How to TALK So People Actually Listen with Dr. Alison Wood Brooks 7 | 12

Episode at a Glance: TALK

Radical Candor Podcast Resources: TALK

• Alison Wood Brooks
• Talk: The Science Of Conversation and the Art Of Being Ourselves
• Alison Wood Brooks | LinkedIn

The TLDR Radical Candor Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Amy Sandler: I’m Amy Sandler, the principal coach and podcast host at Radical Candor. Today I am so excited to introduce our guest, Dr. Alison Wood Brooks. Hello Alison, author of the new book, Talk, and I’ve got it right here. Talk, The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Well, at Radical Candor, we are all about conversation, being ourselves. And so I’m so excited to have this conversation. Dr. Brooks is the O’Brien associate professor of business administration and Hellman faculty fellow at the Harvard Business School. She’s a leading expert on the science of conversation and also teaches a course on the subject at Harvard Business School. 

[00:00:49] So in the book, Talk, Alison, I’m going to start referring to you as Alison. I hope that’s okay. All right. All right. Um, so Alison reveals that even the best communicators have room for improvement. So, you know, at Radical Candor, we’re all about growth. How can we get better? And what I love about this book are there are simple and effective techniques that help us improve our conversation. So, yes, absolutely for business settings, but also personal relationships. The flight, the stranger at the party, Talk offers valuable insights for anyone who’s looking to enhance their communication skills. And I think, uh, that is probably all of us in this group. So if you’ve got questions, the way this will work, go ahead, put them in the chat. Our producer Brandi, thank you Brandi, will elevate them so that we can answer them for you. Welcome Alison. 

[00:01:38] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Thank you so much for having me. Amy, what’s going on? How you doing? 

[00:01:44] Amy Sandler: Uh, I am doing well. I have to say you and I both connected at the top of this before we went live that we have each been through, um, sort of the gamut of some illness in this moment. So I think that was, you know, we were actually the first thing off the bat was talking about, I’ve been dealing with a virus. You’ve got, had stomach flu, etcetera. So, um, first of all, do you just want to name like what was happening there when we were connecting around that?

[00:02:09] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Oh my gosh. Yes. In the spirit of Radical Candor and to everyone out there who is also, uh, struggling with this winter, uh, and this world. Um, yeah, I had the flu last week. I got it the day after my book launched. Um, I’ve got to get, one of my three kids is homesick. He now has the flu. So to all of you out there cycling through winter sickness and beyond, we’re there with you in solidarity. Um, also at the top of the hour when we connected, Amy, my power went out because we are in a world that is just plagued by high winds and hurricanes and fires. So, here we are trying to connect and find love for all of us in this crazy world.

[00:02:53] Amy Sandler: Yeah, I just I was so just touched instantly by that connection and how that actually elevated us to an even deeper place to set the table for the conversation. Because you talk about there’s, you know, the science of conversation, but there’s also kind of the art of being ourselves in that balance. So, you know, I did go to Harvard Business School, but then I went and got my MFA in screenwriting. And I think so much of what I love about your book is that it’s this real blend of, there is a lot of research in there. And especially like really recent research, which I found fascinating. But also so many rich stories of how people have applied these theories and how you develop the theory. So I’d love to hear before we get into the actual book itself, just what sparked the idea for you to want to write this book and then teach the course? 

[00:03:41] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Oh, the story is so, I mean, it’s like the whole story of my life. I feel like everything has been leading to this moment and, um, I am a behavioral scientist. I’ve been studying emotions like anxiety and excitement and anger and sadness for almost twenty years. And at some point, I realized that I wasn’t just studying how people feel, but how they talk about their feelings with other people. And then I realized, oh, I’m deeply fascinated by not just how we talk about our feelings, but how we talk about everything. And I was very lucky to have this epiphany at the same time that behavioral science was getting to a place where we could do research a little differently. And you said, you just said that a lot of the research in the book is very recent because we’ve only been able to start studying real conversations between real people at very large scale over the last ten years.

[00:04:33] Um, scholars have studied language and the acquisition of language and one way speaking, so like public speaking for centuries. Um, but only in the last decade or so have we been able, have we gotten our hands on tools that allow us to transcribe real conversations at large scale and analyze them using natural language processing and AI, um, so that we can learn about how people relate to each other in conversation much better than ever before. Um, we’re still in early days of figuring it all out. It’s kind of funny to me that there’s so many people out there giving advice based on hunches and anecdotes and their own experience while the science of conversation is really in its infancy. Um, but we’ve learned enough that I invented a course at HBS called Talk.

[00:05:23] Uh, it was exciting to do it because I’d been teaching negotiation, which is essentially a course on difficult conversations. And I started to realize, you know, how often are we negotiating? Maybe, you know, for like a new house or a car or your salary, maybe once every couple months, but we have to talk to people all day long, every day, all the time. And we’re, we make tons of mistakes in even seemingly easy conversations too. And so I invented this course called Talk. Not everyone in the world is going to be able to take this course at Harvard. Um, and so I wrote this book so that everybody can get access to the ideas and the insights. My personal answer about why I’m so in love with people and obsessed with conversation goes back much further than, um, being a scientist and a professor. And it’s because I’m an identical twin, Amy. Um, which I talk about in the book a little bit. 

[00:06:16] Amy Sandler: Yeah. Is it Sarah? 

[00:06:18] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yes, Sarah. I dedicated the book to her and.

[00:06:22] Amy Sandler: I saw that.

[00:06:23] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: And she, when I, when she, I didn’t tell her I was dedicating the book to her. And so when she opened up a copy for the first time, she lives about a mile away. She drove over and she was just like sobbing in her car. It was like this beautiful moment. And she’s like, I don’t know what I did right to deserve to have a sister who can write a book and it was very, very nice. Um, we’re very close, we’ve always been very close. And I think, you know, twins are creepy, but also, uh, it’s a very, 

[00:06:53] Amy Sandler: Did we just get the pull quote from this interview?

[00:06:55] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Twins are creepy, I can confirm. Um, but also, it’s um, it’s like getting to watch a version of yourself, um, interact in the social world your whole childhood and your whole life, and it’s really, that’s really quite a privilege. I think I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing, trying to help other people find the shared reality that I have with my twin, um, helping other people find that within relationships in their lives.

[00:07:25] Amy Sandler: That is so interesting because, you know, we do, uh, an exercise in a Radical Candor workshop where we have people practice giving feedback, specifically giving criticism. So we would have both praise and criticism. And, but the way that we do it is we have it in threes. So let’s say I would role play giving you criticism and then I would have a coach role. Because it’s so rare that in like real life, we actually get a coach. And I feel like that’s a lot of what you do in the Talk course is sort of bringing those mirrors and those reflections, whether through recordings, etcetera, because, you know, to get better at something, we actually have to, you know, sort of get this real time analysis of what’s happening, but we’re in the conversation. And when you have, you know, I was struck in the book when you talked about you could observe what Sarah was doing and be like, oh, do I do it this way? And I could do it this differently. And isn’t that amazing how she does it that way. And you know, it’s rare that most of us get that opportunity. 

[00:08:21] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s so rare. It’s the reason that we all feel so weird and awkward and we’re not sure about whether we’re doing conversation well, when we’re learning to do it as children is because there’s no feedback, very little feedback. It’s what scholars would call a wicked feedback environment. People, 

[00:08:38] Amy Sandler: I haven’t heard that. We might have to take that, a wicked feedback, not in terms of, not in terms of either the Boston wicked awesome or the hit sensation, uh, stage, uh, and now film, uh, okay. 

[00:08:50] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s the third version of wicked. 

[00:08:51] Amy Sandler: Okay.

[00:08:51] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Um, made in a Boston accent. I said, it’s like a wicked feedback. 

[00:08:55] Amy Sandler: It’s a wicked. 

[00:08:56] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. 

[00:08:56] Amy Sandler: After some Dunkin Donuts. I am from Boston. 

[00:09:00] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. Um, but no, this is a, uh, an environment where there’s, you’re not getting feedback on naturally on how things are going. People can’t stop mid conversation and tell you feedback on every like, hey, that joke was really great or, 

[00:09:13] Amy Sandler: That was wicked awesome, Alison. 

[00:09:16] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Or that was hurtful to somebody or you need to smile more or you’re not making eye contact. It would just be impossible to get that relentless stream of feedback. There are some companies that are now trying to do that. Companies like Gong that, um, will record people’s conversations and then give them feedback, AI feedback after the conversation is over so that they can try and work on it for their next conversation. But humans don’t often give feedback like that. And having a twin sister means I got an extra source of feedback. It’s like I got to watch myself. 

[00:09:46] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:09:47] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Succeeding and failing in the world.

[00:09:49] Amy Sandler: And also just to really anchor on, um, there is a real, uh, intentionality about kindness, that’s the K in Talk. We’ll get into all of this, but it’s really coming from a place of being helpful, of wanting to see this person succeed. So obviously, this is your twin sister that you care and love. And, you know, so I just wanted to anchor that we’re doing this feedback from that place of being helpful and growing. Um, and there, you know, there’s so much overlap, I think, between Radical Candor and your book. Before I get into Talk, I just had to go back. Um, I think we’re calling this circling back. Am I am I doing that right? Callback. Um, we’re doing, I’m doing a callback. Um, not to be confused with a boomer ask, which will be a little, um, plot point to pick up later. 

[00:10:34] But the callback is around that you teach negotiation. And I have to tell you back when I was in business school, and this was in the late 20th century. And one of my takeaways from the negotiation class was this idea of the Pareto frontier. And, you know, we had some exercise where it was like, you each got a number and you had a partner and you had to tell the partner your number. So basically like your number is two hundred and my number is a hundred. And so we’re like, okay, let’s do a hundred and fifty. So I would go into that exercise like my number is a hundred. And this person’s like, my number is five hundred. So I’m like, okay, three hundred, you know, and I got so upset and they’re like, oh, it’s just an exercise. But I was like, but it’s not just an exercise. Like, so I don’t know, have people changed or, um, was that is, has that, what is, what has changed? Give me some hope for the future, Alison. 

[00:11:27] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: So many things have changed and so many things have not changed. 

[00:11:31] Amy Sandler: Okay. 

[00:11:32] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. I remember when I was teaching negotiation at the beginning of my time at HBS, I remember a student very vividly raised her hand and she said, so is this just, is it like solving a math problem? Like, are we just trying to find that Pareto efficient frontier and trying to optimize like the outcomes for everybody. And the way that that course is structured the answer is a little bit like, yes. But like, but that doesn’t feel like what I’m doing in my life. And I think my dissatisfaction with that feeling of, that life isn’t really solving a math problem was part of the motivation to sort of shift, in some ways, towards a wider aperture of understanding about what people are trying to achieve when they interact with each other. It’s not just about optimizing profit or optimizing on a couple objectives. People have a vast array of goals. And in addition to, you know, achievement and whatever, making money, they also care about mental health. They also care about having fun. They also care about not feeling awkward. They also care about sometimes keeping secrets, right? Like we just have a much wider, broader understanding of what success means in human to human interaction these days. 

[00:12:47] Amy Sandler: Yeah.

[00:12:47] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: And I think this framework in this book allows for that wider aperture of understanding of like, what are we aiming for? And I think humans have always been aiming for those things, but our culture today allows more public discourse of that’s what we are aiming for. We put more value on mental health. We put more value on happiness. We put more value on meaning and intentionality, uh, explicitly and sort of out loud in public discourse than I think ever before. And that’s a really good change. That’s a really good update. 

[00:13:17] Amy Sandler: I totally agree. Yeah, I had to kind of go off on my own for wellbeing and meaning and all of those things. And now I’m thrilled to see, you know, your course, your book. We had, you know, Michael Norton on this as well and so, about rituals. Yeah. Um, so I, one of the things that you mentioned at the top of your book was this idea that conversations are a coordination game. And that we’re kind of making these constant micro decisions like and so, can you dig into that for us? I find that idea fascinating. 

[00:13:50] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah, and it’s pretty related to how you were just describing these negotiation exercises in a way. Um, I’m going to go back even further in time. In the middle of the 20th century, around the 1950s, um, game theory became very popular and there were all kinds of game theorists who studied coordination games. And it’s games that probably are very familiar to most of us, games like the game of chicken. Where there’s two people hurtling towards each other and they need to decide, am I going to veer right or veer left so that we don’t, we’re trying not to collide. Um, and so a coordination game is any decision that you have to, two or more people both have to make independent decisions, but they’re, they can’t communicate with each other about it.

[00:14:31] And so they kind of have to guess and hope that they coordinate. There’s all kinds of games. There’s the prisoner’s dilemma. There’s the battle of the sexes. There’s all of these coordination games, but they all have in common that there’s two or more people who have to coordinate their decisions without communicating. And this epiphany that I had as I was studying conversation is ironically, even while we’re talking to people, there are so many things that we can’t talk about. We can’t coordinate all of the little micro decisions we’re making while we talk to people. So, it’s just, it’s exactly the same as that game of chicken, except it’s even more relentless.

[00:15:10] It’s like every time you’re talking, every time you’re listening, you’re making these tiny choices. Do I veer left or veer right? And you can’t actually communicate about it. And if you did communicate about it, it would sort of ruin the magic of serendipity and spontaneity that we’re all trying to achieve when we’re Interacting with each other. So in a way, conversation is like this big meta coordination game that’s filled with moment by moment coordination, um, conundra and nobody had talked about it that way before. And for me, that was so clarifying. The word, sometimes, uh, those game theorists called them coordination problems or puzzles because they’re hard to solve. Um, and so it’s both, it helps highlight, hey, look, conversation is harder than you think it is. When you look under the hood, it’s really complicated. Number two, the gaminess of it, when we call it a game, 

[00:16:04] Amy Sandler: It’s fun.

[00:16:05] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s fun, we get to play together and figure out together. And that’s amazing. 

[00:16:11] Amy Sandler: Yeah. You know, it’s so interesting when you said the word puzzle and like, it can be hard because one of the things that I was touched by in so many of your stories in the book was, um, the vulnerability of people like feeling awkward at a party or on a speed date, or just this, this sense of like, this is hard for people and naming it and kind of giving people permission. And, you know, a lot of your people were mentioned were Harvard Business School students. And so there might be this sense of, you know, uh, bravado or whatever, but there was so much, you know, humility and vulnerability. And so in many ways to me, I got from your book, both the puzzle sense of like validating the fact of like, you feel uncomfortable and awkward for a reason. Like, 

[00:16:54] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: For good reasons.

[00:16:56] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:16:56] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s so much trickier than at first it feels. I think you get to adulthood, you should feel like you should be great at conversation, be an expert at it. You’ve been practicing it your whole life. Um, and it’s just, I think an acknowledgement that this is a very tricky coordination game that at times is impossible to solve, even for the best communicators, I hope will bring people tremendous comfort. At the beginning of the semester, every time I teach the course, I send out a survey to the students and ask them why they’re taking the class. And I know how it’s going to go. I know they’re going to show up on the first day of class, pretending to, you know, put on these masks and these like competence and like the swagger that they bring in to the classroom. But I also know what they wrote to me the day before in the survey, and every single one of them is feeling anxious, feeling like they have things to work on.

[00:17:49] Feeling like they’re getting it wrong all the time, um, feeling like they’re inarticulate, like they’re not expressing their ideas, feeling scared to speak up in large groups. So all of these anxieties and these fears, even for students at Harvard who are already such high achievers and so successful, like everybody is feeling that way. And no matter what bravado you bring to a conversation, you have to know that everybody is feeling some level of anxiety because the recipe for anxiety is uncertainty. And in conversation, you never know what your partner is going to say and do next. So it’s a very uncertain environment and lack of control. And again, it’s a jointly constructed endeavor between two speakers. So you by definition only have fifty percent of the control. It’s a perfect recipe for anxiety. So if you feel anxious in your, uh, social interactions, you’re not alone and you’re doing it right guys.

[00:18:54] Amy Sandler: I’m going to introduce a topic shift and go to, uh, Talk, because I want to make sure that we, uh, give our audience some practical examples of things they can do, but there’s so much richness in your Talk maxim. So that’s T A L K, which is also the title of the book. So you want to start first with the T and why we start there?

[00:19:15] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. Let me just say up front, we need a very simple acronym because this coordination game is so complicated. And once you’re doing the thing, once you’re in a conversation, your brain is so busy. Your brain is really busy trying to confront all of the complexities. So Talk is by definition, extremely simple. Some of my students are like, oh, like I could have learned this in kindergarten. I’m like, just wait because you’re not going to be good at doing any of the things when it comes time to actually do them. So T stands for topics, choosing good topics and managing them well at every moment of every conversation. A is for asking, asking more and better questions. L is for levity, finding moments of humor and warmth to keep conversations from becoming boring. Boredom is a secret killer of conversation, and K is for kindness, and kindness is about respectful language, staying receptive to opposing viewpoints, and listening. Even though the book is called Talk, the real glue that holds it all together is very high effort, uh, engagement and listening. 

[00:20:24] Amy Sandler: Yeah, that really came through in everything that I was reading. What exercises do you do throughout the class to, um, have folks practice listening? 

[00:20:34] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: We do a listening workshop with a number of exercises and all of the exercises that I teach in the class are summarized in an appendix at the end of the book. So there’s over a hundred topics for conversation openers and lots of exercises. Things you can do on your own to reflect about your conversational life, as well as guided exercises to try in conversation with people you know. In our listening workshop, and in the book I talk about some of these, there are a number of things you can do. Um, listening is a surprisingly, um, complicated process. 

[00:21:05] Here’s why. The human brain was built to wander. It was not built to sustain attention on like one person at a time, everything they’re saying, all the sounds and visual cues that are coming, that are flooding your brain. So, what we have found in our research is that people’s minds are wandering at least a quarter of the time during their, during live conversation. If your mind is wandering, you’re not alone and you’re not doing it wrong. It’s just a sign that listening is very effortful. It takes a lot of effort to try and overcome that natural mind wandering to focus in on the people that we’re with. 

[00:21:39] Amy Sandler: Can I ask you on that data point? Because, um, one of the things I’ve done over the years in teaching mindfulness, there was a study, I think it was like 2010 or 2011 from I think Killingsworth. Um, and it was about, uh, forty-seven percent of the time our mind is wandering. And so I’m curious, is that just the, ’cause that was, they were pinging people just in a regular moment on their phone. So that’s different than the, than what you’re talking about with conversation. 

[00:22:06] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s very similar to Matt, so that was a paper with Matt Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert. Love that paper. 

[00:22:10] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:22:11] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: They were really pioneers in using a method where you ping people randomly throughout the day, a sort of sampling, experience sampling, we call it. Um, almost all of their pings happen when people were not in conversation. And so they were getting a really neat baseline of how often is your mind wandering just like at any point during the day. And in our work on listening, we said, well, okay, that’s amazing. And we’ve learned so much. 

[00:22:34] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:22:34] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Now let’s figure out how much are our minds wandering even when we’re engaged with other people and we’re working really hard to listen to them. Is it still the case that your mind is going elsewhere? Um, I think this is not, it’s not, um, surprising that this coincides with quite a wave of learning, in today’s culture of people learning even in midlife about their own attentional deficits like ADD, ADHD. 

[00:23:00] Amy Sandler: Yeah.

[00:23:01] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I’m on that bandwagon, too, in the spirit of Radical Candor. 

[00:23:04] Amy Sandler: Hi. We’ll have a follow up meeting on that. So, I am using every effort to, I have like, I have so many questions and paths I want to go down with you, Alison. It’s like taking every iota of discipline to rein me in. 

[00:23:17] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I know. You’re doing great. I know the feeling. Um, and for all of you who struggle to stay the path on conversation, I’m with you. Um, yes, and the thing that’s so hard about it is like you’re having all of these good ideas while we’re talking and you’re working so hard to stay where we should go. And you’re also afraid you’re going to forget all the good ideas that you have that occur to you as you’re talking to exciting people. Um, it’s all very effortful. 

[00:23:41] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:23:41] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Um, so yeah, so in this paper, what we did is we actually had people, participants come in and talk to each other live. And we interrupted them every five minutes and we literally asked them on the last turn, were you listening to your partner? Was your mind pondering? And twenty-four percent of the time people said, I was not listening just now. 

[00:24:00] Amy Sandler: And they say what they were, what they were doing? 

[00:24:03] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Well, usually it’s good things, right? 

[00:24:05] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:24:05] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: The reason your mind is wandering is because you heard something your partner said, you’re elaborating on it in your mind. You’re drawing connections between what they said and some other good idea. It’s a creativity process. The problem is, because we know that it’s polite to listen, we pretend that we are hearing each other. And so we smile and nod, and we can really compensate for a lot of lost fidelity and the information that it seems like was exchanged, but we didn’t actually hear each other.

[00:24:34] And so what I love from this research is that I hope it empowers people. First of all, it should be comforting to everybody. Like if you struggle to listen to people, you’re totally normal, and you’re not alone. Um, but also maybe being a little more having more candor about it. So it’s saying, oh, my mind was just wondering because I was so excited about the thing you said I missed what you just said, can you, do you mind repeating that? Because I’m like hanging on your every word. Um, doing little repair sidebars like that can be incredibly helpful and productive. And it’s easier when you have a close relationship with someone and they can assume, oh, yeah, they’re not ignoring me because they don’t like me or care about what I’m saying.

[00:25:11] It’s because they’re so engaged and their mind is so normal and distractible that we need to work hard to make sure we’re staying on the same page in the conversation. Um, actually, we’re tremendously good at faking good listening. In the same paper that I was describing about reporting our own mind wandering, um, we had a study where we had two people talking and the sound of one person’s voice was disrupted up to seventy-five percent of the time,

[00:25:41] Amy Sandler: Like Charlie, Charlie Brown kind of voice?

[00:25:43] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Exactly like Charlie Brown. So if it would be like seventy-five percent of the time I turn into meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh. The other, so the person whose voice was being disrupted could not tell, they could not tell that their partner couldn’t understand what they were saying because we are so good at pretending to hear people. 

[00:26:02] Amy Sandler: Kind of like filling in the blanks for ourselves?

[00:26:04] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: And we can still respond sensically. We smile and nod, we laugh. Seventy-five percent of the content. That’s crazy. Um, that blew our minds as researchers that we’re so good at pretending to listen that, um, and so well practiced. I mean, think of a Zoom webinar, um, or a Zoom call, everybody’s smiling and nodding and looking at the camera and they’re off texting their friends and writing emails and making grocery lists on the side. Um, so that’s not bad. It’s just the way that our brains are built. It’s the way that we have learned habits to be polite listeners to each other. That’s all good. 

[00:26:40] Amy Sandler: Yeah.

[00:26:41] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I mean, it’s important to make your partner feel like you’re hearing them. The problem is when we’re pretending to listen and we actually haven’t heard each other, it can lead to problems down the road. Um, where you actually, they believe that you know something that you actually didn’t hear. Um, and so in the book, we talk about, um, how to do this better, how to be more attentive. And also how to sort of show that you’ve heard people with your words, rather than just smiling and nodding, asking follow up questions. Um, calling back to topics from earlier. Uh, I only know that you have the norovirus because I, you told me and I listened to you and I care and I can bring it up later. Um, paraphrasing if you’re in a group, so summarizing what a few people have said, um, and then of course, uh, uh, callbacks to things from earlier.

[00:27:29] Amy Sandler: So I’ll try to paraphrase and callback a little bit here. First of all, thank you for sharing about the updated, uh, research because, uh, I’m actually doing a TEDx talk on Sunday and I’m referencing the forty-seven percent. Now I have some new fresh research there. 

[00:27:46] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Our minds wonder forty-seven percent of the time. And in conver, even in conversation when we’re working mightily to pay attention, it, our minds wander twenty-four percent.

[00:27:55] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:27:55] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: And that’s likely an underestimate because it’s self-reported, right? 

[00:27:59] Amy Sandler: I find the data just so helpful to kind of take the blame and shame out of, oh, I should be able to, you know, manage this or, you know, rather than beating ourselves up for getting distracted. So to get like, I love these practical tips. So, you know, one of the things that Radical Candor, we really like giving practical tips. So you mentioned in, even in a one on one setting, if I were to say with the folks that I work with, like, hey, you know, let’s say you and I are now working on a project, it’ll be like, hey, Alison, you know, I’m like this relationship is important. I want us to work really well together. Um, I’d love to learn about your conversational style. You know, I tend to have lots of ideas and I tend to go all over the place. So, um, I’m going to do my best to really stay focused on the topic. But if I do meander, please know it’s because I’m getting so excited. So I wanted, is that something, so kind of teeing that up in advance? 

[00:28:49] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: And empowering them at times if it feels like your creativity and energy are spinning off into the stratosphere in a way that’s not feeling helpful to them. Empowering them to give you that feedback and say. 

[00:29:00] Amy Sandler: Yeah

[00:29:00] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I love talking to you, Amy, you’re one of my favorite talk partners. But right now, let’s get back to this decision and focus. 

[00:29:06] Amy Sandler: Like we really have to get this done. Yeah. So I think that’s so helpful. Really aligns with, you know, asking for feedback, rewarding the candor. How do you start, and you have a whole chapter on, you know, many, you know, a lot of folks in the room meetings. I would love to get some tips on how both in terms of your Talk framework, but just in general, like whether you are leading a meeting or a participant in a meeting. What practical tips do you have for folks based on the research? 

[00:29:37] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: There is a whole chapter in the book about this idea of many minds. And so we have a tendency to think of one on one conversation as the same task as a group conversation, because in both, you’re talking, you’re listening, you’re together with other people. They share those things in common, but it is very helpful to think of them as almost categorically different. As soon as a third person pulls up a chair, the coordination dynamics of the conversation change entirely. For example, all of a sudden, one of the people who is very much included in the conversation doesn’t have to speak at all. Like, they can be entirely an audience member. 

[00:30:14] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:30:15] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: That’s quite different than a one on one where you have to talk in order to maintain a back and forth exchange with another person. Um, it’s good and bad. It’s, it relieves the pressure on any one member of the group. It, you bring more ideas and more energy, of course, but as group size grows, those coordination challenges become exponentially more difficult to manage. And I think we all sense that. Even when you get to just six people, a group becomes naturally unstable and is likely to split partition into separate groups, sub groups of holding more than one conversational thread. We’ve all been at dinners like that. It kind of goes back where you have a centralized thread and then you break into subgroups. As a leader, when you’re designing work meetings, I think it’s incredibly helpful just to acknowledge, hey, group conversation is hard. It’s really hard. It’s a very hard coordination conundrum. If we walk away feeling like it wasn’t perfect, that’s okay. That’s the nature of the beast. 

[00:31:12] Amy Sandler: But, so again, sort of normalizing the awkward. 

[00:31:15] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Normalizing awkward, normalizing the coordination challenges, um, that to some extent are sort of unsolvable, especially as groups scale to be quite large. Um, when you think about meeting design, I’ve worked a lot with this, um, a meeting guru named Elise Keith, who is the founder and CEO of a company called Lucid Meetings. Uh, they, this is what they do for companies. They go in and help them design work meetings in a cadence, in different sizes, different lengths, different purposes. Um, ultimately your meeting design should be very much aligned with your goals for the meeting. Uh, including how long should the meeting be, who needs to be there, uh, what topics should we be covering? All of that should, uh, align with what you need to do. So sometimes we have, let’s say we have two goals for a meeting. The first goal is to generate as many ideas as possible about a certain new product that you’re designing. 

[00:32:08] And the second goal is, okay, we’re going to pick two or three of those to pursue as possible development projects. Um, just saying those goals out loud is a really good start so that the people in the meeting know what they’re supposed to be doing. Even better if you can design pastures where it’s like, okay, for the first twenty minutes, we’re going to generate as many ideas as we can. So people like Amy who are very generative and love conversational digressions and have these wild ideas, that’s where people like you might come alive, right? And feel very empowered to speak and have lots of ideas and feel very comfortable.

[00:32:42] Then we’re going to pivot and we’re going to focus on deciding which ones to focus on. And as soon as the topic shifts, there might be people in the room who are better equipped to kind of manage that and lead that. Um, and so what, something that I have found very helpful and we discuss in the book is the idea that every group has a status hierarchy. It’s determined often by formal rank in an organization or power over resources, but also unspoken things like how charismatic is someone, how much expertise do they have? How much do I just like this person? And so, status hierarchies define every group, but they change at the topic level. If you’re in a group and you’re talking about, you know, reality TV.

[00:33:26] Someone in that group has the most knowledge about some reality TV shows. As soon as you move away from talking about reality TV and you start talking about hardware that’s going to get sent into space for NASA. Maybe somebody else in the room has more expertise on that topic than another. But thinking of our status hierarchies is a little bit more dynamic, almost at the topic level as topics change through the conversation, can be incredibly empowering, especially for people who I think can feel marginalized or pushed to the margins and not empowered to speak. There might be a moment where a topic comes up where you are the most expert person in the room and the group really needs to hear from you. 

[00:34:05] Amy Sandler: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and there’s a few things you said that I want to, um, to make sure that I heard and amplify. So one that I thought was very interesting was very aligned with Radical Candor in terms of what kind of meeting are we having? Are we having a debate meeting where we’re actually talking about the different ideas and we’re expecting to actually have a thoughtful debate? Or are we in a decision meeting? Because if I come in thinking we’re in a brainstorming session and I’m throwing out all these ideas and the person thought we were deciding, they’re going to be frustrated, etcetera. So to your point, just naming what kind of meeting. I’m curious, uh, did your research explore any differences in dynamics between in person versus virtual or hybrid in terms of those, uh, the sort of many minds?

[00:34:51] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yes. So we have a little bit of research. Here’s an example. The main difference between digital modes of communication versus in person is the amount of, two things, synchronicity, of course, like how synchronous are we? How together do we feel, um, which varies as you move from text based emails, text, and then Zoom, phone call, and in person, it’s a sort of spectrum. But also information richness. Um, when you’re in person, you are flooded with visual information and acoustic information. You’re hearing people’s words, but also the sound of their voice in a very, very fine grained detail. You see the all of their body language. You see other cues in the room. It’s just an incredible, face to face is an incredibly information rich medium.

[00:35:36] And as soon as we’re on Zoom, many of, much of that richness is gone. You can see their faces, you can hear their voices, but it’s disrupted a bit. Um, and delayed. You can’t see their whole body. You can’t see their whole environment. Um, you don’t know that my son is like twenty feet away, who has the flu. Like, that’s another thing about me that you don’t know because we’re not actually together. Um, so nothing can beat face to face in terms of information, richness and synchronicity and the feeling of actually knowing each other and being together. But if you have more transactional goals, if you have goals that are about information exchange, that just need to happen, especially with workers and people who are remotely located. Then video conferencing is great or a phone call is great. And that’s what technology sort of enables us to do. Um, if you have goals that are more relational about being known, feeling connected, um, then face to face is, face to face is best. 

[00:36:36] Amy Sandler: And you had a, ’cause we love a good two by two. So you had a two by two there with, uh, information and relational. Was that the. 

[00:36:43] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: That’s right. 

[00:36:44] Amy Sandler: Yeah, awesome. 

[00:36:46] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Is that you’re actually, you’re pursuing informational and relational goals at the same time. 

[00:36:51] Amy Sandler: Yeah. And that same with Radical Candor, you’re caring and you’re challenging at the same time. We’re not, you know, sort of one or, one or the other. I want to make sure that we touch on what you mentioned previously about status. Because I’m really curious what tips you might have for leaders, especially, um, as well as for folks who might be, um, sort of to advocate for themselves. How can a leader create a more inclusive meeting environment for folks who may have less status, whether it’s, um, hierarchical or be aware that, like, we keep choosing topics that this person is not well versed in.

[00:37:27] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Okay. Some very concrete ideas here. Um, number one, connect with people before the meeting. Group conversations are a kerfuffle and you can circumvent that by actually connecting with people one on one before and after. And there’s much to learn from people who might feel shy participating in a group, like get their ideas before, after, follow up with them. That’s really good leadership and personal connection. It’s time consuming is the trade off, but, um, important. Once you’re in the group conversation, get out of the way. Um, leaders and high status group members, it’s so much easier for you to talk and participate. You’re empowered to do so, you have many more options of things to say that will be seen as appropriate. And that leads dominant group members to, to dominate airtime. And that’s a real problem because it boxes lower status people out of the conversation.

[00:38:16] Just staying quiet. You can’t just stay quiet, of course. Part of your role as a leader or a high status group member is to create psychological safety. So people feel comfortable participating when they have valuable things to add. From our research one thing that we find that’s quite helpful is trying to give equitable eye gaze to people. So it sounds very subtle, but there’s a lot of love and comfort and empowerment that comes from feeling seen, literally having someone look at you. As human beings, we have a tendency to only look at high status members of the group as they’re talking and just to defer to them, look at their emotional reactions as other people are talking, and so that very subtly makes low status group members feel excluded and invisible. It’s very subtle. Next time you’re sitting in a group, you’ll notice it. It’s you. 

[00:39:06] Amy Sandler: And it seems hard in a virtual meeting, though, where we’re all just looking into a camera, right? 

[00:39:11] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: It’s hard. So that’s kinda why virtual meetings are fatiguing is because it goes against those gaze habits. One way you can simulate eye gaze on Zoom or on a video conference is the private chat.

[00:39:24] Amy Sandler: Yeah. 

[00:39:24] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: In a way, eye gaze in person is the same as chatting someone on the side and saying, I see you, I can’t wait, I think we’d love to hear from you on this topic if you feel comfortable. Um, that’s one advantage that you have on video conference. 

[00:39:37] Amy Sandler: That’s such a great note. I do try to do that. Because there’s kind of a fine line of wanting people to feel included, but not put on the spot, right? So do it, doing it privately. I know we just have five more minutes. I did promise. I did make a teaser about boomer asking, which is not a generational comment. So, um, yeah, 

[00:39:55] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I know we almost renamed it. When we were, so this is very recent, uh, academic work. The project started before the phrase boomer even came about.

[00:40:03] Amy Sandler: Oh, wow. 

[00:40:04] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: To describe, to describe our beloved friends and family who are born, uh, before 1964. Um, it is not about generational differences at all. It is a nasty conversational habit that most of us do and should stop doing. And it is, if I ask you a question, Amy, like, how did you get the norovirus? How do you think you got norovirus? And you give me an answer. It’s like a boomerang. I bring the conversation right back to myself and I’m like, let me tell you about how bad my flu was last year instead of following up with you about your life. So here’s the bottom line. If someone shares something with you about them, about their life, about their interests, you have to follow up with them about it before you turn the conversation back to yourself. Um, the ping ponginess of conversation, we’re always looking for a balance of like, I’m going to share about me, you’re going to share about you. That’s very important, but you can’t bring it back to yourself immediately after someone has shared with you. It’s just much too egocentric. It makes them feel like you didn’t actually care.

[00:41:13] Amy Sandler: It feels very manipulative. Like you’re just asking me that to tell you about and sort of the one upsmanship. It’s a fine line, of course, because we want to sort of share and connect. But I think that that really leapt at me and I think it is a pretty recognizable phrase so people can realize, oops, I’m boomer asking. Um, I want to make sure before we close, first of all, I don’t see any questions that have, uh, have popped up. Um, but I want to make sure first of all, that people are really clear on Talk. So can you again, just kind of repeat what those four pieces are? 

[00:41:44] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yes. Talk is an acronym. It’s, uh, it’s what my course is called at Harvard. It’s the title of this book, uh, Talk. T stands for topics, A stands for asking, L stands for levity. Thank goodness. And K stands for kindness. Um, and if we follow these very, four very simple reminders, it really helps tremendously to navigate the very, the surprisingly complex environment of human to human conversation. 

[00:42:12] Amy Sandler: So, um, as we look at our conversation, we covered a lot of topics, um, I tried to ask some follow up questions, some callbacks, restating what you said, paraphrasing. Was there levity? I mean, we kind of laughed about the norovirus, but did we really laugh at the flu? I think that.

[00:42:32] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Levity actually isn’t about trying to be funny or to make jokes. It’s about having tiny little fleeting moment opportunities. to feel warm and engaged. And so often we find levity just through topic switching and by asking questions that pull people’s engagement, um, pull people’s engagement in. And for our next conversation, here’s our goal. 

[00:42:57] Amy Sandler: Okay. 

[00:42:57] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: We’re going to both try and find a very, a profound moment of levity in our next conversation together. How about that? 

[00:43:04] Amy Sandler: Ooh, I am, I am so excited. Okay. Wait a second. A profound moment of levity. So can you again redefine levity for me so I know what my assignment is? ‘Cause you know, that student in me wants to really hit this one out of the park. 

[00:43:18] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Levity is any move, small or big in conversation that brings humor or warmth and it helps to cut up the boredom. And so a profound moment of levity, and now that we’ve connected, we have the opportunity to call back to things that we talked about in this conversation. And often callbacks are the best path to find really great moments of levity. But that’s your, my challenge to you, Amy, next time we talk. 

[00:43:42] Amy Sandler: I am all for profound levity. And I also, um, there, there was so much more in this book. I really encourage folks to, to get their copy of Talk. There was a whole section, I don’t even think I can put it in front properly, but there was a whole section around apologies and around difficult conversations that, you know, people said this was the most profound part of their time at HBS was having that session. So if you’re up for it, I would love to have a follow up conversation if you’re able to find time because I think there, especially now there’s so much to learn. Um, if we could go maybe a level deeper into both profound levity, difficult conversations, apologies. Would you be up for that? 

[00:44:23] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: I would love it. I would love it. It’ll give us our chance to find that spark again. 

[00:44:28] Amy Sandler: All right. I look forward to it. Thank you so much. How can people find you? What do you want them to do, Alison? 

[00:44:33] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: So I’m on LinkedIn, the book, the book Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves is out. It launched exactly a week ago. It’s out in the world. It’s not just a book. It’s a skillset. It’s a movement. I’m so excited to, for you to read it. Uh, and to incorporate these things in your lives. My website is Alisonwoodbrooks.com. You can follow along on my book tour there, everything’s, uh, posted there. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Instagram. Um, come find me, Prof Alison Woodbrooks, uh, anywhere that you can. 

[00:45:05] Amy Sandler: Thank you so much. I so enjoyed the conversation. Uh, I hope that you continue to feel better, your son and just wishing you a wonderful tour. This book has so much wisdom that I think is going to make the world a much better place. So thank you for putting it out there. 

[00:45:20] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Thank you for reading it so, so well. And so, with such heart, Amy, and for having me on Radical Candor. It’s been a delight. 

[00:45:28] Amy Sandler: It has been such a treat. Take care. 

[00:45:30] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Yeah. You too. 

[00:45:31] Amy Sandler: Okay. Bye.

[00:45:32] Dr. Alison Wood Brooks: Bye. 

[00:45:32] Amy Sandler: The Radical Candor podcast is based on the book Radical Candor: Be a Kick Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott. Episodes are written and produced by Brandi Neal with script editing by me, Amy Sandler. The show features Radical Candor co founders Kim Scott and Jason Rosoff and is hosted by me still Amy Sandler. Nick Carissimi is our audio engineer. The Radical Candor podcast theme music was composed by Cliff Goldmacher. Follow us on LinkedIn, Radical Candor company and visit us at RadicalCandor.com.

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