CM 284: Alison Wood Brooks on the Science of Conversation
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Every human being that you encounter in the world, it's a beginning of a potential relationship and every relationship is just a sequence of conversations over time. Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. Conversations play a big role in our personal and professional lives. It'd be hard to build or maintain a relationship without them.

That's why Allison Woodbrooks, Harvard Business School professor and conversation expert, has written the book, Talk, The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. She's found that if we improve our conversations, even a little, the results can be game-changing. In this interview, we talk about the framework she's developed to help us do that. We also discuss how to improve our one-on-one and group conversations.

Finally, we learn effective ways to manage difficult conversations, including apologies. It's the ultimate conversation playbook. Before we start, one quick ask. If you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Alison Woodbrooks. Alison Woodbrooks, welcome to the podcast. It is so great to have you on. Thank you so much for having me, Gail.

Allison, we don't often spend time thinking ahead about a conversation that we're going to have. Then after we have it, we wonder why it didn't go as well as we wanted, or maybe it was trickier than we expected. You share two reasons why this can happen, namely context and purpose. Why are they so important?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. Isn't it funny? We spend so much more time thinking about our conversations after they've happened than before they've happened. Context and purposes. These are two big categories of things that make conversations quite challenging. And they're both

a sort of a constellation of complexity. So context is everything about the environment that's going on around you while you're talking to somebody. It's who, what, where, when, why, how, right? So who are you talking to? Who's your partner? What's your relationship with them? What's going on in your environment? Are you sitting down? Are you standing up? Are you walking outside? Are you rock climbing while you talk? Are you doing an art project?

Why are you talking? What are your goals? What are you talking about? How's the lighting? What does it smell like? Who's pulling up a chair? All of these contextual variables matter tremendously for how the conversation is going to play out and how it unfolds. And the human mind is quite good at picking up on context clues and contextual variables, but often not as good as we'd like to be.

The second category, purposes, are our goals. And they are so fundamental. It's funny. When you think of everyday conversation, you don't often think that they're always goal-driven. Like sometimes you're just talking to your kid and that's what you do, right? Or you're just talking to your spouse and they're just there. That's why you're talking to them. Right?

But as psychologists, when we look at conversation, you realize that every conversation has at least one purpose. Otherwise, you wouldn't bother talking to each other. So even if your only goal is to uphold the very basic expectation that you respond to somebody or you're polite or maybe you just want to have fun or maybe you just want to feel close to somebody,

that's still an important goal to consider. And so our purposes can be vast and complex. And usually in most conversations, every person who's part of it has many more than just one goal. And that's where things get tricky. You have been steeped in the art of conversation for a long time. So I think it's probably helpful for us to step back for a minute and define, how do you define a conversation? And what kinds of conversations do you study?

So the definition of conversation is surprisingly simple. It's any exchange of words between two or more people. That's it. Any exchange of words. If there aren't words, it's not a conversation. But if there are words and there's more than one person, it's a conversation, which means it can happen over any mode of communication. You can be texting words to each other. You can be emailing to each other. You can be talking face to face or on the phone, whatever.

And, but from this very, very simple definition of conversation, there is a surprising amount of complexity that lies beneath the surface. And that's really what I've been studying for about a decade now is the hidden architecture and the hidden complexity of this thing that we all learn to do as toddlers and spend all our lives doing. And we get to adulthood and we're still not perfect at it.

You explain that it's not just what we say, but how we say it, and that conversations are ultimately about relationships. Say more about this.

My view on conversation is profoundly relationship driven. I think of every person, every human being that you encounter in the world, it's a beginning of a potential relationship. And every relationship is just a sequence of conversations over time. Time that we spend together talking to each other and time we spend apart, just waiting for that next moment of conversation to come.

And so we really need to think of conversation in the context of this repeated game over time within every relationship we have with every person we encounter in the world. You talk about conversations as a coordination game, that there's this relentless stream of coordination decisions.

Talk about what that means and also how aware are we of that? How aware should we be of that? I think we become aware during moments of awkwardness. We realize, so for example, my students just yesterday in class, they were saying, I'm

How do we end a conversation? How do we how do you end this? It's endings of conversations are always so awkward, like nobody knows when to go and then you feel bad and then you feel like you've blown it and then you have to give an excuse. Like, what is this crazy dance that we're doing at the end of every conversation?

And I was like, guys, the end of a conversation is just the last coordination decision that you have to make. You're making those coordination decisions at every moment of every conversation.

Do I go and talk to this person? If I do, where do we begin? How long do we spend talking about that topic? When do we switch to something new? Should we talk about something they're interested in or I'm interested in? Should they talk now or should I talk now? Do I listen? Do I interrupt them? We're making these little micro decisions and coordinating just everything.

constantly. And every once in a while we realize, oh boy, I think we just miscoordinated in this moment. And sometimes it becomes clear. And the endings of a conversation is one very clear moment when we're often aware that we're not doing a very good job with it.

Well, to that end, there's something really interesting in a description that you use for thinking about this. You talk about three kinds of reading, that there's self-reading, mind reading, room reading. How do these work?

Self-reading is all about fostering an awareness of your own perspective. What are your goals and purposes? What are your preferences? What do you need out of the conversation? How are you feeling? What are your beliefs about a certain topic or a certain issue? So just really fostering an awareness of your own perspective. And sometimes we're remarkably bad at just knowing ourselves, right?

Then, of course, we need to figure out what our partner's perspective is. How are they feeling? What are their beliefs about this issue? What do they need out of this conversation? Who are they? What are the aspects of their identity that I don't want to stomp on or offend or stick an invisible barb into and hurt them?

And while we're doing all of this back and forth trying to figure out what we need and what they need and are we having fun with it, there's an environment all around us. And that's room reading, right? That goes back to what we were talking about with context. Where are we? What's going on in the world? What time of day is it? Should we stand up and walk outside? Right?

Are there a table full of people next to us that's very loud, that's very distracting? Who else is in the conversation? Are they going to find this joke as funny as the other person does? So fostering an awareness of this environment all around us is what makes some people really terrific at conversation and others of us make lots of mistakes. There's a really wonderful illustration in your book of what you call the conversational compass. Yes.

Can you describe that compass to us and how, if we're aware of it, it can help us have better conversations? Everything about a successful conversation, the meaning of success in conversation comes down to what the people want out of it, right? It's user-driven. It's not me saying, hey, here's what a good conversation looks like. No, it's up to the speakers themselves to decide what does success mean to me? What does success mean to my conversation partner?

And so when you start to look at what does success mean to people, you have to look at their needs and desires, their sincere goals and what they're hoping to get out of their social interactions. And when you start to do that, you realize that people's motivations are incredibly complex. It's a vast constellation of things that we care about. There are

I want to connect with this person, but also I might want to persuade them to babysit my kid next weekend. And I'm dying to hear about the wedding they went to, but also I'm bursting at the seams to tell them about this weird experience I had this morning on the way into work. Also, I want it to be fun, but also when I hear about the wedding that they went to, it's super sad and I want to make sure that they're doing okay. Oh, and also I need to leave in 10 minutes.

Right? Like there's all of a sudden we're hoping to achieve all of these things. We want to connect. We want to persuade. We want to learn. We want to have fun. We want to keep a secret.

And my co-authors and I realized we need a framework to help us organize all of these things. Otherwise, like we just, we're all over the map all the time. And so we came up with this framework called the conversational compass. It has two axes. The X axis is a relational axis. And so on the high end of the axis, these are things, these are goals that aim to help the relationship, help the other person that you're talking to,

The low end of the X-axis are low relational goals. So these are things that serve yourself. These are needs that you have for you to flourish. They are not bad. They are not evil. It's just who we are as human beings. We all have needs. The Y-axis is an informational axis. So at the high end of the informational axis, these are goals that reach for accurate information exchange and

So it's things like learning and sharing information, brainstorming, making a decision, persuading, that all rest on accurate information exchange with your partner. At the low end of the informational axis, these are goals that maybe are about hiding or concealing or keeping a secret, or maybe it's goals that aren't about information exchange at all. I

I think when people think of conversation, you realize, oh, humans evolved the ability to talk to each other so that we could exchange information.

But that doesn't mean that that's the main purpose of conversation nowadays. In fact, we have all kinds of very sincere and important goals that are not about information exchange at all. It's just about being together, having fun, protecting our privacy, filling time, keeping people on schedule. These are all really important things that are not about accurate information exchange. Talk to...

T-A-L-K is an acronym that you developed to teach us how to have better conversations. We're going to dive more deeply into each of these, but to start, what are the four elements of talk? And maybe tell us a little bit about them. So we have this vast ocean of complexity in conversation. There's so much going on under the hood. And I think it's important to think about the four elements of talk.

And I just, as a scientist and as a teacher, I felt this dying need to simplify, to come up with this really simple approach to help all of us have better conversations. What can we possibly remember when we get lost in the sauce of conversation? And so we came up with this acronym, TALK, and it just requires that you remember four things, right?

T is for topics, and topics are the building blocks of conversation. They're very basic and fundamental. It's what we choose to talk about. A is for asking questions. Asking more questions and better questions will help your conversations tremendously, and we can talk about what it means to ask good questions.

L is for levity and levity is the antidote for boredom. I think when we think of conversations going off the rails, we often think of hostility or conflict, disagreement, difficult moments. But really what is perhaps an even more pervasive killer of conversation is low energy and boredom and disinterest. Conversation requires that everybody stays engaged and

So levity helps with that. There are these fleeting moments of sparkle and fizz, humor and warmth that keep everybody engaged and having a good time. And then K in the acronym is for kindness. And kindness is really the masterclass of the talk acronym. It's about using respectful language and listening attentively and responsibly to your partner.

So let's go ahead and dive into those. I want to start with T is for topics. What role do they play in a conversation? What makes for a good topic? Topics are everything in conversation. I don't know. We don't really realize this, but we're choosing and steering topics every time we talk. Not just at the beginning when you're saying, oh, what should we talk about? Every time you talk, you're making these little micro decisions to stay on topic and

drift to something else, switch abruptly to something else, call back to something from earlier, or even to just walk away. At the end of a conversation, everyone chooses silence and that's the topic and you walk away.

So we're making these choices all the time and becoming a better conversationalist is about making these micro decisions more smoothly and in a more sort of intentional way, realizing the great power that you and your partner have to steer topics more effectively. I think I'll focus on two pieces of advice about how to manage topics better and

The first is topic prep. At the beginning of our conversation, you said something about how we all ruminate after conversations have ended, but we don't think a lot about them before they happen. And so I think the advice for me is to shift your focus just a little bit more towards before the conversation happens.

Just a little bit more effort and thinking ahead, hey, who am I going to see today? Usually we have a really good knowledge of the types of people we're going to see or the specific people in our life that we're going to see. And when I think about those people, even if I think about each one for 20 seconds, 30 seconds,

We can ask ourselves, oh, when I saw them last time, what were we talking about? Oh, yeah, they said their kid was going to try out for the school play, and they were going to start taking guitar lessons, and they had a really important meeting coming up at work. So maybe I'm going to check in about those things and ask them, like, did your kid make the play? How are your lessons going? How was that big meeting?

Just that alone, remembering to think about them and what you talked about last time and following up in this conversation all really

already, you're going to be doing so much better than most people in most conversations. And I think people are so touched by that, that you would have listened hard enough to hold on to that information. It's so touching. It's what we call long-term listening. It's saying, look, I actually heard you last time. I listened to what you said. I was thinking about it while we were apart and I care enough to follow up and ask you more about it. And it

It's just when we think of people that we love and who we think of as charismatic, this is often what they're doing. They're just thinking about other people and remembering to check in with them and raise topics that that person's going to find interesting.

So topic prep, very powerful. And the nature of your topic prep can go anywhere. It can be based on things you've already talked about or just think about, well, what is this person going to find interesting? What did I see in the news? What onion headline did I see that they might find funny? What can I bring up? What movie did I see that I think they'd like to see? What can I recommend to them? And just thinking about it for 30 seconds before you see them makes conversations more enjoyable, more productive, and much more smooth.

And I find that so comforting. Many people are very resistant to topic prep, and I get it. It does feel counterintuitive to think about prepping for a conversation, especially with someone you know really well, that you're very close to, like a close friend or romantic partner, maybe your child or your parent.

But that's actually when it's at its best because you're saying, look, I love you so much. I was thinking about you while we were apart and I really am excited to talk to you about this, this and this. So I'm hearing that as you prepare topics, if you know the person well, do the callback. And I'm also hearing premeditation.

personalize it or customize it to something you think they would really enjoy. Yes. And personalization can take many forms. One is talking about shared experiences or things that you've talked about together before and asking about their life. But it can also be, you know, asking questions about topics on which, you know, they have expertise or a unique perspective or just something, you know, they're interested in or excited about. There are many ways to personalize your topic prep and your topic choices for other people.

What about topic switching? How many, how often, how do we think about that? Because those are decision points in a conversation where I can often feel myself

pushed and pulled? Like, should I switch the topic yet? Are we done with it? Do we not have to be done with it? How do we think about that? There's a remarkable amount of hemming and hawing. We call them topic boundaries. When you feel that a topic is running out of juice, and there are very clear signs that a topic's running out of juice, there's longer pauses, uncomfortable laughter, people start repeating things they've already said on the topic.

When you get to that moment and you're sort of hemming and hawing, "Oh, is it rude for me to change the topic? Is it would be impolite? Is it too abrupt?" And also, where can we go next? We sort of have these mini panics. It's a little mini brainstorming task you have to do of like, "Oh, what can we possibly talk about next?" Topic prep helps a lot in those moments, by the way, because you'll have ideas ready to go in those panicky moments.

But topic switching, I think the advice here is be a more assertive switcher. When you start to hem and haw and you start to wonder if it's time to switch, the answer is almost always yes. Switch to something new. The best conversationalists that we study are confident and assertive topic switchers.

They know that if you feel like you haven't covered all the ground on a topic, you can always go back to it. You can always circle back to it. But the risk of boredom and stagnation is very real and disinterest is sort of the quiet killer. So we have some data on this. There's this amazing data set collected by Gus Cooney and some other psychologists that

where they asked people, do you feel like you covered the right amount of topics during your conversation? And most people say, yes, it was fine. We covered the right amount of topics. But if you zoom in on the people who feel like they didn't cover the right amount of topics, it's so much more common that they feel like they didn't cover enough different topics compared to people who feel like they moved too quickly and covered too many. And so the takeaway from this is that

The mistake, if we're going to make a mistake about topic switching, it's almost always in the direction of not switching frequently enough. That's so helpful to hear. I have a really, really good friend of mine. I've known her for a very long time and we don't live in the same state anymore. So we book walking phone calls. So it'll be early morning and fortunately we're in the same time zone, but we will sometimes-

have fun sending each other an agenda of topics before the conversation. And we don't always hold to it because usually once we're off and running, but there are things that are on our minds that we want to make sure we talk about. But we laugh because we tend to change up the topics continually. We'll start in this one place and we'll end up in a

totally different place. And we'll both say to each other, that was just so much fun. And so now I understand why that's fun. It's a very stimulating thing. It's incredibly stimulating. It's so fun. It's meaningful that you're doing this with a close friend. There is some really nice emerging research showing that the closer you are, the more

You're able to travel through topics quickly and nimbly with each other. It's part of social closeness and tight friendship. And there's a couple of reasons for it. One is you trust that the other, you know the other person is able to go on this journey with you and that they're not going to be like making judgments like, oh God, this is so chaotic or this is so crazy. So there's trust there.

There's also a lot of shared reality baked into your friendship. So you've already shared a lot of life together. You have a lot to talk about. And so it's easier to change topics quickly knowing that you have that shared understanding baked in.

It's a little bit harder to do nimble topic switching with strangers, for example. But really good conversationalists make strangers feel like friends by doing this more frequent topic switching. It's when you're with a stranger and things are moving slowly, that's when it feels a bit tortured and awkward.

I don't know if you've ever heard of the show before. I believe it's on Netflix. It's called Somebody Somewhere, and it's kind of a niche show. I have not seen that. Tell me about it. Well, you might get a kick out of it because it just wrapped up its final season, but it's about these characters. It's a very, what I would call, small show in that you really delve into these lives of folks who are living a very local life in a very specific place. And

The reason what you said struck me is because in the very last episode, the main character is going on sort of, if I could do the air quotes here, going on sort of a quasi date with this person. But she is extremely nervous. And so they're walking and talking and she admits that she actually prepared a list of topics in advance. And the person says to her, can I see the list? And she said, no, no, no, I'm too embarrassed. And finally, she ponies up the list.

And he stops and starts to go through the list. But it's one of the rare instances I've seen of someone who took the time to prepare. And I thought, oh, I have to tell Allison this because she may want to use that clip. Oh, it's such a great clip. And I think a lot of people can relate to this. There was a meme going around of...

very adorable, like a grandfatherly figure, a dad who got together with like his old guy friends in a bar every week. And he always prepared a topic list and on his topic list or things like, like one bullet point would just be like Bud Light. And the next one would be like the Detroit Lions. And then the third one will be like my grandson's new girlfriend. You know, like it's just so endearing and it doesn't need to be

It's complicated. It's just saying, look, I've been thinking about what I think my friends or this date or whoever might be interested in hearing about what I'm excited to bring to the table. And I don't want to forget them once we're there. So I'm going to write them down. That example sounds amazing, Gail. I'd love to see the clip.

Allison, is this something that you were predisposed to before you did the research? Was this one of those aha moments like, yeah, I do that now it makes sense. Why? Or was this a new thing for you to realize? I am a habitual topic prepper.

And at some point during my life, I have the same instincts as others. I thought, oh, this is something that maybe I shouldn't share with other people, or maybe it's a little bit embarrassing, or it's my A-type think-ahead organization tactic. I'm just going to keep it under my hat.

Over time, the longer I worked and the more business people I talked to, in particular, very powerful executives and CEOs, I realized, oh, no, this sort of secretive thing that I do of prepping topics is something that all of these very successful people do. And maybe it's part of what's making them successful, right?

And so it became less of a sort of hidden secretive thing to be embarrassed about and more of a point of pride.

over time. And then once you bring it out into the open and you share your topic list with people, you realize, oh my gosh, people really appreciate that I have been thinking about them and that I'm doing this. People come, they openly are like, thank you so much. You just made this conversation so much easier. And thank you for thinking of me. And you just get great feedback about it. So at some point as a scholar, I thought we need to study this. We need to- Yeah, there's something here. There's something here. Some people are doing this naturally. Others have a very-

strong aversion to doing it. And so we got to figure out what's going on. In this interview, conversation expert Allison Woodbrooks reveals how to make every conversation better.

If you'd like to up your conversation game even further, check out episode 266 with Jeff Wetzler, author of the book, Ask. Jeff shares tips on how we can improve our performance and build deeper connections with thoughtful asking. We forego the opportunity to raise our own game when we don't benefit from the ways in which other people can contribute to our learning. Now let's get back to my interview with Alison Woodbrooks.

So I'm going to switch gears. I want to go into A for asking. Why should we be asking more questions than most of us do? Asking questions is one of the most powerful tools that we have in our toolkits as human beings to relate to each other. There have been decades and decades of research showing the human inability to understand the perspectives of other people. We just, if you, we can try and try and try as we might to put ourselves in the shoes of others.

We can't do it. You can't just guess. You can't use your own beliefs and your own preferences to guess perfectly what other people care about and what they prefer.

So luckily, we have a tool that can help us actually learn what's in people's minds and it's question asking. And it is really, truly the gift that becomes possible in conversation is that you can actually ask people, what do you care about? What would make this rewarding for you? What are you excited about today? Who do you care about? You can actually ask them and the

miraculous thing is, is that they will answer. It's so true. It's so true. Although I will tell you, I was really surprised by the research that you shared about sensitive questions. I am a person who will sometimes back off sensitive questions. I don't want to be seen as prying. I don't want to, you know, indirectly make someone uncomfortable or, or

be off-putting, but yet what you shared about sensitive questions was revelatory. Tell me about that. Yes. It's an amazing paper by Inav Hart and Maurice Schweitzer. Um,

I also found it revelatory. The idea is they took a huge list of potential questions that you could ask somebody else that ranged from the benign to very intrusive, seemingly very intrusive. So a benign question would be something like, how did you get to work today? What was your commute like?

A sensitive question might be something like, how many STDs have you had in your life? Or how many sexual partners have you had? Or have you ever thought about leaving your partner? Or, you know, these really, when's the last time you cried to yourself? These questions that on their surface feel very, very sensitive. And just like you, Gail, most of us are very hesitant to ask questions like this in conversation.

The upside of it is that we're very respectful to each other. The downside is that we never get to learn how those questions would have gone if we actually ask them. We never get the counterfactual of like, well, if I actually ask that question, how would it go? So in this paper, they took their very long list of questions ranging from benign to very sensitive, and they had people actually ask each other these questions in conversation.

And what they found was incredible. There was no difference in how the conversations went. There were no downsides to asking any of these questions. And in fact, asking the more sensitive ones often made the conversation feel more meaningful and the people left feeling closer than sticking to a conversation where you're talking about your commute or your breakfast.

When I read your book, I thought I'm going to start in the future to take some more chances, some more risks around the type of questions I ask when it comes to being a little bit more, maybe what I would consider sensitive, someone else won't. And it feels like if I frame it as, if you're uncomfortable answering this, or if I've made you uncomfortable, please let me know. And then, you know, they can tell me. Of course, that's the real beauty that I think we underestimate is like this, the other person has control over what they're willing to share. If you ask them something that's really, really,

intrusive and they actually feel sensitive, they have the power to make a joke about it or dodge or not answer, right? Like, yeah, that's up to them. But by asking that question, you're showing to them, hey, I trust that we can do this together. And I'm really curious about you and your life. And I believe in us in this moment that we can cover this difficult ground together.

In the paper, the research itself, they did this exercise both with close pairs, people who knew each other well. They also did it with strangers and they found the same in both cases. Are there particular types of questions that we should ask more of? I have a feeling we live in a world of mainly the same types of questions if we ask any at all and that there are types of questions we should actually be asking more of, including clearly some that are more sensitive. That's right. So...

When I think about good questioning behaviors, I think more about the patterns of questions that people ask and less about the topics. Because as we've just said, you can really ask about anything and it depends where the conversation goes that's either going to make it a great topic or not.

But patterns of questioning are reliably and predictably, there are some that are reliably good and very productive and make it better. And I'll share two with you. The first is follow-up questions, the superhero of question types. Follow-up questions ask for more information on something that your partner has already said.

And they're so amazing. They achieve both informational goals and relational goals because you're asking for more information. You're going to learn a lot more.

And it shows your partner that you were listening to them, that you heard what they said earlier, that you care to learn more. And that just feels so good. It's an undeniable signal that you were actually listening to their answer and that you care about them. And so these follow-up questions just achieve it. And they can be so simple. Imagine a conversation started with like, hey, Gail, how are you?

And then you give me an answer. And then right after that, I just say, how are you really? Or you tell me an answer about this show you were watching on Netflix, Somebody Somewhere you're watching. And I say, oh, what was your favorite episode? Yeah.

Right? Like it's not complicated. It's just saying, I heard you talk about this interesting show on Netflix and I'm dying to hear more. I want to hear more. And I love that you shared that with me and I want to learn more about you and your perspective. Oh, that's so fun. Yeah. I think follow-up questions are so much fun. So much fun. So that's number one. The second pattern of question asking that is heroic is thinking about asking open-ended questions.

So both open-ended and closed questions serve a purpose. Often we ask closed questions around topic boundaries to figure out, let's set a new context for this topic. So let's say I want to talk to you about the new movie Wicked. So I want to ask a series of quick closed questions like, have you seen Wicked yet?

No, and I have to tell you, I want to see it. Right? Have you seen it? I saw it. It's so amazing. But now, I've asked you this question. I now know you haven't seen it. So now I have enough context to say, okay, I'm not going to give you any spoilers about Wicked. I don't want to ruin it for you. But this now, by asking that closed question, that yes or no question, it lets me now move on to a well-informed and appropriate open-ended question. Okay.

such as what are you looking forward to most about this movie? The relationship between the two main characters and getting insights into, I read that book a long, long time ago and I don't remember it. And I want to recall how she ultimately became the Wicked Witch. And I think what I'm really intrigued by is

How the woman to use a word you used earlier but I'm going to use it in this example context, how much of a role context played in her becoming the quote unquote wicked which I'm very fascinated by that what circumstances can do when it comes to the choices we make in life the behaviors we engage in kind of how we're perceived so yeah.

Amazing. I think it's so bad. I just learned so much about you and your perspective. You care about female friendships. You care about how good people come to do bad things. You love character development. I know that you're a reader because you read this book so long ago. I know that you're willing to admit that you forget things. That's such a lovely thing about people. Anyway, I just learned so much about you, Gail, just from that one answer.

And the question that I asked you to learn all that information was an open-ended question. And importantly, it was an open-ended question that started with the word, what?

When we think about open-ended questions, you can frame them in many different ways. Asking a why question can feel more accusatory. So if I said, why haven't you seen it yet? Or why do you care about this so much? Or why are you excited? It often can put people on the defensive, like you have to defend your position in some way. Whereas what questions...

achieve that perfect harmony of you're going to explain your perspective to me, but you're not going to feel hurt or accused or threatened by the question itself. So starting open-ended questions with the word what can be incredibly powerful. How questions can be helpful as well. But again, they're less threatening to the relationship, but you're probably not going to learn quite as much information as you do when you ask a what question.

Very helpful. Can you have too many questions? Can that be bothersome or problematic?

You can ask too many questions. We all know people who ask too many questions. We can all think of moments in our life where you were like, oh my God, that person was driving me nuts. Well, and I wonder how much of it has to do with them not doing some of the other things you were saying. Like I have had times where people are asking me questions in rapid fire, but I don't feel like it's to connect. I feel like it's to transact maybe. Maybe that's the difference. I don't know. You would know much better than I. What about that?

Yes. So usually it's when they're asking repeated questions, exactly like you're saying, with the primary goal of extracting information. Rapid fire. Maybe they're asking the same question over and over in different ways because they feel like you're not giving them the answer that they want. That is not the spirit of good question asking in conversation. You're getting into interrogation territory. Right.

So the spirit of good question asking is to aim to ask more questions that are truly driven by care and curiosity and sincerity and really wanting to learn other people's perspectives or really even just to keep the conversation alive is actually fine. But doing it in a way that becomes interrogative or prying, like you're trying to get some secret information out of somebody, that really kills a conversation quickly and

And I will say, even though it's possible to ask too many questions and we can all think of examples of someone asking too many questions, the risk of asking too many questions is so much lower than the risk of not asking enough.

It's when we look at, so when we look at transcripts of conversations and we count the number of questions, the tipping point where lots of questions becomes too many questions is very, very high. It's very far out. It's further out than most of us could even reach in a conversation. And in some contexts, like talking to strangers or dating, very cooperative contexts,

we actually never see the tipping point. Like it's almost impossible to get to a point where you've asked too many questions because there's so much to learn about each other. It's in more competitive or conflictual situations where you actually can get to a point where it feels like someone is trying to extract information to use it to exploit you in some way.

But even there, it's harder to get to the tipping point than the risk of asking too few questions or zero questions, which is really the greatest sin of all. You talk about something called past, present, future questions and that, you know, an expert interviewer, Barbara Walters, she was really good at this. What are they?

Past, present, future is a really nice framework to think about question asking, but also just topics in general. Thinking about when you're talking to somebody, there's a really nice reframe that you can do and say like, what about your past led you to this moment or what happened in the past?

How did the thing that happened in the past shape who you are now? And then looking to the future, how has it changed you and what will you do differently in the future? Every human being is existing at a point in time. And so asking questions about their past,

their present and their future is a really lovely way of getting a more comprehensive understanding of them and of different topics and situations in the world. Barbara Walters used it when she was talking to Monica Lewinsky. She interviewed her many years after her kerfuffle with Bill Clinton and

And she asked a question, a series of questions, something like, you know, what happened back then? How are you feeling about it now? And what will you tell your daughter in the future about this? And Monica, such a beautiful set of questions. And Monica Lewinsky gives a beautiful answer, something like, I'll tell her that mommy made a big mistake.

So in your acronym TALK, L is for levity. What do you mean by levity? Why is it so important? The word levity means light or lightness or lifting, right? I think when we think of how conversations go badly, it's very obvious that they can go bad from hostility, conflict, anger, disagreement, very obviously fraught moments of difficulty.

What's less obvious and perhaps a more pervasive killer of conversation is actually boredom and disinterest and people becoming disengaged and interested from each other. And so levity is the antidote for boredom and disengagement.

When I talk about levity in the book, we talk about it as both humor, so things that are funny and keep us laughing and engaged, but also it doesn't necessarily have to be funny. It can also be small moves that are just warm and pull each other back in, so things like compliments. It can also be basic structural things like, okay, I think this topic is getting boring, so let's switch to something new or maybe switch to a topic that's a little bit off the wall or a

And so levity can really come from many, many places. The secret is to not let your conversation get to a place where it's stale and boring and people are losing interest. I think that's such an important thing to remember. You know, sometimes I can feel like in a conversation I'm entering into tunnel vision. Even if I change topics, I'm not changing tone. That's right. And I just think that's a really good reminder. That's one that continues to stay with me that I could do work

well by practicing more and more. So I really appreciated that one. I'm so glad. It's sort of like making sure you're able to keep your hand on the emotional dial of the conversation. Can you realize when you've got this tunnel vision and you're letting the conversation get to a place that's too intense or too serious or too much of an extended focus in a sort of serious way, that should be a signal in your mind, oh, we need to do something right now, something different, something fun to make sure we stay fresh.

Kay is for kindness, and you start this chapter with a wonderful story of Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper in conversation. Talk to us about that story, why you included it, what it involves. I found it both very touching but very enlightening.

It's a beautiful conversation and it's a publicly available conversation. So listeners can go and find it. This is a conversation right after Anderson Cooper's mother, a very famous mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.

passed away, he booked an interview to talk to Stephen Colbert, who also had experienced a lot of loss in his life. He also lost his father and two brothers when he was young, and his mother had died relatively recently at the time of the interview.

So Anderson Cooper was very fresh in his grief about his mother. And I think he was looking for a good conversation partner, a good friend, someone who could provide some support to him in his fresh time of need. And Stephen Colbert gives a masterclass in how to be a supportive conversation partner to someone who is going through something hard.

And really watching both of them have this conversation about grief and loss is so inspiring. It's two grown men who are talking about really personal, sensitive things in an incredibly loving, kind way.

funny and thoughtful way. They both talk about, they're all over the conversational map. They talk about religion and family and work and emotions and the way they struggle to express their emotions. And they cover far ranging conversational ground. And they're both very

intensive listeners to each other. And you get the sense that they're both trying to give the other person what they need all the time. Anderson Cooper is,

As he always does, and a huge reason why he's successful, has prepared very thoroughly for the conversation. He has a stack of papers that you can see where he has quotes from interviews that Stephen Colbert has given in the past, and he references them during the conversation. The whole thing is really beautiful to watch, and it's really a masterclass in conversation broadly, but particularly in kindness. Yeah.

Thank you for including it in your book because I hadn't seen that interview and because it was publicly available and you shared that in the book, I went and watched it and it was extremely touching on so many levels. It was a really beautiful conversation. And I was, it was interesting to me because as you mentioned, Anderson Cooper clearly wanted to have that conversation because there was something he needed. Like he wanted something in particular from it, but he was so giving in it as well. And it's just,

an incredible example of just a beautiful conversation where both people want to be in it for each other. That's right. And I think it went so well and he knew it. And I think it meant so much to him, to Anderson Cooper. It inspired him to go on and start a whole podcast called All There Is.

where he interviews people about grief and loss. And in the introduction of that podcast, he references back to the conversation with Stephen Colbert as this sort of watershed moment that inspired him like, oh, we need to be talking about this. This can be a really lovely topic to talk about publicly. Yeah.

Well, and I have some friends in my life who are grief counselors and they adore that podcast. They use it to, with maybe new clients, new people they're working with, as well as for their own ongoing education. And they just said, he just does an amazing job. Amazing job. And I think in a way, maybe made it,

in the public discourse more appropriate for people to talk about grieving and grief in general. I've noticed that some younger people have been talking more publicly about grief. Andrew Garfield, the actor, has been talking in really lovely ways about the loss of his mother. And I do think that great conversations have the power to signal what is okay to talk about publicly. And I think probably...

Probably that conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper had that positive effect in our culture, made it sort of normalized talking about grief in this way.

Being kind is about how we speak and it's about how we listen. And you talk about the Stanford research study with the Oakland police officers, the word choices. I had Jennifer Eberhardt on the podcast a while back and she talked a lot about that research based on the research that she does. But you talk about it from a different perspective. And I wondered if you could really tell us more about that study and what it means about how we speak and the words we choose.

Yes, the study is remarkable for so many reasons. It's part of what I view as a sort of renaissance in behavioral science and insistence on getting our hands on data of real people talking to other real people.

and doing it at a larger scale than we ever have been able to before. And so this study in particular was by Daniel McFarland and Dan Jurafsky and their colleagues at Stanford. They got their hands on police body camera footage from real traffic stops in Oakland, California. And they transcribed all of these interactions, very routine interactions when police officers pull people over for speeding or for other sort of traffic infractions.

What they did was so ingenious. They looked at all the words that were exchanged between in these interactions and they had, they rated the respectfulness of the language on a scale from disrespectful to very respectful. And they had actual citizens in California do that rating. So they looked at little pieces of like sentences from,

from the real transcripts and rated how respectful is this one and how respectful is this one and how respectful is this one. And what emerges is a very clear picture across many interactions and across many people of the types of language that we all view as respectful versus disrespectful.

So what this means for us is three things emerge. The language that is very respectful makes people feel a certain way. It turns out that positive sentiments, so positive emotion words like great, good, wonderful, awesome, are respectful because it's saying, hey, I care about how you feel and I have the power to make you feel better by using more positive language.

The second thing that emerges is that people want to feel seen and known. In the context of a traffic stop, this means using appropriate language to refer to someone. So saying like, good evening, good evening, Mrs. Allen, like good evening, Gail, Gail.

Using someone's name appropriately can be so powerful. What it means outside of traffic stops is that the names we use to refer to people matter tremendously. We all know this. I mean, having an interaction where you don't know someone's name or they're calling you the wrong name really can feel sort of disrespectful or dehumanizing. And then the third element that emerged from this study that's highly respectful is just making people feel worthy of care.

Using language that shows, hey, I want to be in this interaction and I care about you. I know I'm pulling you over to give you a ticket, but I still see you as a human being and I care about your safety. And that kind of language emerged as very important on the respectful end.

On the disrespectful end of language, you have things like negative sentiment was disrespectful. Accusatory language, so saying like, keep your hands on the wheel. There's a reason that that's a famous line in movies. It is very scary and disrespectful. And that came out in these transcripts as well. Is respectful language an indicator of kindness? To me, it feels that way. Yes. Respectful language is...

In a thousand cuts, a thousand tiny moments, the language we use builds up towards kindness. When I use positive language and I'm willing to apologize to you, when I feel like I'm happy to be with you, when I use your name, all of these little moves are tiny signals that I care about you and that I think you're worthy of care. And that's what kindness is, making someone feel

valued and respected. Part of being kind is also in a conversation, active listening. We hear this a lot. It gets thrown around a lot, but you approached it in a way that I thought was once again, a real differentiator and really, really helpful. You use the word responsive when it comes to listening. What do you mean?

Yeah, so decades of work on active listening have been so productive. It's focused mostly, active listening mostly focuses on nonverbal signals of listening. So making eye contact, smiling, leaning forward, nodding, these sort of cues that you're giving to your partner that you're hearing them. Now that's very important. It's a great first step to increase perceptions of good listening, to show your partner, hey, I'm listening to you.

The problem is all of those things can be faked. And not only can they be faked, we all fake them a lot of the time. I mean, imagine like a Zoom call where somebody's talking and you're nodding politely, but actually on the side, you're like texting a friend or surfing the internet or whatever.

So active listening is so important. It's a sort of basic first step in being a good listener. In our research, we want to go beyond active listening to be amazing, attentive listeners.

So what we have found in our research is that paying attention in conversation is really hard. Our minds were built to wander, and that's not a bad thing. That's what our brains do when we're trying to pull ideas together and brainstorm and relate one topic to another and being thoughtful about, oh, talking to Todd makes me think of his mother, and I wonder how she's doing, right? So this mind wandering is not a bad thing. It just is how we are.

If you're a chronic mind wanderer in conversation, you're not alone. We ran a study where we actually asked people to report how often their minds were wandering. We interrupted their conversation every five minutes and we found that 24% of the time,

People's minds are wandering and they are not listening attentively. And that's based on self-report. So it's actually, it's probably an underestimate of how often people's minds are wandering. So the first thing to sort of acknowledge is that attentive listening, continuous attentive listening in conversation is really hard and probably not realistic.

Um, and the second thing to note is knowing that our listening is sort of, uh, intermittent and disrupted and our minds are wandering sometimes. What can we do about it? What can we do to be better listeners, to show people that we're listening and also to give grace to ourselves and to others when they've, when their minds have wandered, when they've missed something, all of those things are really important.

So, here's the key. Where active listening has focused on nonverbal signals, really responsive listeners use verbal cues of good listening. So, if you've actually put in the hard work to hear what someone else has said and

Don't forget to say it out loud. And you can do this in a number of ways. You can repeat back what someone has said to you. You can paraphrase what several people in a group have said. You can use that superhero of questions, follow-up questions, to follow up on something someone has already said. You can use callbacks to call back to a detail from earlier in the conversation or just validate what they've said.

I love when you shared about the show you watched on Netflix about somebody somewhere that really resonated with me. Let me tell you about a Netflix show that I've been watching and enjoying recently. So the only way I can actually give you that compliment is if I was listening earlier in the conversation.

And for whatever reason, many of us forget to express our listening out loud to other people and use verbal cues to show them that we've been listening. And verbal cues are the only ones that can't be faked. Unlike smiling and nodding, you can't fake a callback or a follow-up question. You know, with people who are very close to me in my life, I always want to make sure they feel like I'm listening to them. And I've actually gotten to the point where I'll say,

you know what? I need you to kind of rewind and say what you just said again. Cause I zoned out. Absolutely. Oh, it's such a lovely sign of closeness and trust. And it's really important. We call these repair strategies and everyone should lean into them. Um,

we should give each other grace because of course you missed something in the conversation. You were probably busy thinking so hard about something they said that your mind wanders elsewhere. But for whatever reason, it takes a lot of vulnerability in that moment to say, hey, I heard the first thing you said, but I missed the last piece. Can you repeat yourself?

So linguists call this a repair sequence or a side sequence for repair. So leaning and asking repair questions to make sure that you're all on the same page. Often we use phrases or like language and you realize, oh, I think we might be using that word to mean two different things. So that's an opportunity for repair as well. Like, oh, when you say, when you say, uh,

a plant. You're talking about a living plant. When I said plant, I actually meant an industrial plant. So there are these moments that we have opportunities for repair, and often we shy away from them because they feel embarrassing or vulnerable or a failure in some way. But the best conversationalists do what you do, Gail, which is say, hey,

I'm so sorry. I missed what you said. Can you repeat it so that we can get back on track? Well, and it sounds like an opportunity for levity because nine times out of 10, when I do it, I'm laughing like, Hey, you know, uh, guilty. And I'm just going to fess up on this. Cause I don't want to, I'm realizing that I can't answer your question now, or I haven't fully paid attention, but I really want to. And so it's almost always funny because you're admitting like this, like very human thing that we can all relate to. So yes, it's, it's just great. We should do all do more of it.

One of the things that we're not going to go into in too much detail, but you do shift gears in your book to a wonderful place where I think we also can get a little anxious, and that is group conversations. So we don't have time to do a real deep dive on it, but Allison, if you wanted to give us some advice about having a conversation in groups, what's one piece of advice that you would really want us to be aware of and maybe take away?

I think the top line takeaway is that group conversation takes all of the tricky coordination problems of one-on-one conversation and multiplies them exponentially.

If you walk away from a group, from a family dinner or a holiday celebration or a board meeting or a meeting at work or teaching a class, whatever, if there are more than two people there and you walk away feeling like it was not good, like everything was out of control, you didn't say what you meant to say, someone else was writhing in silence while another person was taking up all the airtime, um,

Of course, a group conversation is a coordination kerfuffle. And there are some things that we can do to make them more well-coordinated. But I think the top line takeaway is just like a level of acceptance that groups are a coordination nightmare and they always will be. And that's okay. It's the nature of bringing together many human minds and trying to make that time together productive.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing? And I guess it depends. If I'm in a group conversation and maybe somebody else put the group together, I feel differently if I did. If I put the group together, I feel very much like I want to be what you call a conversational steward. I want to take responsibility for that group. But sometimes I walk into a group and it's just kind of what you said. It's very chaotic. And I worry most about people who aren't getting any airtime and

Is it, if you do it effectively, if you do it in a way that isn't heavy handed, is it helpful in those situations to kind of, I don't, I can't, I'm not going to pick the perfect language, but maybe steer or guide or direct a little bit the group so that things get a little smoother? Do you tend to do that because you know so much about conversation? How do you handle it?

I do. I mean, in my capacity as a professor and as a teacher, I teach groups of 90 to 200 students at a time. Also, I'm just a very controlling person. So I...

Yes, I'm obsessed with trying to maximize group conversation, even with my eyes open to the fact that you can't perfectly control it and it's always going to be a bit chaotic. A couple of things to think about. One is just the structure of the interaction. Something that is so frustrating about group conversation is the sharing of airtime, which is sort of obvious.

But one solution to, instead of writhing and being frustrated about people dominating airtime or not getting enough airtime, one way to get everyone more airtime is to actually like break up the group on purpose, right?

and say, okay, we're going to take two minutes, and I want you to break into groups of three, or two, or four, or whatever you want, to do individual, smaller group discussion, and then we're going to come back together and have a plenary discussion with all of us. That way, everybody has a chance to voice their thoughts, to hear other people's opinions,

opinions on their thoughts to really interact in a meaningful way. And then once you pull back together to the plenary group, you get the benefit of all being on shared ground with one conversational thread. And so we call this partitioning when you break into smaller groups versus centralizing when you have one centralized thread of a conversation. And I think great stewards of groups or leaders of groups

leverage partitioning and centralizing very strategically. Alison, there are two questions I always ask at the end of an interview to wrap things up. The first one is the podcast theme is curiosity. What are you most curious about today? My goodness, everything. I think, oh, I'm such a curious cat. I have three young children. And so I

Something I'm so curious about and want to figure out so badly is how do I teach them to be the best conversationalist they can be?

And every interaction I have with them is a new, fresh opportunity to understand their mind a little bit better and to think, how can I be the best role model and best friend and best parent that I can be to this little person who's just learning to find their way in the social world?

And then the last question, is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to or, you know, some kind of final thoughts to share? And I ask this one because there's so much in your book and we have not mined it to the extent that we could just for lack of time. But is there something you want to leave us with that maybe we didn't talk about or something you want to go deeper on that we did?

I think one of my main takeaways from doing all of this research and writing this book is the importance of grace. I think we put pressure on ourselves for conversation to go well and to go perfectly. And we've been doing it our whole lives. So we feel like we should be experts at it, that it should always be smooth and charismatic and fun and productive.

But when you really start to look at transcripts of real conversations, you realize very quickly that actual conversations between people are a train wreck. Like there's half-finished ideas and we interrupt each other and we overlap and we say things that we...

regret and we don't say things that we wish we had said. And that's always going to be true. No matter how good you get at conversation, it's never going to be perfect. So aiming for perfection is really not a goal. And when you make mistakes to have more grace for yourself and when other people make mistakes, try your best to have grace for them as well, because we're all just doing our best.

I cannot thank you enough. It has been such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much, Gail. It's been such a pleasure. I've loved it. Thank you. Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Machabelli for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity.

This week is Callie-Ann Bradley's novel, The Ministry of Time. It's a book that's hard to pin down. Time travel? Spy thriller? Romance? Yes, yes, and yes, with reference to the 1845 Arctic expedition thrown in. There's something about this book that's both magical and thrilling. I couldn't put it down.