlet with your passport to get one). "Why would I waste 40 minutes doing that?" I ask him. "I can get a hotspot from whoever is around." In these 72 hours I've asked for, conservatively, about 18 hotspots... and my strike rate is 100%. Never once has the other person hesitated.

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

a. 'We Need to Talk' on the Hidden Brain podcast with Shankar Vedantam

In this episode the host speaks with Alison Wood Brooks, a Behavioral scientist and professor at Harvard Business School, on the art of conversation. Turns, out it's mostly about the art of listening and asking good questions.

Alison starts with a story of a first date of hers that went wrong:

Now, the whole point of a first date is to get to know each other, so I am pelting him with questions. Where is he from? What's his family like? What was his college like? What was it like to play football there? Tell me more about your football career. What's your job like now? Where do you live? Do you have lots of friends in the city? So I'm asking him lots of questions, and I realized that 10 minutes have gone by, and he has not asked me a single thing about myself. 10 minutes. And at that point, you sort of have this out-of-body experience, and I'm floating over the table looking down at this conversation game that's now afoot. And you start to play this little game where you're like, how many questions can I ask this person before they ask a single question back to me?

If not asking any questions is one sin, another issue is what Alison calls 'boomerasking':

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Boomerasking is not people over 50 who ask questions. It is named after the arc of a boomerang.. And the structure of boomerasking is you ask a question to your partner, you let them answer the question, but then you bring the focus of the conversation right back to yourself. So it would be as if I said to you, Shankar, how was your weekend?

SHANKAR VEDANTAM: Oh, the weekend was fun. You know, we went to a nice restaurant and went for a walk in the park.

ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Oh, well, I actually went skydiving with Harry Styles, and it was terrific... So you let your partner answer. But then you almost ignore what they share with you, and you bring the focus right back to yourself

The third sin - pretending to listen. People admit to doing this at least one-fourth of the time:

We have done research recently to show that people's minds are wandering 24% of the time during conversation. And this was based on their own self-reports. So we interrupted them every five minutes in a conversation and asked them, were you listening attentively to your partner or was your mind wandering? And 24% of the time, they say, actually, my mind was wandering. I wasn't listening to my partner. We suspect this is an underestimate because people know that it's sort of embarrassing to not be listening to their partner. You see this happen during video calls or on Zoom. People are smiling and nodding at the camera even while they're like to the side texting their friend or making a grocery list. Because there are these norms of politeness, right? We know that we should make our partners feel like we're listening to them.

One of the useful concepts that Alison shares is the Topic Pyramid:

There are three levels to the pyramid. At the base of the pyramid, this is where small talk lives. These are topics that you could talk about with anyone. So what about this weather? How was your weekend? What are you excited about? You know, what's going on at the weekend coming up? Those sort of well-trodden, well-known small talk topics. It's totally okay to be at the bottom of the pyramid. In fact, many conversations have to start there.. especially with strangers or with people you haven't seen in a long time. The mistake is staying at the base of the pyramid too long and letting it stagnate and become dull. And that's when these alarm bells go off in your mind where you say, oh, my, we got to get out of this. We got to get to something more meaningful.

So the second tier of the pyramid is what we call medium talk or tailored talk where you're moving towards a topic that is more interesting, more personal, and closer maybe to what your partner has in terms of interests and expertise. So it's becoming more personalized.

The third, the top tier of the pyramid is deep talk. Deep talk is what friends and family members and work besties, this is what we're all hungry for, the type of conversation to have with people we're very close to. It's a sort of unique place of shared reality, where maybe only the two of you could be talking about this topic in this way.

And so, not every conversation needs to get to the peak. That's not always the goal. When your neighbor is just taking out their trash, you don't need to get to the peak of the pyramid. The key here is fostering a little bit more of an awareness of where you are in the pyramid, and making sure that you don't get stuck at the base of the pyramid for too long.

Another tip - ask more open-ended questions:

...open-ended questions, invite your partner to share, right? These are questions are like, what's on your mind? Or what was your morning like? What are you excited about lately? These questions that are born of curiosity, that invite your partner to share their perspective with you. Whereas closed-ended questions, as many of us know, usually have a very distinct answer. So do you like how this conversation is going? Did you sleep well last night? These sort of yes, no questions are very closed.

---

When we studied question asking among negotiators, what we found is that only 9% of turns across hundreds of conversations included open-ended questions. And this is a huge mistake. Open-ended questions are the most direct pathway to extract information from your counterpart because they're going to answer you in a much more open-ended way.

Also - ask follow up questions - they are the surest sign that you are listening:

Follow-up questions are superheroes. They are amazing. When we studied 1,100 speed dates, what we found is that people who asked more questions were more likely to get second dates. So much so that if you asked just one more question on each of your 20 dates, you would convert one more of your dates into a yes.

That's all from this week's edition.

Ravi

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Ravishankar Iyer

Better questions = Better Conversations (3-2-1 by Story Rules #106)

𝕏 3 Tweets of the week

📄 2 Articles of the week

🎧 1 long-form listen of the week

Gladwell on Disordered Stories (3-2-1 by Story Rules #105)

The Two Kinds of English (3-2-1 by Story Rules #104)

Life of a Standup Comedian (3-2-1 by Story Rules #103)