Supercommunicators

“The single biggest problem with communication,”2 said the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion it has taken place.” But scientists have now unraveled many of the secrets of how successful conversations happen. They’ve learned that paying attention to someone’s body, alongside their voice, helps us hear them better. They have determined

What’s This Really About? has two goals: The first is to determine what topics we want to discuss—what everyone needs from this dialogue. The second is to figure out how this discussion will unfold—what unspoken rules and norms we have agreed upon, and how we will make decisions together.

There was one other key finding in the Harvard study of speed daters: Follow-up questions are particularly powerful. “Follow-ups are a signal that you’re listening, that you want to know more,”22 one

“Mutual playfulness, in-group feeling and positive emotional tone—not comedy—mark the social settings of most naturally occurring laughter,” Provine concluded. Laughter is powerful, he wrote, because it is contagious, “immediate and involuntary, involving the most direct communication possible between people: Brain to brain.”19

When someone says, “Can we talk about the upcoming meeting?,” or “That memo was crazy, right?,” or worries aloud, “I’m not sure he can get the job done,” they are inviting us into a What’s This Really About? discussion, signaling there’s something deeper they want to discuss. Boly knew how to listen for those signals, and Dr. Ehdaie learned how to

“An important step in any negotiation is getting clarity on what all the participants want,” Malhotra told me. Often, what people desire from a negotiation isn’t obvious at first. Sometimes a union leader might say her goal is higher wages. But then, over time, other goals are revealed: She also wants to look good to her members, or one union facti

Elite diplomats have explained that their goal at a bargaining table isn’t seizing victory, but rather convincing the other side to become collaborators in uncovering new solutions that no one thought of before. Negotiation, among its top practitioners, isn’t a battle. It’s an act of creativity.

The next time you feel yourself edging toward an argument, try asking your partner: “Do you want to talk about our emotions? Or do we need to make a decision together? Or is this about something else?”

Perhaps, instead of perspective taking, we ought to be focused on perspective getting,8 on asking people to describe their inner lives, their values and beliefs and feelings, the things they care about most. Epley sensed there was something about asking questions—the right questions—that contained the seeds of real understanding. But which question

“I learned that if you listen for someone’s truth, and you put your truth next to it, you might reach them.” His goal, during sales calls, became simply to connect.