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Today, we’re chatting with author Charles Duhigg about his work, including his latest book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.

All this, and more, in just 5 minutes to read.

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Trivia

Charles Duhigg on Supercommunicators

The power of clarity

Almost nobody enjoys small talk, and few people like having hard conversations, whether at home or in the workplace. Public speaking? Forget it.

Communication mistakes are often at the core of many problems in relationships and organizations. But there’s hope, thankfully. Charles Duhigg, a bestselling author and writer for The New Yorker, explains that communication is a learned skill, like playing pickleball, cooking, or doing financial analysis. The more we recognize the right skills to practice and implement, the better we connect with others. 

“Anyone can become a supercommunicator,” Duhigg said in an interview earlier this month. “We all are super communicators at various moments in our lives. We all have friends who, when they call, we know exactly what to say to them to make them feel better. Our brains evolved to be good at communication. That is the homo sapiens superpower.”

Below, Duhigg shares his insight about what makes excellent communication and his new book, “Supercommunicators,” an “investigation of what makes conversations work, and how we can all learn to be supercommunicators at work and in our lives.” Duhigg was partly inspired to write the book after an experience a few years ago: After his father died, many people offered condolences, but few people asked him any questions.

“I desperately wanted to talk about him,” Duhigg says. “I would have loved being asked, ‘Tell me about your dad. What was he like?’”

This interview has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity. 

Tell us the importance of asking simple, deep questions to engage and connect with others.

Asking questions is powerful. Supercommunicators tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person. Some of these questions invite us in: “What do you think about that?”

Some are deep questions. Deep questions ask about our values, beliefs, or experiences, which sounds intimidating. But if you ask someone where they went to high school, it’s a dead-end question, right? There’s not necessarily much to say. But you could ask, “What was high school like for you?” People tend to say something pretty revealing. 

Whatever they say, it’s a way for us to get to know someone. It creates meaning and an opportunity to share ideas. 

How about social networking hours, happy hours, or in-between periods/throwaway time, such as in a lobby before a meeting, waiting for Uber, etc.? How should we navigate these spaces?

Nobody likes small talk, right? Not only does nobody like small talk, but nobody remembers small talk. 

But small talk is just because you’re not asking deep questions. Usually, you ask about the facts of someone’s life rather than how they feel about something. If you bump into someone and have three minutes before the meeting starts, and you say, “Where do you live?” That's kind of dull. But then you could say, what do you like about it there? What made you decide to move there? You’ll learn so much more about them. Those questions can kick off a real conversation, even a real relationship. 

When we ask people what they think or feel, they say something real, and we start to feel connected. 

What have you learned about handling harder conversations, conversations we’ve been putting off, or ones we are afraid or nervous about?

What we most often feel anxious about is the unknown, right? How will this person react? What are they going to say? Will I be able to say what’s important to me?

Rather than focusing on what’s going to happen, we get anxious about what we don’t know about what’s going to happen. Second, we tend to focus on moments of conflict, right? Maybe I really want to say we must do things differently, but there’s a drawback to that. 

It doesn't set us up for a conversation; it sets us up for a monologue. But equally, we're so on edge that we tend not to listen. A study was done by Harvard Business School professors where they told all the students that they’d have a conversation with a stranger in 10 minutes. Of course, this is one of the most anxiety-producing things you can ask someone to do — talk to a stranger.

But before you have the conversation, they told the students to write a list of three questions they might want to discuss. Simple things that take 10 seconds, like, where are you going this weekend? 

Afterward, students said they never even asked the questions they’d written down. They said they felt more confident, relaxed, and less anxious about this conversation because they knew they had the questions in their back pocket that they could pull out and use at any time.

You lessen the unknown, giving yourself a sense of more control. That makes the conversation go smoother.

How important is communicating a good story in business and markets?

It’s critical. Our brain is designed to remember stories much better than facts. If you embed a fact or idea inside a story, people can recall it more easily. 

Every conversation falls into one of three buckets: practical conversations (making plans, solving problems), emotional conversations (how I’m feeling), and social conversations (how we relate to each other). The best conversations contain all three kinds of conversations. 

What’s a story? It’s like a little package with all three kinds of conversations. As a founder, I’d tell you why I started the company. I’ll bring some emotion and give you our earnings numbers about how we persevered to have a great quarter. Then I’ll get into a social conversation about why our work is so important — how we might have helped customers and how we help our employees, like Jenny, a single mom who’s providing for her family. 

Not only does this kind of communication and storytelling stick in our minds longer, but it hits us at different levels. It feels like your company is about more than making money—it feels like something important.

When many of us think of what we learned in college, great stories often come to mind, not necessarily formulas from the textbook. 

That's exactly right. More importantly, if you have an idea you learned, it's hard to remember it in the abstract. It's very easy to remember an idea when it's embedded in a story.

How do you see the role of phones in our conversations?

You don't have to be a genius to figure out that your phone should be away when you're at dinner with your friends—not on the table, but in your pocket. Nobody would come to dinner with their friends with a little radio playing songs while they were trying to have dinner. You wouldn’t bring a small TV and glance at it every two minutes. So, we can create a social norm that your phone should be in your pocket. 

What have you learned about making better decisions, specifically knowing our biases and the role they might play in our decision-making? 

A lot of it comes down to the concept that you carry a story inside your head that you might not be aware of completely. I have a basic bias: I want to believe that America's future is brighter than its past. As a result, I will be attracted to data that shows the economy will grow. I might guard off for this. But if I’m now aware of that story lurking inside my head, it’s hard for me to figure out how to stress-test it. The same thing is true whenever people disagree with each other.

One reason for a disagreement is that two people come to the table with different stories in their heads, and they don't realize that the other person's story is different. If a couple is getting divorced, one person’s story might be that the other person spends too freely and doesn’t earn enough. The other person’s story might be, well, you don’t allow me to have any fun, you’re worried, you’re too uptight. Those are two sides of the same story.

They won’t understand each other unless they sit down and say, look, I understand the story in your head. Let me try to say what I think is going on inside your head, and you tell me if I'm getting it wrong or right. That's when they begin to understand each other.

That works with our internal dialogue, too.

We all have conversations with ourselves, and part of the conversation should be admitting to ourselves what the story is inside our heads because we're all carrying that story, whether it's a story that capitalism is great or terrible, whether it's a story that the future is bright or not bright. All of those things influence how we see the world.

How do you handle information overload?

Remember that there's a difference between information and knowledge. So, how do we transmit information into knowledge? We usually have to force ourselves to play with the information in some way to interact with it.

In one of my other books, Smarter Faster Better, there's a chapter about data fluency in which a school starts collecting a lot of data on which students do well and which do poorly. The problem is that they would give it to the teachers on this dashboard, and the teachers basically just ignored it. It was just too much data, too much information.

They created “data rooms” where they would tell teachers, OK, go into the room, take the data off the screen, and write it on index cards. Then, arrange the index cards on the wall to see what patterns you find. Suddenly, once the teacher started interacting with the data, they saw things they had missed.

How do you communicate simply? 

Understanding what I want to say is one of the most important things when communicating with someone. We must ask ourselves: What do I want to ask or tell this person? Conversations get better when we know what we want to say.

So much of business is about persuading someone to buy a product or service. How can we improve our persuasion skills? 

Two things. First: Start by asking questions. 

Once I know what's important to you, I will know how to persuade you. If I tell you that my new cleaning product is the best thing on earth and it turns out you never clean and don't care, I won't be able to persuade you, no matter how persuasive I am. It doesn't matter. I'm selling something you don't need.

But if I start by saying, what's something that bothers you? What's the problem you have?

Ask more questions because when we ask questions, we learn the other person's criteria for decision-making. 

Second, understand that humans are good at detecting inauthenticity. If we want to be persuasive, we need to be completely authentic.

Dive deeper

Buy Duhigg’s new book here, visit his website, follow him on X, or sign up for his newsletter, The Science of Better.

See you next time!

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