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Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 520, an interview with the author of TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, Alison Wood Brooks.
In this episode, Alison shares how her experiences at Harvard shaped her understanding of one of the most critical skills for anyone in any industry: conversation. She introduces the concept of the “topic pyramid”, which includes small talk, tailored talk, and deep talk, and shares strategies for handling difficult conversations, such as using acknowledgment, affirmation, and hedging language. Alison shows why conversing more effectively can make a big difference in the quality of our close personal relationships and our professional success.
I hope you will enjoy this episode.
Kris Safarova
Alison Wood Brooks is the O’Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow at the Harvard Business School. She teaches an award-winning course in the MBA curriculum called “TALK.”
Get Alison’s new book here:
Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
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Episode Transcript:
Kris Safarova 00:41
Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. And just to give you a link where to get it, it is firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And another gift I have for you today is McKinsey and BCG Winning Resume. It’s a free download as well, and it is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can take a look at it and see what you can adapt and use on your resume. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And today we have with us a very, very special guest, Alison Wood Brooks, who is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School, and she created and teaches a cutting edge course to MBA students and executives. And her new book is called TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Such a great book. Alison, I’m so glad to have you with us.
Alison Wood Brooks 01:45
Thank you so much for having me on Kris. Let’s have some fun. I can’t wait to talk.
Kris Safarova 01:49
There are so many important things in your book, and I’m so excited to have this discussion with you. So maybe we can start with very briefly. How did your experiences at Harvard shape the understanding of conversation as a critical skill?
Alison Wood Brooks 02:05
That’s a great question. So I’ve now been at Harvard on the faculty for about 12 years, which is a long time and a lot of conversations. And so there’s an answer that’s being there has shaped my thinking as a scientist, so we’ll talk about that in a moment. But then also being there for that long and teaching so many students you get exposed to like more people than I think most people, right, like so every class that I teach. Every semester I teach, I meet 200 new people and really get to know them. And so you learn so much about conversation from that experience, too, starting from the scientist side of things in graduate school at Wharton, I had studied emotions, especially anxiety, and the types of anxiety that most of us feel before performance events, before social interactions and also during tasks. So while we’re interacting with someone, when we encounter awkward pauses or we’re not sure what to say next or what to do next, what to share about ourselves, when I started at Harvard, I realized that I had been studying emotions. I studying anxiety, but it really was specifically in the context of, how are people confronting their anxiety during in the social world during conversation, and how are we expressing our feelings to other people at the same time, I’m part of a field of behavioral science that has increasingly focused on the decisions that people make. How do people make big decisions? Like, should I buy this house or this house? Should I marry this person or that person? And all the while, I kind of became obsessed with this idea of like, well, where, where, where do we make decisions are, is it when we’re sitting in a chair? Is it when we’re walking outside? Is it when we’re talking to somebody else? And so that led me to a place as a scientist, where I realized, Oh, we don’t just make big or even medium sized choices. We make 1000s of micro decisions at every moment of every day, including during our conversations with other people. And luckily, being so privileged to be at this amazing institution, I was around people and tools and resources where I realized, oh, we have we can get our hands on large scale data of real interactions between real people, so we can study those 1000s of micro decisions at a larger scale than ever before in scientific history. So now we can, we can study real transcripts and use tools like natural language processing and AI and machine learning to dissect and analyze what’s happening between people in a much. A rigorous way. So that’s the scientific side of things. Really was inspired by so many people and collaborators at Harvard and outside of Harvard, and then as a teacher, I was hired there to teach negotiation, which is a course that almost every business school, every law school, teaches. It’s a fabulous course. And as I was teaching this course on negotiation, I loved it, and it’s so valuable, but I also found myself getting a little frustrated, because it’s not we. Yes, we struggle with obviously fraught conversations and disagreement, but we also struggle with the kinds of conversations we have every day, all day long, that on their surface should be easy and casual and fun, and all of a sudden we land on a topic, or we say something and poke an invisible barb into somebody else, and all of a sudden, what should be an easy interaction becomes very awkward or very difficult. And I wanted my students to have the skills to confront every conversation more effectively, and so I designed a new course. I moved away from teaching negotiation, and I designed a new course called talk, and I’ve now been teaching it for five years. It seems to have really hit a nerve and resonates with the students, and I’ve written everything I learned from that course in in my new book, so now it’s available to everybody.
Kris Safarova 06:26
And thank you for writing that book, thank you for sharing your knowledge. I think it can help a lot of people. So let’s talk about conversation as a coordination game. Can you elaborate on what is a coordination game?
Alison Wood Brooks 06:39
Absolutely. We’ll have a little mini lesson on coordination games. So coordination games, game theorists and economists have been thinking about coordination games since about the middle of the 20th century. So people like John Nash, who was a protagonist in beautiful mind, Thomas Schelling, so many game theorists have been studying what they call coordination games for many decades. Now, the classic coordination game, there are many of them, and we won’t get too technical, but the idea is there are multiple people, at least two people, making simultaneous decisions, independent decisions without communicating with each other. And the outcome of those choices, it depends on what everybody chooses, so the outcomes are interdependent. So an example of a cooperative coordination game is the game of chicken, where there are two people hurtling towards each other, and they get to this point where they need to decide if they’re going to veer right or veer left, and they both make that same choice at the same time without communicating, and you just hope that they both either veer right or both veer left so they don’t collide. Now, if they avoid the collision, they’ve successfully coordinated. If they collide, then they’ve mis coordinated, right? So there are lots of these coordination games that have been studied for decades. Another example that we would call a non cooperative coordination game would be the prisoner’s dilemma, which you probably heard of in this one. Instead of wanting to choose the same direction as each other, you almost hope that your partner chooses the opposite thing from you. So the scenario of the prisoner’s dilemma is that there are two people sitting in jail. They’re being questioned about a crime that’s just happened. They’re in different rooms from each other, so they can’t communicate with each other, and the decision they each face is, do I stay silent, or do I snitch on the other person? Do I blame the other person? Now, if they both stay silent, they’ll be in jail, but only for a short time, let’s say a year. If they both snitch and rat each other out, they’re both in jail, but for much longer. Here’s where. So it’s clear, like it seems obvious, that you should choose to stay silent, except you’re tempted to snitch, because if you snitch and your partner stays silent, that means you get to pin the whole thing on the crime, on them. You walk free, and that person stays in jail. So both people are tempted to betray the other one. That’s why it’s called a dilemma. Sometimes we call it a coordination puzzle, a coordination problem, and it’s non cooperative, because you’re sort of hoping that the other that the other person chooses something different from you. And so the idea that that I describe in the book is that we’ve studied these coordination games, these like where people have to make decisions and they can’t talk about it. They have to guess what their partner is going to do without talking. And in a weird way, every conversation is also like a giant coordination game. It’s different than these sort of simple. Decisions like the game of chicken or the prisoner’s dilemma, because the coordination game of conversation demands much more. It’s requires much more guessing about what your partner wants, needs is going to do, wants to do, will do in the future. It also requires many more decisions, rather than just one decision, like, Oh, should we veer left or veer right? You’re deciding, should I talk to this person? Okay, let’s say that you do. What’s the first question or what’s the first topic? Okay, they’re gonna they’re gonna respond in a way. Now I have to make this decision. Do they want to stay on this topic or switch to something else? If we switch to something else, what should we switch to? Should it be something they want to talk about, or something I want to talk about. Should we talk about it in a formal way or an informal way? Should it be fun or should it be serious? Should we go Should I ask a question or make or tell a story? And so we’re making these sort of relentless unfolding choices, and every one of them is like a little mini coordination game. It’s why the game of the experience of conversation feels so complex and so hard to solve, because it’s a sort of unsolvable coordination game. But I think knowing that that’s what’s going on is so empowering and so helpful to know like, Oh, this is why we have moments of awkwardness. This is why we say things that we regret. This is why we collide and end up talking about stuff that we shouldn’t or forget to talk about stuff that we should. It’s because every conversation is a series of sort of relentless coordination puzzles that we have to try and solve with other people.
Kris Safarova 11:40
And in your book, you talk about system one and system two thinking, and how one of the reasons conversations can be tough for us is we are only relying on system one thinking. So maybe you can share with our listeners what the system one system two thinking, and how can people incorporate system to thinking to make conversations more enjoyable and more also more impactful.
Alison Wood Brooks 12:04
Yeah, so behavioral scientists talk about system one and system two thinking. This idea was brought to the mainstream by Danny Kahneman, who was an amazing psychologist at Princeton. I took his I took his class on judgment and decision making. It was the last time he ever taught it. So amazing. So he wrote this book called Thinking Fast and Slow for so for those of you who read that book, you already know all of this. But system one is the way that our human mind was built for intuitive judgment, quick judgment, the things that we do very instinctively and intuitively without a lot of deliberate judgment. System two is the slower way that we process information and decisions, so more deliberately and with more sort of logical cognition. In our lives, we are constantly toggling between system one and system two thinking and in the context of conversation. This is very important. Many of us sort of glide through life relying almost entirely on system one, processing when it comes to conversation. So even even our choices of who we talk to, it’s sort of like who we bump into, who we see, who we might who we whatever Right? Like, it’s just like who you run into, even that you can do more purposefully with more intentionality. And then, once we’re in a conversation with so many of us, rely almost entirely on our instincts and our impulses to decide what to talk about for how long and whether to switch what we raise what we don’t raise. And so one of the messages in my book is like, what if we can rely a little bit more on our system too, this more deliberative, careful, intentional way to process information and make decisions, it would help us have much better conversations, and so what that looks like in conversation, often is just doing a little bit of forethought before the conversation begins. This is called cognitive offloading. Once you’re in the chaos of a conversation, cognitively, there’s so much going on in this complex coordination environment that it’s hard to get everything right. It’s much easier to make intentional choices and reflect before the conversation has started. And so in our research, what we find is even 30 seconds of forethought, thinking about, Oh, what are two or three things that I could talk about or should talk about with this person? What have they been up to since the last time I saw them? What did we talk about last time. Oh yeah, they said that they were taking up piano lessons. I should check in with them about piano lessons. They told me that I know that their mother’s been in the hospital. I should ask how she’s doing. So just 30 seconds of reflection like this about the topics that you might talk about can be incredibly helpful during the conversation. It makes us. Feel less anxious. We have fewer disfluencies, so ums, uhs and stutters, we’ll feel more confident at topic boundaries, where we’re not sure where to go next. If you’ve prepped ahead of time, you always have options, so you know where to go next, and ultimately it makes for a more enjoyable conversation, a more productive conversation, you end up remembering things that you should talk about and landing on topics that are mutually interesting to everybody involved in the conversation. So topic prep is this first step in leaning more into system. Two The more deliberative judgment as part of the human mind. And then there are more things you can do throughout the conversation, so that we’re not always relying on that snap judgment, instinctive impulses that lead us to do all kinds of not great things during our conversations.
Kris Safarova 15:55
So topic prep, by the end of your course, you mentioned over 90% of the class rated topic prep is one of the courses top three most important takeaways, so let’s talk about it, and then I would love to talk about the other two takeaways. So let’s talk about topic prep. What people need to know about that?
Alison Wood Brooks 16:15
Yeah, they wouldn’t rate topic prep as one of the most important things at the beginning of the class, because a lot of people are very hesitant about it. Even now, as I just mentioned it in this podcast, there’s probably people listening being like, No, I’m not doing that, and I know it’ll make the conver it’ll make my conversations feel overly scripted and rigid and wooden, and also, I’m going to get distracted because it’s hard to remember my topic prep, and I’m going to forget what I meant to bring up. So there’s lots of objections. There’s a lot of aversion to topic prep, and I get that, especially, I think, when we think about prepping for conversations with people that we know intimately, so people we know really well, so close friends, our parents, our children, close work colleagues, a besties. Thinking about prepping for conversations with these types of people feels weird or sounds can feel like, should I be doing this in the same way that you might prep an agenda for a work meeting or something? But let me tell you by the end of the course, my students are have completely come around on the idea of topic prep, because they experience how powerful it is. So for those of you who already do this a little bit in your lives, I hope this is very validating. You should keep doing it. Lean into it. Do it even more. For those of you who are averse to it, I challenge you to try and see how it goes. Almost all of the studies and all of my students experiences suggest that when a conversation when they’ve prepared topics ahead of time is better, and in so many ways, than a conversation when they had than when they haven’t. And one of the things that is sort of surprising about it is that it doesn’t make the conversation scripted or wooden or rigid. It just means you have a backup plan when if things were going to get awkward or you didn’t know what to talk about, you just always have ideas in your back pocket, and that’s incredibly soothing and very productive. If you get to the end of the conversation and you haven’t raised any of the topics that you prepped, it’s totally fine, you know, like you don’t have to, you don’t have to raise these. It’s just that you have the option available to you.
Kris Safarova 18:33
What should people keep in mind when they’re doing topic prep? How can they do it better?
Alison Wood Brooks 18:40
Oh, what a great question. Kris, when you’re prepping topics, as with most good things in conversation, you should be focused mainly on the other person. Most Great conversationalists are very good at getting over their own egocentrism. We’re all egocentric. It’s how the human mind was built. But great conversationalists sort of get over that hurdle and focus intently on their partner. So thinking about, what will my partner find interesting? What should we as a dyad or as a group be talking about, what’s going to be the most rewarding for the most of us? And so when I do topic prep, I think about the people I’m likely to see in a day, and you can predict who you’re going to see in a day with pretty close accuracy. Even if you’re not a big planner or you don’t have a strict like, work schedule, you still know like, Oh, I’m going to wake up and I’m going to see my kids and get them on the bus and then maybe I’m going to go get my coffee. I don’t know who’s going to be there, but I know somebody’s going to be away. Going to be working the cash register, or the there’s going to be somebody making my coffee, right? So you can kind of predict every step of your day, either the specific people you’re going to see, or the archetypes of the people you’re going to see, and for each person that you see, you can think ahead about what you might. To them, even if it’s just a very quick, like off handed compliment, thinking about that ahead of time can be very helpful. So since you know who you’re going to interact with, to a large extent, it opens up the opportunity to personalize your prep. And so personalized prep is so powerful. You think about what do I think this person is going to want out of this interaction? And what are the topics that we should talk about to achieve that? So even if you think like, oh, they just want to they just want to see me because I they know I’m a good time, they just want to have fun. You should think ahead, like, what topics would be fun to talk about? Or if you’re like, Oh, they’re like, they’re really struggling. They I know that they’re going to be asking me for my advice about X, Y and Z. Think ahead about X, Y and Z, think ahead about well, do I have any pearls of wisdom that I could share with them that might be helpful to them? Or again, think to the back to the last conversation you had with them, or about what they’ve been up to in the time since. That will give you so many things to call back to, to inquire about, joke about, to give compliments on. Hey, I knew you were having a big presentation at work. How did that go? I bet it was great. You know, anything right? Very personalized. And then once you get past this, I’m focused so like so carefully on the other person, and you’re personalizing your prep to them, then you can also reflect, well, what has happened in my life recently, or what, what? What did we talk about last time that I was feeling weird about or upset about or excited about, because you matter too. And so sharing your own experiences telling a story of something funny that happened that you think they’d be interested in, you can prep that kind of stuff as well.
Kris Safarova 21:47
And this brings us to discussing topic pyramid. Can you share with our listeners what it is, and should listeners keep it in mind when they’re doing topic prep?
Alison Wood Brooks 21:59
Yes. In teaching my talk course, I have come to realize over thousands of students, people hate small talk, I mean, really, more than I even realized. People really dread small talk. They dread it ahead of time. They hate it while it’s happening. They regret it after the fact, because they feel like their conversations have been shallow or not meaningful and annoying and sort of useless. So the topic pyramid is a framework that I teach my students to help them be more aware of small talk and also to help them think about ways to cope with it and sort of escape it, so that you don’t feel dread or panic or regret after the conversation has ended. So the pyramid has three tiers. At the bottom tier is small talk topics. These are topics you could talk about with anybody, the traffic, the weather, the holidays, the weekend. This is these topics are important. You can’t avoid small talk entirely most of the time, especially when you’re talking with strangers or people you don’t know that well, or people you haven’t seen in a while. This is where we sort of reify our relationships. We reacquaint ourselves or acquaint ourselves with someone new, and so feeling filled with dread and trying to avoid it entirely is not actually the right goal. The right goal is using it as as a place, as a search, search ground, right a well trodden area where you’re looking for door knobs to go through doors into more exciting places, or like a treasure hunt, where you are together looking to find little golden nuggets to to explore. So that’s the base of the topic pyramid. The second tier is medium or tailored talk. This is where you’re launching away from small talk. And things are getting more personal. And you can get more personal in a few different ways. It can be through self disclosure, disclosure like this person is sharing information about their mind, their life, their experiences, or if you can get more personalized by simply landing on topics that they find more interesting. Like so they’re through their preferences, and so often, you can detect when you’re climbing the pyramid by the energy of the conversation. It should feel like you’re chasing the good energy. Where is that kinetic vibe? Like, go there, go through that door. And one of the best ways to do that is by is by asking questions. We’ll get there in a little bit, I’m sure. At the peak of the topic pyramid, this is deep talk. And I think this is what a lot of people feel hungry for. They wish that their conversations could be deeper, more meaningful, more magical, more connective. It’s important to acknowledge that, like, not every conversation is bound for the peak. I don’t actually want to have conversations that are like serious and deep. Been profound very often and definitely not, like with the barista at Starbucks or with my neighbor when they’re just taking out the trash, right? So not every conversation should be aiming there, but fostering a bit of awareness about when you do get there and you’re in this you’ve been on this journey. And finally, you land on one of those magical moments of togetherness where you feel like only the two of you could talk about this thing in this way at this specific moment in time. I think fostering appreciation for that is incredibly helpful habit. And so our conversations go up and down the topic pyramid, being a little bit more aware of where you are in the topic pyramid, where you want to be on the topic pyramid. And of course, don’t get stuck at the base of the pyramid in small talk for too long.
Kris Safarova 25:52
Alison, what is your advice when you’re speaking to someone you really want to build the relationships, but the other person is giving you one word answers or seems completely disinterested in any topic you bring up?
Alison Wood Brooks 26:04
What a question. I know. I do think it can be helpful to remember that conversation is CO created, that you don’t have control over your partner’s behavior. What you do have control over is how you respond to them, and you have control over your own emotions. So whether you’re talking to somebody who’s not giving you very much in return, and you’re starting to feel angry or frustrated, or you’re starting to feel like self doubt, like maybe this is my fault. What am I doing wrong? Feeling badly about yourself, remember it’s outside of your control. The best you can do is ask questions, try and maintain moments of levity, choose good topics that you think they’ll be interested in and sort of focus on their perspective, try and stay relentlessly kind, if you are doing all of those things and you still feel like they’re not giving you very much. The final thing you have control over is choosing who you interact with. And we don’t always have perfect control over it, right? There are some people we have to interact with in our families, sometimes at work, but keeping in mind that, like even if you have to interact with someone, if they time and time again, are giving you asymmetrical conversation, unrewarding conversation, there might be ways to sort of de prioritize their role in your life or in your social portfolio, even if you have to keep having conversations with them. Maybe your conversations can be shorter. Maybe they can be on only on topics that you have to talk to them about and then, like, don’t feel bad about it, right? That’s you only have control over your own choices and your own emotions and conversation is profoundly co constructed so you can’t, can’t do it all yourself.
Kris Safarova 28:09
Let’s talk about asking questions. One question I really liked in your book is, what are nine year olds up to or into these days? I thought it was a very smart way to transition, especially when you don’t have very close relationship and it’s a little bit awkward to ask about the person’s child. Thinking about what nine year olds are into these days, opens the door.
Alison Wood Brooks 28:35
Definitely. I love asking that question. I asked that question a lot another form, another version of that question, if you’re talking to people about their kids, is what what cute or cool things are, is your kid doing these days? It gives them enough latitude, like there’s always going to be a cool, cute or interesting thing that their kid is doing, and it gives them enough latitude to decide what they’re comfortable sharing about their kid or about their family, the one of what are nine year olds up to these days? I like as well, because I, I don’t know about you, but I truly like I’m always curious like, what for someone who know has a sample of humans, of humans that I don’t have, but it would be equally interesting to ask someone like, what are 70 year olds up to these days? And in fact, my sister just asked that question to chat GPT the other day. So asking someone, a parent or a teacher who spends all day long every day with nine year olds, you’re gonna learn something really cool. And it doesn’t need to be like, so personal about their kid or like what their kid is struggling with, if they’re not comfortable sharing that with you. Another reason I like this question is a more generalizable reason, which is it’s a question that starts with the word what, questions that start with the word what and are open ended. Give your part. Are a lot of latitude about what to share with you, and they tend to strike a very lovely balance between information exchange and warmth or psychological safety compared to other open ended questions that start with the word why. So if I say, Why is your nine year old into basketball, or why is your 70 year old mom not going to the doctor more often? Or, why is she going to the doctor so much? Why? Questions, they’re open ended technically, but they feel much more accusatory than a what question like, What do you think your mom needs in helping her get to the doctor more often? Or, what does she think about when she thinks about health? About health care? These open ended questions that start with what are extract a lot of information, but also feel warmer and more safe and inviting.
Kris Safarova 30:55
Definitely. So can you teach us a little more? How do we ask the right questions? How do we prepare to ask the right question during topic prep?
Alison Wood Brooks 31:06
Yeah, topic prep. So, so personalizing again goes just going back to this idea of personalizing. Think it’s really trying to push yourself to think about the other person’s perspective. What, what have they been up to in their life? What? What are they what are they going to be excited about? What are they working on these days that you might be able to help them with, and if you aren’t able to prep, if you can’t really guess, like, what they will be excited to talk about, you can always ask them directly once you’re together. Hey, what are you excited about these days? Or are you working on anything hard at work, like what’s going on there, or what, what is your family been doing that you have really loved recently, right? So these, these big, open ended what questions can help unlock topics. They’re going to give you an answer that sort of naturally directs you to a place of a place in the conversation that they want to be and you should follow them there.
Kris Safarova 32:03
What is your recommendation when you are speaking to someone who is feeling somewhat frustrated or angry towards you? So a typical example will be management consultants serving the client. Some people from client side may feel that frustration or anger towards management consultants, what would be your recommendation?
Alison Wood Brooks 32:27
Absolutely, I am a recovering non confrontational person. I, for most of my life, have been very afraid of conflict and sort of anger expressions interpersonally, and thank goodness there has been groundbreaking research over the last five to 10 years about how the best conversationalists handle those difficult moments when we confront them, if, if the emotional temperature is getting overheated, or even just heated a little bit, if there’s any sort of incivility or hostility or conflict you’re sensing that things are getting to a difficult moment. Researchers, Julia Minson, Mike Yeomans, Hannah Collins, have been studying what they call receptiveness. And there’s two parts to receptiveness. There’s the part of, well, what am I thinking about in my mind so that I can hold on to my convictions that I really believe in, but also remain very open to other people’s convictions at the same time. So there’s work that we have to do in our own minds, internally, but also externally. What is the language that we need to use in our conversations to be optimally receptive during these difficult moments. And I think for a lot of people, the receptiveness recipe, the advice that spills out of this new research can be a bit counterintuitive. I think especially in our work, you have this instinct where when you feel like you know the answer, you feel like you’re right, you want to persuade other people to believe you and to and to sort of be resolute and decisive and compelling and like get them to come along with you. The problem is that in live conversation, that’s extremely hard to be on the receiving end of to listen to someone be resolute in their very differing views. It’s not actually persuasive in practice. So what I teach in my class is this receptiveness recipe, and the receptiveness recipe instead of having a mindset of persuasion. So if you’re a consultant and you’re trying to persuade someone, instead of focusing on persuading them, de escalate your persuasion goal, and instead focus on learning. Really like focus on learning as much as you can about the other person’s mind, their beliefs, how they came to hold those beliefs, the nuances of their beliefs, what they care about, why they care about it, and at the end of the conversation, if you use these receptiveness tools. And focus on learning. The great and victorious irony of it is that you end up being more persuasive to the to the person, the other person in the conversation. So Kris, do you want me to share the elements of this receptiveness recipe? Yes, please. Yeah. So these are the elements of language that can help you. They’re very concrete from studying 1000s of transcripts of people in actual difficult moments and disagreements. The first element is acknowledgement, literally repeating back what you hear another person saying, like, oh. So what I’m hearing is that you think there are some pros to this immigration policy, but also these costs, is that right? Am I hearing you? Right? It’s almost like checking in with repeating back what you’ve heard, checking in with them, making sure you’re building a sort of accurate shared reality, shared understanding with them. The second piece of the resec, the receptiveness recipe, goes a step beyond acknowledgement, so you’re not just repeating back what you’ve heard, but also affirming their feelings about it. This is sometimes affirmation or validation saying like, Oh, it makes sense that you feel sad about how things have evolved around this policy at our company, where it makes sense that you’re feeling frustrated about this, and I can see how you came to feel that way, even if right after that, you go on to disagree with them or present a sort of countervailing belief or argument, doing that first step of validating people’s feelings is so important it makes him feel like, oh, they understand me. They get me. They believe me. They think I’m a reasonable person. And also, now we can go on to safely consider another perspective, maybe a counter, a countering perspective. So acknowledgement, affirmation. The third piece is hedging language. So this is very counterintuitive for those of us who feel like, well, I need to prove that I’m right and that I know everything and that I’m certain about it, and I’m confident hedging language is expressing uncertainty in your own views. And it’s so much easier to be on the receiving end of hedged or qualified language in conversation than resolute certainty. So hedging language would be like, Oh, I wonder if, I wonder if sometimes abortion could be good. I did hear this statistic. I wasn’t sure that it was. Here’s what they told me. Here’s the source. I wonder if that’s true. What do you think? And so expressing that sort of reasonable level of uncertainty about the data or the sort of arguments underlying your perspective as a scientist, I find this one really compelling, because even scientists who study things for years and years know that they don’t, they don’t know things with certainty. Right? No amount of data in the world could make you feel certain about most things, most underlying ground truths, and so expressing a reasonable level of uncertainty can be very compelling, and it’s certainly easier to be on the on the receiving end of it, a final piece of the receptiveness recipe is about sharing personal stories, stories, especially of of harm or pain, helps us come closer. It helps us do that emotional validation of like, well, even if I don’t agree with what you’re saying, I can I understand why you would be you were you know you yourself were a victim of abuse when you were a child. So of course, you have these strong feelings about it, and that you’ve come to hold a certain view about it. So sharing personal stories can be really helpful to help people understand each other’s position, different positions on an issue. It work. It could be something like, Well, I’ve been I’ve been told that this is the right way to do something for 10 years, and even if I disagreed with it the beginning, now, I’ve been indoctrinated to this view, and that’s been really painful, or whatever, right was sharing a story of how you evolved, and the sort of joys and pains in that process can be quite helpful. The final piece of the receptiveness recipe that I’ll share for now is dividing yourself into multiple parts. This has been so helpful to me in my life. So it sounds like this, if let’s say, Kris, you say to me, you say to me, I’m really upset about this presidential candidate. I just don’t agree with their their policy, and whatever I could in that moment, say, as your friend, I it makes so much sense that you feel this way, and I’m so sorry that you’re feeling so upset about this as a fellow citizen, or as you know, a country music enthusiast, whatever, whatever role you want to say, you divide yourself so you’re in on one hand, their friend or and then say, you know, as your colleague, I wonder if I could push you to consider this perspective instead. God, and so you’re literally that both validating that you care about them and their views and why they hold them, and also saying, I wonder if together, we could talk about the possibility of some other data or reality or view or belief. I love that one. I find that one very empowering and comforting.
Kris Safarova 40:20
Thank you, Alison. So for someone who will listen to this conversation and realize I can do conversation so much better, they will read your book, study it, read many times, implement it, and then they will want to go deeper, deeper, deeper. What resources would you recommend they study after your book?
Alison Wood Brooks 40:40
Oh, my goodness, what a great question. Kris, listen, there’s a lot in the book. It’s a far ranging, ambitious landscape of everything about everything that we sort of know now from the new science of conversation, and it provides a comprehensive framework for how to become a better conversationalist, how to celebrate other people in conversation, how to find acceptance for yourself and others when we very predictably, fall short of perfection in our conversations. If you want to go beyond the learnings in the book, there is an appendix that has over 100 topics that you can raise, so I suggest trying some of those in your life. There’s also a list of exercises that I use in my course at Harvard with my students to help them practice these skills and go beyond these skills in the experience of their lives. So if you wanted to go beyond the learning in the book my my sort of top line suggestion is go and do it. And maybe that looks like bringing it to your team at work and saying, Hey, we’re going to try a couple of these exercises together, and then debrief about it, and then talk about how we can incorporate it into our work, and how we can make our team stronger, how we can make our organization stronger. Start a book club, or take bring it to your already existing book club. Do some exercises there. Talk about some of the topic starters that are listed at the back of the book. I think the sort of top line advice is, after you’ve read the book, go and do it in lots of different creative ways. Start a little club with your kids to practice choosing good topics, asking good questions, find start celebrating moments of levity with your coworkers or with your family. There’s so much that you that you can do, and I think over the next five or 10 years, there are so many more scientists and teachers that are now working on this new science of conversation that we’re going to continue to learn. There’s so much left to learn, so we’ll keep learning new things, and I’m sure that new version of advanced talk will be available at some point.
Kris Safarova 42:50
I’m looking forward to it. And I also want to ask you about the other two takeaways that your students say are top takeaways.
Alison Wood Brooks 42:59
Oh, what a great question. You’re challenging my memory. I think there are concrete answers to this question. So many students say that learning to ask more follow up questions. So in addition to topic prep, they would say asking more follow up questions is very revolutionary for them. So just remembering that as soon as someone shares really anything with you, you should ask a follow up question to show them that you care, to draw out the nuances of what they’re sharing with you before you turn the conversation back to yourself. And then the third, very tactical thing that they really love learning about is this idea of callbacks. So callbacks are references back to things that you’ve talked about earlier in the conversation, or even earlier in your relationship, like in previous conversations. Callbacks are so powerful they show what we call long term listening. So in order to do a callback, you had to be listening to your partner in the first place, and you have to be smart enough to remember this like little detail or tidbit or question that they said, and then call back to it later. So it shows long term listening. But it has another amazing benefit, which is, like, almost every callback is funny. It gets it gets a really good laugh because it’s surprising and thoughtful, and if it’s well timed, it almost always gets a laugh. So those are three tactical takeaways, topic, prep, more follow up, questions and more callbacks. I think from a more philosophical conceptual perspective, I think one of the main takeaways from the course that the students really appreciate is that conversation really is a very complex coordination game, and even though we learn to do it when we’re toddlers, and we spend every day of our lives practicing doing it with a wide array of partners, by the time you get. To adulthood, you are still not perfect at it, and even the best communicators have so much room for improvement. So that’s both empowering, like, let’s get better at it, but also, you know, each conversation is a train wreck, and that’s okay. That’s the way it’s going to be. It’s a relentless co created special moment in time that just is going to have lots of errors and mistakes, and so fostering a greater sense of grace for yourself for not being perfect at it, and more forgiveness and grace for other people for not being perfect at it, I think, is a major takeaway for the students from the class.
Kris Safarova 45:40
Alison and what will be your recommendation if someone asks you a question that you don’t want to answer because maybe they’re asking for personal information you don’t feel comfortable revealing?
Alison Wood Brooks 45:51
Yeah, I love this question. Three ideas. One, you can dodge the question by answering a slightly different question. You see politicians do this all the time. Answer the question that you wish they had asked if you’re if you get good at dodging, then your partner may not even notice that you didn’t specifically answer the question they asked. A second idea is using humor so often you can dodge a question by making a joke of like, well, how? That’s none of your business, right? Like this being a little bit quippy about it a third idea, and this helps a lot, actually, in the context of conflict, if someone asks you a sensitive question and you don’t want to disclose that information to them, one of the best ways to respond to it is deflecting with a question back to them, especially an open ended question. So if someone says like, how much are you willing to pay for this house, you might ask a question like, well, what does this house mean to you? How long have you lived here? What right like? So just drawing out more information from them before you answer their question can be one of the most effective ways to deal with that, in the middle of in the midst of the conversation. And then finally, I think just don’t underestimate the power of silence. Some of the best conversationalists, you really wield pausing very powerfully. A good pause. Can get a good laugh. It can help dodge a question. It can give you the space to breathe and think, oh, what could what could I switch to right now that would carry us away from this question? I wish they hadn’t asked me one of the most in order to enact any of these strategies. One of the most helpful pieces of advice I received once is before a hard conversation where you’re sure that someone’s going to ask you something you don’t want to answer, write down those questions. Write down the questions that are keeping you up at night. Don’t just ruminate about them. Don’t worry about them and panic about if whether they’re going to ask you instead write them down on a piece of paper or on your computer and and write out your answers to them. Workshop, your dodge. Workshop your deflect with a laugh. Workshop your dot, your deflect with a question. Or write, just write out the sort of short, pithy script of the ideal answer and practice saying it out loud. It gets back to this idea of topic prep, right? If you put in a little bit of forethought, once you’re in the chaos of conversation, you’re so much more prepared to really confront anything, whether it’s easy or hard.
Kris Safarova 48:36
Allison, thank you. I could speak to you forever. Yes, such an incredible person, and you know so much on this topic. I really enjoyed our discussion. Where can our listeners learn more about you by your book, anything you want to share.
Alison Wood Brooks 48:49
Thank you so much. Kris, this has been so fun. I am at alisonwoodbrooks.com you can look up my academic research so much more about the book, including videos and topic lists. You can follow me along on the book tour. There’s a schedule of events there. You can also follow along on Instagram or LinkedIn, and I’d be very I really love engaging with people there, but I can’t wait to hear how the book lands with people, and what creative ways people put talk into practice in their lives.
Kris Safarova 49:27
Alison, thank you again, so much for being here for writing this book. And when you have additional research information, please do pronto for the book, and please come back and talk to us.
Alison Wood Brooks 49:37
Amazing Kris. I will put you on top, at the top of the list for Advanced Talk book number two, Advanced Talk, I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Kris Safarova 49:47
Thank you. Our guest today, again has been Alison Wood Brooks. Check out Alison’s book. It’s called TALK. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you as a gift, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And another gift we prepared for you is a McKinsey and BCG-winning resume template. You can download it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf, and it is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.