What are two topics you most want to discuss? • What is one thing you hope to say that shows what you want to talk about? • What is one question you will ask that reveals what others want?

“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

Happily married couples, successful negotiators, persuasive politicians, influential executives, and other kinds of supercommunicators tend to have a few behaviors in common. They are as interested in figuring out what kind of conversation everyone wants as the topics they hope to discuss. They ask more questions about others’ feelings and

He explained that one reason she felt so at ease was likely because of the environment they had created together, how Felix had listened closely, had asked questions that drew out people’s vulnerabilities, how they had all revealed meaningful details about themselves.

“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

In fact, there was only one method the Arons tested that could reliably help strangers form a connection: A series of thirty-six questions11 that, as Elaine and Arthur Aron later wrote, elicited “sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure.” These questions eventually became known as the Fast Friends Procedure, and grew famous

Put another way, if you want to have a successful conversation with someone, you don’t have to ask them about their worst memories or how they prepare for telephone calls. You just have to ask them to describe how they feel about their life—rather than the facts of their life—and then ask lots of follow-ups.

They found that during successful conversations, people tended to ask20 each other the kinds of questions that drew out replies where people expressed their “needs, goals, beliefs [and] emotions,”

In the wake of that attack, the organizers of the experiment decided to focus on a discussion about guns, “a classically broken conversation,” as John Sarrouf, who helped design the project, put it to me. Sarrouf runs an organization devoted to reducing polarization, Essential Partners, and has followed the firearms debate for years.