Alison Wood Brooks is a behavioral scientist and professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, where she created an oversubscribed course about conversation called TALK. Her award-winning research has been published in top academic journals and is frequently cited in media outlets such as the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and NPR.
What’s the big idea?
Talented conversationalists are not born. Being charismatic and delightful in conversation requires effort. Understanding the hidden architecture of a good talk and enacting small changes to your speaking and listening habits allows you to make the most of every interaction. We can all make the world a little brighter, one conversation at a time.
Below, Alison shares five key insights from her new book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. Listen to the audio version—read by Alison herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Conversation is a coordination game.
Think of a time when you weren’t sure how to end a conversation. You thought it might be time to say goodbye, but you didn’t want to seem rude. You weren’t sure if they were ready to end, so you kept going. Or maybe you cut out abruptly, later ruminating about what the other person thought after you left. Ending a conversation is just one of the micro-decisions we make during every conversation. By the time we get to the end of a conversation, we’ve made thousands of micro-decisions about what to say and how to say it. And we don’t make these choices alone. We coordinate our contributions with our conversation partners.
In the mid-20th century, game theorists studied coordination games, in which people make decisions independently, without communicating, and that have interdependent outcomes. For example, in the game of chicken, two people are hurtling toward each other, and they must decide whether to veer right or left. If they coordinate successfully, they avoid a collision. Conversation is also a coordination game, but it demands more guessing and more decisions.
Success in this relentless coordination game is determined by everyone’s goals: what does each person want out of the interaction? We always have at least one goal—like being polite or having fun—otherwise, we wouldn’t bother talking at all. But usually, we have more than just one goal. We often want to learn, persuade, brainstorm, keep a secret, fill time, and, at some point, leave. My book provides a framework called the conversational compass that helps to organize the many goals that talkers pursue. That’s where the TALK maxims come in. TALK is an acronym that stands for Topics, Asking, Levity, and Kindness. They’re reminders to help us achieve our goals, one conversation at a time.
2. Topics are the building blocks of conversation.
At the start of my TALK course at Harvard, students do an exercise called the Chat Circle. It’s like speed-dating without the romantic part. They have rapid-fire conversations with five different classmates, then rate how each conversation went. The night before this exercise, I ask them to brainstorm topics that they could raise during their chats the next day.
Many students find the idea of preparing topics to be uncomfortable and unnecessary, but over the course of the Chat Circle exercise, and the next several months of the class, they come to see that thinking ahead about topics can be incredibly helpful. Topics are the fundamental building blocks of conversation, and it’s hard to manage them well during conversation. Here’s the trick: don’t just choose a topic to start. We make micro-decisions to manage topics at every moment of every conversation. We choose to stay on the current topic, drift slowly away, jump-cut to completely different topics, and call back to things we talked about before. All the while, our partners are doing the same. Topic management determines the content and flow of conversations.
Most people dread small talk, but when you understand conversation in terms of topic management, you realize that many conversations have to start on a small talk topic—at the base of what I call the topic pyramid. Start with things anyone could discuss, like traffic, weather, or the weekend. It’s a well-worn social ritual that helps us reacquaint ourselves with each other. The trick is to avoid getting stuck at the base of the topic pyramid, doom spiraling in small talk for too long. We should use small-talk topics as an opportunity to search for the spark of something better, to climb to the second tier of the topic pyramid: medium or tailored talk. This is where conversation becomes more personal, exciting, and interesting. You can get there by sharing information about yourself—experiences, perspectives, beliefs—or by asking your partner about theirs. Sharing joy and pain can help us connect more quickly. Or you can look for topics that seem mutually exciting. Chase the energy to climb the topic pyramid away from small talk.
“Use small-talk topics as an opportunity to search for the spark of something better.”
The top tier of the topic pyramid is deep talk—topics that only you and your partner could talk about in a very specific moment in time. We all know what it feels like when you’ve reached this conversational peak: close, trusting, fascinating, magical. Not every conversation is bound for the peak of the topic pyramid, but if we get there, we should appreciate it.
The keys to navigating the topic pyramid more effectively are to think ahead about what will be interesting or important to discuss, don’t get stuck in small talk for too long, and chase the energy—switch to a new topic as soon as the current one starts to run out of juice.
3. Ask more, and better, questions.
In the coordination game of conversation, if topics are the game pieces, then questions are the hands that lift those pieces. As a psychologist, I get to eavesdrop on thousands of first dates, negotiations, parole hearings, doctor-patient interactions, sales calls, and get-to-know-you conversations between strangers. Across all these domains, one thing is clear: people who ask more questions have better conversations. They learn more information and their partners like them more. On first dates, asking just one more question will earn you five percent more agreement to a second date. We should aim to ask more questions or, at the very least, not leave any conversation having asked zero questions. We call these folks ZQs for “zero questions,” and you don’t want to be one.
In our quest to ask more questions, there are patterns of questioning that emerge as heroic and villainous. Heroes include follow-up questions and open-ended questions that start with “What.” Open-ended questions elicit more than twice the information from our partners compared to closed questions, and compared to questions that start with “Why” or “How” (which can feel accusatory or nit-picky). Questions like “What did you think of the concert last night?” or “What will make this meeting most rewarding for you?” strike the ideal balance between information elicitation and warmth.
Sadly, there is such a thing as a bad question. For example, a colleague approaches you and asks, “Hey, what are you up to this weekend?” You tell her you’re not sure, but nothing big. She replies: “I’m going to my lake house, and we’re having a massive bonfire,” or “I have no friends, so I’m just going to stay in my basement,” or “I’m going to a medieval fair to use the trebuchet I made.” In each case, what seemed like a genuine expression of interest in you suddenly shifts. It becomes a chance for your partner to disclose about herself—to brag, to complain, or simply to share. This three-turn sequence of conversational choices is a nasty habit I call boomerasking, and it happens constantly.
Like the outgoing and returning arc of a boomerang, boomeraskers ask a question, let their partner answer, and then immediately bring the focus of the conversation back to themselves. Boomeraskers try to achieve two conflicting goals at once: to show interest in their partner and disclose about themselves. In doing so, they fall short of achieving either goal. When your partner answers you wonderful questions, make sure you listen to their answers, follow up, and don’t bring the conversation right back to yourself.
4. Levity keeps us engaged.
Imagine you’re having a conversation with someone on Zoom. You’re starting to lose interest when suddenly they start talking in a voice that sounds like a chipmunk. Suddenly, you’re pulled back into the conversation, laughing to yourself, confused, and intrigued. This is the L of the TALK framework: Levity.
Conversations are easily derailed by hostility and conflict, but a stealthier, poisonous conversation killer is boredom. If anyone in a conversation becomes bored, the conversation will struggle. Mutual attention is a prerequisite for good conversation.
Levity moves—behaviors that inject humor or warmth into the conversation—are the antidote to boredom. There are countless options, but I will share three. First, when many of us think of funny people, we think of comedians and stand-up routines, which really have no place in back-and-forth dialogue. Instead of aiming to be funny, good conversationalists aim to find the fun. This does not require funny jokes or stories, but instead, we need to look for and seize opportunities for playfulness and joy.
“If anyone in a conversation becomes bored, the conversation will struggle.”
Second, when those joyful moments happen, laugh. Laughter is 30 times more likely to happen in the presence of other people than when we’re alone. In practice, many of the people we revere as “funny” are just more likely to laugh when they’re talking to other people.
Third, if you’re not funny, and don’t think you can be funny, don’t worry. You can still capitalize on the benefits of conversational levity by seeking moments of warmth. One of the clearest ways to turn up your warmth is by giving compliments effusively. Many of us hesitate to give compliments because we fear that we’ll embarrass the recipients or that doing so will make us look incompetent. In studies of compliments, neither of these fears is substantiated. Everyone wants to hear how smart, kind, magnanimous, and attractive they are. We massively underestimate the positive impact giving compliments has on givers and receivers alike.
Levity isn’t an afterthought. We need mutual engagement to sustain good conversation. Finding fun and bringing warmth are core skills to keep everyone feeling playful, safe, and engaged.
5. Kindness means listening attentively and showing it.
When Anderson Cooper’s mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, passed away in 2019, Cooper scheduled an interview with late-night television host and comedian Stephen Colbert. They filmed the conversation backstage at The Late Show, not in front of a live audience, with the plan to televise the interaction later.
Colbert is no stranger to grief. He’d lost his father and two brothers when he was young, and his mother more recently. Cooper looks to Colbert for guidance about how to process his fresh grief about his mother. It’s a beautiful conversation that provides a masterclass in topic management, question asking, and sparkly moments of levity between these two gifted talkers. It feels special to hear two grown men talk so lovingly about their mothers. And what makes it stand out most is the last of the TALK maxims: Kindness.
Stephen Colbert is a talented listener during this conversation, showing us how the kindest conversationalists not only work hard to listen to their partners and understand what they need but also express their good listening and support with their words.
Decades of books and research focus on the concept of active listening, strategies that aim to convince your partner that you’re engaged, such as nodding, smiling, maintaining eye contact, and leaning forward. These strategies are important and a good start, but more recent research has revealed that the best conversationalists go one step further: the best listening is spoken.
There are many ways to express that you’ve heard someone with your words. You can ask follow-up questions (the superhero of questions); you can repeat and affirm what you’ve heard your partner say; you can use back-channel utterances like “yea,” “mmhmm,” and “fascinating” to cheer on your partner as they tell a story; you can paraphrase two or more perspectives during a group conversation; and you can call back to topics or details that were discussed earlier in the conversation, or in the relationship. All are undeniable signals, like Stephen Colbert for Anderson Cooper in his time of need, that you were listening and you care.
The conversation between Cooper and Colbert inspired Cooper to launch a new podcast series called All There Is, where he interviews public figures and celebrities about loss and grief. It became one of the most listened-to podcasts of all time. In the introduction, Cooper refers back to his conversation with Colbert as an experience that moved and healed him. Meaningful conversations have the power to unite us, to heal us, to inspire us, and to illuminate the world, one discussion at a time.
To listen to the audio version read by author Alison Wood Brooks, download the Next Big Idea App today:
