Let's Talk: How to Have Better Conversations

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Ah yes, in your question you asked how long the world’s longest telephone conversation lasted. It guessed it was an incredible 24 hours and 4 minutes… was I right? You ask them questions; they know the answer to about something they care about. And they're never going to not have an answer to what is your hometown like. They're never not going to care what their hometown is like, and that relieves the pressure from you for coming up to something to say. And just to take this one step further, one of the biggest issues for leaders is the expertise trap. The idea that as soon as you become a leader, or as soon as you become an expert, you're learning curve either flattens out at best or falls straight off a cliff. And that's because as soon as you begin to think that you know, maybe you just know a lot, but usually it's that you know more than other people. Then you're going to approach all your team members as though you are there to tell them to impart wisdom and to guide them and manage them as opposed to coach. The expertise trap is such a danger, and it leads to group think, it leads to all kinds of really, really bad decisions. So, the way to get around that is to constantly approach your team members with curiosity and understanding that even if you held a job 15 years ago, you have no idea what that job entails now and here's this person right in front of you who's in that job and could enlighten you and really help you out. And if you approach your conversations that way, you will never be short of topics. Conversation is broken. And while we know that effective communication can lead to greater fulfilment in our personal and professional lives, evidence suggests we are having fewer meaningful conversations than previous generations. The pandemic has exacerbated the trend towards fewer face-to-face interactions, while the growth of social media has led to heated arguments online. We are losing the ability to talk to each other.

in a conversation, look at the people around you like an orchestra. Your job is to give each part a chance to play - the strings, percussion, brass, and woodwind. So, I will start by repeating a little bit of what I just said, which that very often when people say they don't know what to talk to somebody about, it's because they're focused on what they can talk about. They'll look at somebody who's very different from them. They'll say, "I have nothing in common with this person, and so therefore nothing to talk about." But if you're less focused on that, what you're going to talk about, as opposed to what could this person tell me, you always can talk about that. In many ways this is not like any of the books I have read in the past, in the sense that this is not an easily read fiction book, or even an autobiography. In some ways this is very similar to some of the other books that I have read more recently, in that this requires concentration and provokes introspection, and a desire to continue to develop.The widespread use of any kind of text-based communication is degrading the quality of our conversations. And the reason for that is because communication is just not as effective by any measure when you're using text as it is when you're hearing the voice. I think we should really stop defaulting to video conferencing because we now know after the pandemic a lot more about Zoom and all of the others and how uniquely taxing they are for our bodies and our brains. But the voice phone call is so much more efficient, it is so much more honest. We are kinder, we are more compassionate, we are more likely to cooperate and collaborate when we are on the phone and hear somebody else's voices. There's even research that shows it is the sound of the voice itself that allows us to recognize someone else as a human being.

You also have to be willing to have the door slammed in your face a few times.” A lot of public speech takes place today in the performative space of social media. Are we losing the ability to hold a conversation? Curiosity and humility — both are necessary for approaching other people in a way that builds connection. My gosh, the vitriol that I received for making that comparison. What I was trying to do was encourage people to look in on themselves, and the language they used, because people voted to leave the European Union for all kinds of reasons. The idea that you tell a huge group of people that they are just stupid for doing so is ignorant; or that they are all racists, it doesn’t further the conversation.”

So, do you think body language has anything to do with that as well? And I'm thinking of, you mentioned that video conferencing, it can be very taxing at the same time without the video, you don't see someone's facial expressions, things like that. And then as well, you also hear arguments right now for people to return to office that, if we're going to collaborate, we need to be together in person, we need to be reading each other's body language, looking at each other's faces. Do you think that that really matters to the quality of the conversation or not so much? I love that approach of you've got to be the person who says, "I didn't know that. Thank you for telling me. I honestly had no idea, or I wasn't aware when I used it. It slipped out. That was a mistake, I shouldn't have done it-" The survival instinct is the basic instinct in humans and animals to do something in a dangerous situation that will keep them alive. It sounds like you had a good chinwag– a long and pleasant conversation between friends, which is great because in this programme we’re talking about talking. We’ll be discussing conservations – the exchange of ideas, thoughts and feelings that happens when people talk to each other. And as usual we’ll be learning some new vocabulary as well. Now, if a leader is that way, if they're constantly pretending like they haven't said the wrong thing, they always know the right answer, that's going to erode trust as well, especially when they're saying things that are clearly tone-deaf, clueless, or just wrong. And this is absolutely the case when it comes to any kind of issue of difference or fairness. There is no possible way that anybody can know everything about all the different cultures and upbringings and gender identities, and there's no way that you can know that.

Mathew's rule is to talk to the oldest and youngest person in the room , you're much more likely to hear 2 different perspectives and to reshape your own. Talking about yourself, what you know, what you like, the things you believe, we know through neuroscientific research, activates the same pleasure center in the brain as sex and heroin. And so, if you give other people the opportunity to talk about themselves, what they know, what they like, what they believe, they're going to feel great. And so, then they will be impressed with you. They'll be like, "Wow, they are a great conversationalist," but really, you've just made them feel wonderful. Unfortunately, we are in an age now when we tend to wholly define someone by one thing – you know, you’re Catholic, you’re Protestant, you’re a Leaver, you’re a Remainer, you’re woke, you’re racist, but that’s not all of who someone is. And one of the book’s aims is to encourage people to be a little bit more introspective about who you are, and look at your own prejudices and biases. If we do that more effectively, we can connect with others more openly.”In 2012, a competition in Latvia broke the world record for the longest telephone conversation. How long did this record-breaking conversation last? Well, it gave me the sense that you are enriched by listening. And this was of course, pre-social media which has of course encouraged us to project - to transmit - more than receive. So it meant that I guess I was conscious of experiences of others, and wanted to try and understand them. Also, partially, Michael, it was a survival instinct because I was a little brown boy in a predominantly white school, a state school in the 1980s.