The opener is not the hard part.

A man at a conference spent most of the first morning working on an opening line. Something about the keynote, ideally a bit funny, that would signal he was worth talking to. He used it twice, and both conversations died inside a minute.

At lunch he ended up next to someone who had apparently spoken to about a dozen people that morning. He asked what his approach was, expecting a technique.

The answer was that he mostly said something about the coffee.

Why the boring opener wins

An opener has one job: establish that a conversation is now available. That is the whole specification. It does not have to be interesting, because nothing has started yet and there is nothing to be interesting about.

A clever line is actually worse at the job, because it makes an offer the other person has to match. Now they have to be funny back, at a coffee station, to a stranger, before they have decided whether they want to talk to you. Most people will just smile and leave.

A good opener is easy to answer. That is the only property it needs.

Shared context

The reliable move is to comment on something you are both currently inside. The room, the queue, the delay, the thing that just happened on stage. It requires no disclosure from either of you and it is obviously true, so the other person can respond without deciding anything about you first.

• "Is this queue for the good coffee or the other one?"
• "I understood about a third of that talk."
• "Have you found where the afternoon sessions are? I have walked past this door twice."

The third one has an extra property worth noticing. Asking for small help is one of the easiest conversation openings available, because most people like being useful and it gives them a role for the first ten seconds.

The part that actually decides it

Conversations do not fail at the opener. They fail two exchanges later, and almost always for the same reason: somebody gives an answer with no surface on it.

This is the actual skill, and it is much less discussed than openers because it is harder to write listicles about. Answer with slightly more than was asked, and hand something back.

The thing you are afraid of

Worth naming, because it is usually the real obstacle rather than any lack of technique. The fear is not that the conversation goes badly. It is that the other person will visibly not want to have it.

That does happen and it is survivable and almost nobody is watching. In practice most people at an event are relieved when somebody starts, because they were doing the same calculation and had also decided to wait.

Getting out

One reason people avoid starting conversations is having no idea how to end them, so they get trapped in nine minutes with somebody they have nothing to say to and then avoid the whole thing next time.

The exit is a sentence you can prepare once and reuse for years. Name a reason, appreciate the conversation, leave. "I am going to grab a seat before it fills up, but that was good, I will look you up." Delivered warmly it lands as normal, because it is normal.

The man with the coffee line said the exit was the actual trick, and that he had only got comfortable starting conversations once he stopped worrying about being stuck in them.