ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
I like to think of myself as a pretty good conversationalist. After all, a big part of my job is interviewing experts for this show and HBR events, and I spend the rest of my time talking to academics and executives about how to shape their ideas into articles. Away from work, you’ll also find me chatting up people pretty regularly, family, friends, the guy at the gym, the stranger I just met at a party.
Still, when it comes to conversational skills, there’s always room for improvement, and I’ll admit that even I come away from some interactions unsure of myself. Did I talk too much, ask questions of everyone, share too candidly? No matter the topic, setting, or partner, conversations can be tricky, and yet, navigating them well, from water cooler to boardroom, school drop-off to dinner outing, can yield both professional and personal benefits. So, whether you’re a practiced talker or more socially awkward, it pays to better understand how conversations work and how to get better at them.
Our guest today is here to help. Alison Wood Brooks is an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and she wrote the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Alison, welcome.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Thank you so much for having me, Alison. How you doing?
ALISON BEARD: So, we all know people who are just fabulous, fluid conversationalists and others who just aren’t that good. How much of that is due to just an extroverted, confident, warm personality or the way you were brought up in a talkative family or just having lots of interesting things to say versus being a more shy or self-conscious person, growing up in a less chatty environment, or just not having that much to contribute to the conversation?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: I think at the heart of your question is how much of our conversational ability is from nature versus nurture? When we think about things like personality, extroversion, and introversion, or even other parts of individual differences in the ways that our brains work – if you’re on the autism spectrum, if you have ADHD, all of it matters in terms of who you are and how your brain works, but ultimately, what really matters is how are you feeling when you’re talking to other people, and how are those things influencing your behaviors, your little micro-decisions that you make at every moment of every conversation?
Some introverts are fabulous conversationalists. Some extroverts are terrible. What really matters is what are you thinking about? How are you feeling, and how is it affecting your choices as your conversations unfold?
ALISON BEARD: So, it seems like you’re saying that anyone can learn to be a good conversationalist?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Absolutely. You can learn to be a better conversationalist. You can also learn and change your preferences around conversation over the trajectory of your life and even from one moment to the next.
ALISON BEARD: So, you mentioned micro-decisions. You also say in the book that conversations are a unique coordination challenge each time. So, explain what you mean by those two things. Why are they so complicated and complex?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: It’s so funny. We learn to have conversations starting around the age of one and a half, when we’re toddlers. So, by the time we get to adulthood, it feels like conversation is one of those things that’s second nature and that we should be great at it and that it should be easy and that it’s this task we’re doing all the time.
But when you start to look under the hood of what’s going on in people’s brains when they’re talking to each other and what about all of these little choices that we’re making at every moment of every conversation, when you look under the hood, conversation is so much more complex than it first appears. In fact, it’s sort of a miracle that humans learn to have dialogue, to take turns speaking and listening with each other in pursuit of goals like information exchange and connection and fun.
And so, I call it a coordination game because you’re coordinating hundreds of thousands of little decisions together with another human mind that you don’t have control over, and those coordination choices are hard.
ALISON BEARD: Why is it so important to think about the context and purpose of a conversation before getting into it, before you start making those decisions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: What it means to have a good conversation or to be a good conversationalist depends so much on both the context, the who, what, where, when, why, how of each individual interaction, but also the purposes. So, every conversation, every person involved has their own set of needs and desires, sincere needs and desires. Sometimes we want to learn from each other. Sometimes we want to keep secrets.
Sometimes we want to persuade someone else, and sometimes we don’t want to be persuaded by them. And so, these needs and desires, these purposes profoundly shape the meaning of what it even means to have a good conversation. And every human has their own set of purposes, their own set of goals in every interaction.
So, in the book, I work really, really hard to have principles that are helpful guides to having good conversations regardless of the context, right? We can’t actually script what it means to have good a conversation. You can’t memorize lines. You never know what your partner’s going to say. There’s so much uncertainty around conversation, but in the book, we talk about these principles that can be applied and helpful across all conversational contexts, whether it’s work, non-work, and as we move fluidly from one context to the next.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. So, let’s dig into those principles. You call it TALK, T-A-L-K, which stands for topic, asking, levity, and kindness, and I want to address each of those. So, first, what do we need to know about choosing and moving between topics?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So, I think the topics part of the framework is the one that I continue to sort of ruminate about the most personally. At every moment of every conversation, everyone involved is making little micro-choices that help to steer topics. So, it’s not like you’re just starting a conversation, and you’re like, “Oh, we’re going to talk about our hiring decision.” Actually, every time you speak, you sort of have your hand on the steering wheel of the topical flow, and you’re choosing, “Should we stay on this current topic? Should we drift gently in another direction? Should we jump cut to something else entirely? Should we end the conversation?” All of these moves steer the trajectory of the conversation itself. They determine what the content of the conversation is and therefore what you’re actually able to accomplish.
ALISON BEARD: So, what’s an exercise that I might do to get better at picking topics and switching between them?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: So, I teach a course at Harvard called TALK, and there are a number of exercises that I have my students do to practice. To start with, a great exercise is to try topic prep. Some people do this naturally, and other people are like, “What are you talking about? That’s a terrible idea. It’s going to make my conversation awful and rigid and scripted,” but don’t knock it until you try it. In our research, we find that people who spend even 30 seconds thinking ahead about possible topics they could talk about leads to more enjoyable, less anxiety-ridden, smoother conversations.
So, you can push yourself to try and come up with a list of two to three bullet points of ideas of things that you might talk about, and not just with work colleagues for a 20 or 30 minute meeting, but also for people you’re really close to. When you call your mom or your best friend, think ahead about what they’re going to find fun to talk about or important. What’s been going on in their life that you should ask them about? What did you see in the world that reminded you of them? Maybe you’ll have the chance to bring that up and make them feel really loved and seen.
So, topic prep helps in all of these ways. In the experience of topic prep, the fears about it making the conversation seem scripted or rigid turn out to not be true. It actually usually makes the conversation feel more exciting and more smooth.
Another idea and another exercise I have my students do is about topic switching once the conversation is underway. Whether you’ve done topic prep or not, once you’re in the conversation, you’re making these choices on the fly about, “Well, should we stay on this topic or switch to something else?” On average, people tend to make the mistake of staying too long on topics more than jumping around too quickly. It’s more common that you have a lull and you start saying things you’ve already said or having long pauses because, usually, because people are polite, and they feel weird switching to a new topic, but in those moments, it’s really important to be courageous and confident and switch to something else.
So, an exercise I have my students do is take a list of a lot of topics, maybe 10 or 12, and just challenge yourself to switch more frequently. Anytime it seems like your partner’s not interested or you haven’t landed on something that’s dazzlingly exciting or there’s … Even if you have landed on something exciting, push yourself to sort of switch more frequently than you naturally would and see how it goes. Most people are pleasantly surprised to learn that it just makes their conversation more exciting and more interesting and actually doesn’t feel as rude as you think it might in theory.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting because one of my tricks when I’m entering a group conversation is to figure out something that two people have in common and mention it, or even if I don’t know what they might have in common, just sort of give a quick backstory on one person and then the other so that they can find a topic to come together on. I sort of just now realized in talking to you is that that’s what I’m trying to do, help them choose a topic.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Totally. That’s such a nice service to the group, and we can do the same thing one-on-one essentially, right, especially … That was kind of the main thing that I did when I interviewed for all my jobs, right, in a job interview. I mean, everybody’s desperate for commonality and ease, and so, finding, landing on something, even something really insignificant that you have in common makes conversation feel so much easier and like you’re developing a really meaningful shared reality together.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Okay. That seems like a good transition to asking questions because that might be another way you can find commonalities. So, I think most of us know that this is a path to better communication and understanding, particularly in the workplace, but why do you think so many people still do tend to share more information than they solicit and talk more than they listen in conversations? Because that’s the worst conversationalist, right, the person who just talks at you and doesn’t ask questions and doesn’t engage you.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Listen, there’s a million ways to be a bad conversationalist, which is part of the challenge in becoming a better one, but certainly, talking too much about yourself is a very quick and common way that people fail. One reason that people under-ask questions is just that our brain, the human mind was built to be egocentric. We’re most familiar with our own perspective. We’re most interested in our own experience of the world. And so many people, because they’re so focused on their own perspective that they really forget to ask and realize, “Oh, I’m talking to another human mind that has had maybe even more experiences and have even more knowledge than I do, and I should be trying to pull that information out of them.” You just sort of forget that that’s even possible in the chaos of conversational flow.
Another reason is that even if you think to ask people questions, there are lots of barriers there too, right? We worry that by asking, it’ll make us look incompetent or too intrusive or that we’ll ask a question on a topic that they don’t actually want to talk about or is too sensitive. I mean, there’s all kinds of hesitations and worries that prevent us from asking questions, even when we ask, even when we think to do it.
ALISON BEARD: As you might imagine, I am the opposite, and very often, my husband will be in a conversation in a group setting. And he’ll say, “You really have to forgive her for asking so many questions. She’s a journalist.” But what does your research show about good types of questions to ask people?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. So, let me tell you about a specific data set that I think is really illustrative of the power of question asking. We got our hands on this great data set of speed dates. It was about a thousand speed dates, four-minute conversations between strangers on heterosexual speed dates, and there’s all kinds of stuff you can study about their conversations, have this beautiful outcome of does the person want to go on another date with you or not at the end?
There’s a very strong and clear effect of question asking such that, for both men and women, asking more questions means that your partner’s more likely to want to go on a date with you, a second date with you, but when you look at that effect, when you dive in and look at the content of what people are asking about, you see that that effect is almost entirely driven by follow-up questions. Follow-up questions are such a superhero because they show that you’re listening to your partner and you care about their answer, and then you want to know more. And that’s what psychologists call responsiveness in action, right? You are actually listening to them. You actually care, and you actually want to know more.
So, follow-up questions are such a superhero. They help us get away from small talk. And it helps us share with each other. It helps you say, “Look, I really want to hear more from you on this. Don’t be afraid to share it with me.”
In a different data set, we looked at question asking in negotiations. So, this is a much more conflictual context compared to dating, where your incentives are very much aligned, right? It’s very cooperative. You have a lot to learn about each other. When you’re negotiating and you’re working through disagreement, you could feel like, “Oh, I shouldn’t ask as much because they’re going to feel like I’m trying to learn information that I’m going to use to exploit them and use for my own gain, right?” It’s more competitive, but even there, even in negotiations, we find that people who ask more questions are, on average, better liked by their counterpart, and they learn more information that helps them identify creative solutions and value creating solutions and helps them claim more value in the negotiation.
And this was particularly true for open-ended questions. So, closed questions, of course, have a sort of predetermined set of answers like yes, no. Open-ended questions are more like, “What do you think about cell phones?” or, “What did you have for breakfast this morning? What’s on your mind?” They beg for more information, more open sharing from your partner, and in fact, in conversation, by asking an open-ended question, people respond with more than twice the word count when you ask them an open question compared to a closed one.
And then we could look at the wording of these questions that negotiators ask each other, and what we saw was really stunning, very helpful in practice. People who asked open-ended questions that start with the word “what” seem to strike the right balance between relational outcomes like likability, trust, as well as informational outcomes, so eliciting more information that’s helpful in the negotiation. So, “what” questions strike that good balance compared to, let’s say, a “why” question. So, I say, “Why did you have cereal for breakfast? Why don’t you like cell phones?” which can feel more accusatory and more threatening.
ALISON BEARD: Hmm. Interesting. So, how might I practice being a better asker of questions?
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Great. This’ll feel very good to you, Alison. It’s an exercise called never-ending follow-ups. I feel like you’re doing it to me right now, which is awesome. It’s an exercise I ask my students to do where, one, it’s in a pair. One person is put in this role of asker. The other person is answerer, and the asker’s job is to ask a follow-up question every time they speak. So, you can make it feel smooth and natural. You can disclose things about yourself, but before you turn the conversational microphone back over to your partner, you end with a follow-up question based on something they just shared with you.
This is the most extreme version of question asking, right? If you’re asking a question every time you talk, that’s a lot of questions. A lot of times, my students are like, “Oh my God. That’s crazy. It’s going to be too much.” In the experience of it, it feels amazing. And when I ask my students at the end, they describe it with words like “fun,” “amazing,” “authentic,” “learning,” “connective,” because there’s so much information and sharing that comes from asking so many follow-up questions.
ALISON BEARD: And it’s also fewer decisions in a way because you’re not thinking about what you need to say or how you should respond. You’re just purely focused on the other person.
ALISON WOOD BROOKS: Yeah. I think a lot of people put pressure on themselves to be knowledgeable about things, like, “Oh, I need to have something smart or funny or surprising to say,” but questions are so beautiful as an improvisational tool because you don’t need to know anything about anything if you know that you can always just ask more questions.
ALISON BEARD: Okay. The L is for levity. Does this mean telling jokes or finding ways to make the conversation lighter with smiles or laughter or self-deprecation? What are we talking about?
ALISON WOOD BRO
