Communicating with ENTPs (and INTPs)

The ENTP communication style can be difficult for an INTJ to appreciate. That’s because of the way ENTPs (and owl melons particularly) interact with inarticulated understanding. Rather than thinking to themselves “I need to split my forces into a pincer attack” they’ll daydream briefly about water in a river breaking around a rock and coming back together. Without knowing precisely why this is the correct principle to apply in the particular context, they’ll follow it.

That’s why their external life is something like a waking dream state. The appropriate principles simply appear as these intuitive daydreams in an actionable form, and most of the time they don’t bother to articulate the principle. That’s because it’s already in an actionable form, and they don’t (typically) have a strong extraverted thinking function so when they socialize they’re going to talk about the vision of the water parting around the rock. (That is, extraverted intuition is both their socializing function and their acting-in-the-world function.)

Intuitions don’t describe the general principle, they describe highly representative special cases and illustrative metaphors. So rather than saying “fascism is the correct organizing principle for a submarine crew but not for a college campus” (how an INTJ would say it) an ENTP will say something like “I have a good idea, let’s unleash a pack of wolves in the library” and laugh to himself about how the silliness of this picture perfectly illustrates the silliness of overgeneralizing principles of organization. I ran into this with Patrick on Saturday, when he was effectively saying “we need to invent the autonomous turrets with the eugenic correction factor” and I started sperging out about the implementation. Then he explained we weren’t talking about literal turrets and we had a bro moment.

What we’ve proved here is that communication between the types is possible so long as the ENTP is patient with the INTJ taking a moment to translate everything from particulars into generals, and then back to particulars. That is, the particulars which actually pertain to the situation at hand, which have nothing to do with water going around a rock and everything to do with the logistics of getting two large masses of normies with no future orientation or agency to form a pincer attack. In turn, INTJs must be patient with the inability of ENTPs to give a straight answer to a question like “which color flag is the signal for attack”. (“No great Buddha, I actually need an answer for this one.”)

Despite my optimism here, these conversations can descend into contempt very easily if either individual demands it be held in their first language (which is a human stress response). The dominant partner ought to shoot for a 2:1 ratio of communication styles and prefer patience over contempt while the inferior partner is restating the messages in their own words. They are translating out loud and this is a necessary step in achieving the clarity of common purpose which is necessary for any collaboration.