Alison Wood Brooks researches conversation across contexts and populations – from speed dates to board meetings – and has published her findings in academic journals as well as written about them in popular media such as The New York Times and Scientific American. She also teaches a course called “How to Talk Gooder in Business and Life” at the Harvard Business School, where she is the O’Brien associate professor of business administration and Hellman faculty fellow. It’s based on her “Talk” framework, an acronym that stands for “Topics, Asking, Levity and Kindness,” that has become the subject of her new book “Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves,” which dives into the complexities of communication and provides lessons for how we can all talk better. “Talk” comes out Jan. 21, and Brooks speaks at Harvard Book Store on Jan. 23. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get into this field of research?
I think all people are sort of lay scientists of conversation. We learn to talk when we’re toddlers, and we spend every day for the rest of our lives practicing talking with a huge array of conversation partners. We watch other people talk, and we try to figure out who’s doing it well and how we can do it better. I started out that way too, and I actually am an identical twin, so I grew up watching a sort of doppelganger version of myself interact with the world at close range. I watched my sister say and do things that went well and tried to copy those things, and I also saw her do embarrassing things or make bad jokes and tried not to do that. And we shared a bedroom, we shared our clothes, we did all the same activities, so I also spent my whole childhood in very close conversation with someone. I love her so much and our shared reality is so tight-knit that it’s almost like I’ve spent the rest of my career trying to help other people achieve that in their relationships.
I went to grad school at The Wharton School, where I studied emotions, mostly anxiety, which is a very prevalent emotion in the social world. Tons of people feel anxious about talking to others, largely because there’s a lot of uncertainty and a lack of control. I realized I was really interested in how we talk about our feelings with other people, and that led me to realize I’m curious about how people talk about everything. My timing happened to coincide with new technology that made the study of conversation more possible – we had automatic transcription, so you could study real conversations between real people, and there were new analysis tools like natural language processing and machine learning that allowed us to start studying transcripts at larger scale than ever before. So I would say this new science of conversation is something that’s evolved over the last decade thanks to work partly done by me and partly by many other people, and yet we are just beginning to scratch the surface of figuring it out. Obviously not everyone can come to Harvard and take this class, so I thought I could write a book about it. The book follows the trajectory of the “TALK” course and is hopefully accessible for everybody.
What do you think is the biggest misconception about conversation?
That anyone has the ability to achieve perfection in conversation. I call it “the myth of naturalness”: We see other people who seem really charismatic or smooth or articulate, and we think, that’s easy for them, it should be easy for me too. So we shoot for this perfect style of communication, but when you look at actual transcripts between real people, not only are they not perfect, they’re like train wrecks. People are constantly interrupting each other, there are long pauses, we talk about topics that are not serving our goals. And we do all kinds of funny things to manage the impression we make on other people, focusing too much on ourselves and our own perspective. This pressure we put on ourselves is very misguided. It’s better to have the mindset that conversation is surprisingly tricky. When you look under the hood, everybody’s making mistakes, and it’s okay if you are too. Conversation is a relentless coordination game in which we have to make microdecisions extremely quickly, and if you can just get a little better at it, your life and your relationships and your work are all going to get better.
Walk me through the acronym.
T is for Topics. We have to choose topics, not just at the beginning of a conversation, but every time we talk. We’re constantly deciding whether we should stay on one topic or shift to something else, and in the book, we work on how to do that more effectively.
A is for Asking. That’s all about asking more and better questions to take advantage of the interactivity of conversation. That’s really the beauty and opportunity of conversation, that it’s co-constructed, and the more we can learn about each other’s minds, the better the conversation is going to be. Questions are the best way to do that.
L is for Levity, finding these beautiful moments of humor and warmth to stave off boredom. We know that hostility and conflict can derail conversation, but the more silent killer of conversation is boredom, and it’s quite common. Levity is an antidote for boredom.
K is Kindness. In a way, all the other maxims are working their way up to kindness. Kindness is many things, and in the book, we talk very concretely about what kind conversationalists think about and what they say and do, including respectful language, receptiveness to opposing viewpoints and responsive listening. Even though the book is called “Talk,” the real secret is that to be a good talker, you have to be a really good listener.
How do you differentiate between various forms of conversation, whether face to face, on the phone, texting or emailing or even on social media?
I actually wrote a whole chapter about digital communication for the book and took it out because things become outdated, like, one day after you’ve written it, and I really wanted the book to be timeless. That said, I have many, many thoughts about this. One of our biggest challenges is that we’re constantly toggling between different modes of communication. You’re on your phone, you’re texting, you’re emailing, you look up to your computer, you’re sending emails, you maybe take a phone call. Even though we’re doing “conversation” across all these modalities, they differ dramatically in terms of both synchronicity and information richness. Email and text are asynchronous, while face-to-face and video or phone conversation are totally synchronous. And in terms of information richness, there are three buckets of information: verbal cues, which are the words we say to each other; acoustic cues, which are how we sound; and nonverbal cues, which are visually perceived, like your facial expression or body language. With communication over the phone, you only get verbal and acoustic cues; over text, you only get verbal cues. Face-to-face conversations, in contrast, are deliciously rich, because you get everything. Our brains have evolved to be in that rich communicative environment, which is why so often only face-to-face conversations feel real and meaningful while everything else feels more transactional in service of you eventually seeing those people in real life. But rather than saying we can only try to have more in-person conversations, a better way of thinking about it, which meets the world where it is, is to think about what we love about face-to-face conversation and figure out how to bring some of those elements into other modes of communication. Are there ways to make our text messaging come alive a bit more? Are there ways to make video conferencing feel less soul-crushing?
How would you say Talk changed the way you communicate? How can following this framework affect people’s lives?
I would love to ask every single one of my students this question! I’ve spent so much time thinking about and studying conversation that it’s impossible to say I haven’t been affected by my study, and I think truly for the better. I feel like I’m constantly floating over the room watching myself have conversations with people. I’m going to quote jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, who said, “You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.” I think that’s the spirit of the art of conversation too. You can practice and uncover strategy, but once you’re in a conversation you need to just let it go and wail. My conversations have only become more rewarding and delightful because of that.
Alison Wood Brooks speaks at 7 p.m. Jan. 23 at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
This post was updated Aug. 19, 2024, to note that descriptions of the books were compiled from the publishers.
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