So effective conversations, they anticipate the needs of the other person and meet them without you having to really push for it. My name's Katrina. And I'm Steve. And we are curious about how changing conversations can change organizations. Yeah. And together with our community of transformation nerds, we're exploring how to leverage conversations to make our workplaces more fit for humans, but also more fit for the future. We'll use our podcast series to do just that while being in conversation with business and thought leaders who have interesting perspectives on the topic. So without further ado, let's start the conversation. Laura is a professor of social interaction at Loughborough University in the UK. She conducts conversation analytic research to understand how talk works from first dates to medical communication and from sales encounters to hostage negotiation. In addition to academic publishing, she is passionate about science communication and has given talks at TED, New Scientist, Google, Microsoft, and the Royal Institution. Her book, Talk the Science of Communication, was published by Little Brown in 2018. She has co-authored a book, Crisis Talk, coming out later this year. She is a Wired Innovation Fellow and in 2021 was awarded Honorary Fellowship of the British Psychological Society. Welcome, Liz. Before sort of going into the nitty gritty of it, what is one of the most surprising things that you have learned or found in studying conversations? I think the most surprising thing that I've learned is that every word really does matter and that every word could always have been something else. And trying to get your head around that enough that you could change a word, you know, it's a bit mind-blowing, actually. You know, when I've been transcribing or analysing for a long time, you start to see your own words coming out like transcript. And the idea that you could change any one of them at any time. Yeah, it's everything. Yeah, we don't pay enough attention to it. So are you saying that a conversation can be fundamentally changed just by changing one word? It can. And some of my research and research of other conversation analysts has shown this, which is radical, really. What is the biggest challenge for us as humans in conversations? And I'm thinking specifically in a corporate world, in a business world, organisational world. So what's the biggest challenge for us in regards to being in conversation? I think it's to take less space yourself and actually enable other people to take turns. One of the biggest challenge. It's to take less space. One of the things that I'm really passionate about has become more and more so over the years is to bust myths around communication. Think about what communication skills really means because we all talk about communication skills. But what does it mean? And it tends to get unpacked in quite almost stereotypical ways. You know, rapport, listening, active listening, effective silences and all of those things sound right. but we never really dig into them and the job of the conversation analyst is to dig into what those things actually mean so I think the biggest challenge is for people to really listen and really listen not not just listen in a of course I listen kind of way and so one of the things I quite like to do is get people to transcribe a little bit of talk in real in the kind of slow motion way that we do it and try to understand what it would really mean to listen. One of the things that we picked up in another conversation we had is that there's a difference between listening to and listening with and that listening can be a very intimate act so could you put your words to what is it could you open that space up for us? Yeah for a conversation analyst it would be about listening for action for what people are doing and I don't really mean sort of hidden meanings it's you know there is so much so much said about communication and the fact is that all of us have been communicating since we were born so we have our lifetimes experience of what it takes to communicate so what that can sometimes do is provide so much anecdotes anecdotal about how conversation works and it's quite difficult to cut through that noise to the actualities which again is what a conversation analyst does and so when you see people actually talking it can look quite different to how you imagine it or how you remember it or how if asked you would report on it later so the listening thing you know I sometimes reluctantly say listening is very important because it sounds so trite it's what everyone would say so we can listen and know what it is what it is what it is what it is that someone is doing really really quickly and sometimes supporting what someone is doing or knowing where they're going with a with whatever it is that they're saying means that you can respond within you know fractions tiny milliseconds because that's how talk works so you can see an invitation coming before it's finished and that means you can come in really quickly to accept it that also means that we can we start to see structural things about interaction that show us that the fact that the fact that you can see an invitation coming before it's finished and respond to it very quickly tells us something about why any kind of delay is indicative of some other type of response that's likely to happen next so we're actually very adept as human beings of listening to what people are saying so that we can respond with that precision timing so but of course you know people are doing things all the time that require listening in a different sort of way and so maybe a really good example of this which is one of my favorite example of this which is one of my current favorite examples because it's so powerful is listening to a 911 emergency telephone call from a woman who turns out to be a victim of domestic violence and one of the jobs that police emergency contact center you know one of the jobs that they have to do is to sift out the calls that are genuine and the ones that are a nuisance call in some way so this is very interesting first of all because just because you call the police doesn't mean that the context means that everything you say will be taken as police relevant one of the main jobs is to sift out the genuine from the nuisance or or not nuisance but just you know calls that don't really belong in that environment so in this call the woman says i'd like to order a pizza for delivery so we're not looking for hidden meanings here although there are kind of there is a hidden meaning but really what you're looking to see is what is it in the way she says that and very precisely where she says that in response to the call center person sort of asking you know what's happening that he manages to hear that as a genuine request because when you compare that to nuisance calls people phone and ask for all sorts of things to the police that aren't a genuine request so how do you figure that out and that's what i really mean by listening somehow it's not just about the word words it's not just the rather basic observation that people say things that aren't literal so you have to think about what pragmatically they mean it's also about because it turned out that the kind of main clue here was where it was in the sequence of turns and in overlap that the woman did that that you got to see that this was a genuine request for help and sorry i think there's something magical about that can i train my ability to to sense these things on the go in a conversation and use them those cues um yeah so so i i turn a lot of my research findings into training for practitioners and one of the sort of foundations of that work that i do is to is to show people that i'm not telling you what to say as a as a goal of the training what i'm doing is showing you what you or people like you as experts as experienced practitioners as negotiators doctors salespeople whatever it is that i'm looking at this is what you're doing that is effective um and i know that you don't know that in a meta way in a report it later way because it's not in your training guidance for the for the organization and i also know that you don't know that kind of in theory because it's not the first thing that you always do so again a really nice example of this is um i did some work with a colleague ryan sickland who um and we looked at the police negotiators talking to people in suicidal crisis and one of the things that we found in there was that when negotiators ask to talk to the person in crisis or suggest talking it gets resisted immediately by the person in crisis i don't want to talk what's the point in talking talking doesn't do anything whereas when the negotiators propose that we speak to each other the person in crisis doesn't resist that in the same way and you tend to get further faster in in the negotiation and we know that because we see see it in the evidence of the negotiations themselves and what we sometimes see is that the negotiator will start with talk get resistance and then find their way to speak because they have to keep trying they don't have an option to to end the conversation they have to keep going so sometimes we see practice that is effective straight away sometimes we see that practitioners themselves are feeling their way through that interaction to the thing that is effective and our job as analyst is then to pull out that thing and say hey here's this thing that you did after 30 minutes that if you'd done it at the start would have been more effective and and then that can lead to two things with regards to training one of them is that we can then go and train and we did train lots of negotiators um who who can kick off that negotiation now with some evidence based things that can go in there their their simulations their role plays their training manual that weren't there before and for me that is that is halfway there because you can change at least the frame in which people are training some of it is harder you know some of these things you're going to forget them um or they just don't come naturally to you because they did somehow come naturally to somebody else and it's it's those things that seem to come naturally to people who are very good at their jobs that's what we want to find so that we can at least have an evidence base for training writing manual manual manuals and that kind of thing when you're looking at a conversation and analyzing it what do you define as a great conversation or a successful conversation a successful conversation is one that is frictionless i've got a nice analogy i've got two to two to two to an analogy and an example if if that sounds okay so my analogy is imagine that you are in the hot air balloon looking down on the landscape and you're looking at a field and you can when you look down you can see the entry point to the field and you can also see the exit to the field because you're high up and you can look and you can also see what what kind of what the path looks like across the field you can see um you can see um that first of all there is a little bit of a hill and then there's a little bit of a you know a pond and then there's a tree and you can kind of see that the landscape um of that field so now imagine that you're looking down on the field and you see a dog walker and a dog and you see them navigate that field together side by side all the way across you know navigating each of the the tree the pond um and they get to the other side of the field and now imagine that you're looking down and you see not that i'm comparing any humans to dogs by the way but but mine but imagine that you're looking down now and the dog is everywhere so the dog's gone into the hedge and you've got to go turn back and get the dog and then bring them back to the path and then a bit further along you know the dog lingers and and and so you're constantly having to sort of bring the dog back to the path so but you looking from the hot air balloon you know where that's going because you see the overall arch of of that field and and conversations are a bit like this whereby in any interaction when you look at lots of examples of the same kind of encounter you know what the overall landscape is because you know what the starting point is you know how the end is and you know what the main tasks are along the way so that's the that's the system that's the systematic nature of interaction however as individuals we're all idiosyncratic and so we can take a long time to get from a to b um so for me a a a a good conversation is one where you get from a to b with the least false starts having to turn back explain it again um and you kind of move along it side by side in alignment with the person so that's my analogy my example if you'd like my example um because i think this example again speaks to so many so many things that we typically don't think about in conversation so imagine you're in a cafe um and i have these examples are from my field notes you know because i i often make notes after i've had a an encounter because i think they're a great example so i'm in a cafe and the i've ordered a cup of tea and the cafe staff give me the tea and and i say thank you and then i say oh do you have wi-fi and they say yes we do and i have to say oh so can customers use it yes they can so do i need a code or is it open or and they eventually give me the information that will get me to use the wi-fi and in this cafe the fact is that you know there is wi-fi wi-fi for customers but it's taken six turns to get there and at the end of it i'm thinking i'm never coming here again because that was really painful even though you gave me the information so of course you know a better way to do it would be do you have wi-fi yeah it's open and so immediately you're they understand that you know they're listening so they know that do you have wi-fi isn't just a yes no question i don't think that that cafe staff member thought that i thought they were just being a bit obstructive or just not very helpful um but even better is this is another cafe now going into the cafe ordering the tea and as the tea comes across the counter from the staff member they say if you need wi-fi here's the code and in this instance i haven't even had to ask and the conversation is very short it's one in fact it's like a term and i feel great about them so this is nice because it i think it tells you a couple of a couple of things that are really important one of them is that effective conversations can be very short and that's kind of the opposite of what a lot of people think they need to do to have an effective conversation which is spend time building rapport and you know adding lots of turns into an interaction that aren't really relevant to the conversation but somehow people feel they need to do that work um so effective conversations are short they they anticipate the needs of the other person um and meet them without you having to really push for it can i can i explore this thing about effective conversation can be short because i agree with you and uh but also i i have this experience that very often an example could be that a leader feels that the leader is going into a conversation where they need to get something across they had have what we call an advocacy they need an information from my head to your head it can be very efficient it can be very short if the receiver has a somewhat different expectation to the conversation i.e i thought we were somehow co-creating something what can you say a little bit about because what we've experienced is that if you look at two positions in a conversation one being advocacy something from my head into yours and the other side is inquiry inquiry inquiry inquiry is inquiry inquiry inquiry inquiry inquiry in some shape and form where i'm curious as to what you're thinking what's in your head and to get that into mine our experience is that when we transcript this or my experience is when you transcript this in conversations most conversations are about 90% advocacy from both sides so there is very little curiosity and very little inquiry into where does this land and and and what what's your reaction so i'm a little bit when you say effective, you know, conversations can be very short. Really? Yeah, I think it's back to listening. So it's back to, are you listening for what it is that this person seems to want from me turn by turn and being good enough to adapt? Could you say something about asking great questions? So what is a beautiful question? A beautiful question is one that, there isn't a beautiful question out of context and purpose. And a good question is one that thinks about the recipient and their ability to answer the question, the importance of them answering the question, your entitlement to ask the question. So those are the things that should be shaped. Well, they do shape, you know, we see evidence of people attending to those kinds of things in conversation. And then we also see people not. So again, an example would be, I did some work on customer inquiries, sales kinds of calls where someone has already, they're already a customer, they're phoning. It's not a cold call. It's like a warm call. And so someone is phoning to buy windows and double glazing near the classic sales environment. And before they've even been asked, what kind of windows would you like? They're asked, how did you hear about us? And after the how did you hear about us? There's 1.9 seconds of silence, which in my world is huge. And then you get just on Google. So it's a delayed response. And the answer comes, but it's, it's, it's problematic in two ways, which are important. One of them is it's in the wrong place in the encounter. So the better salespeople ask that question at the end when all of the, the other person's business has been done. The other thing is that it's, it's a question with a sense of entitlement in it. And really the customer is not entitled, you know, they don't, they're not obliged to tell you where they found out about you that, that benefits you. And so that's the kind of thing where you need to think, well, am I entitled to ask this question? Not really. I am entitled to say what kind of windows would you like? That's different. So a better way to ask the question is something like, just before you go, would you mind telling us how you heard about us? And if you do that after the business has been transacted at the end of the encounter, you know, at the other side of the field and you ask it with, with a less sense of I'm entitled to ask this and you are obliged to answer, then that is a better question. What about non-repetitive conversations? What are the insights for me as a leader? I'm in say 15 different conversations every day, like that are meetings. And, and then maybe I have another hundred touch points during that day. So that can be a look in the eye, could be just exchanging a few words. So I'm, so I'm a conversationalist in, in, in my everyday life. So, so based on your work, what's your advice to me? That's, that's how I navigate a hundred touch points a day. Yeah. It's an interesting one because of course, you know, just, just thinking about that meat, that the repetitiveness, sometimes it's repetitive for one party, but not for the other. So for, so one thing that's kind of interesting when I, when I compare across settings and I look at something that is very repetitive for one party, but is unique for the other, you then have to think, well, how do they manage at all? And of course, everyone is just using all of their communicative conversational competencies or not. to navigate those encounters and put them together. You know, let's just say there are, there are building blocks for interactions and we use different ones with different people in different ways and different orders and so on. I think that there's two, two things which are core all the time. One of them is, is core to all conversation. And I mentioned it earlier, which is this idea conversation analysts have a recipient design so that we're always designing what we say for the purpose of the current purpose. Which might be a very fleeting interaction. And then it's kind of knowing not to extend it because you can see that this, this should be a fleeting interaction and not kind of keeping someone else in it beyond the, what seems to be and should be a fleeting encounter. So we all know what that feels like being kind of held in something longer than you're thinking, why am I still here at the supermarket checkout? Because this is meant to be a quick one or something like that. Through to thinking again, how much does someone know? So do I, do I need, am I telling somebody something that they already know or should already know? Are they, are they in a position where they can't tell me you told me this yesterday? Or actually, I already know that thing because I am an expert or whatever, you know, so thinking about what the other person knows, thinking about what you're entitled to do and what they're entitled to do and what, and those sort of mutual obligations and so on. And the other thing which I think is really interesting and it runs across a lot of different settings that I've studied is something that me and again, my colleague Ryan Sickland have called burden, interactional burden. And so one of them, one of my examples was from the cafe. So having to really push to get the thing that you were going to get anyway, which is the Wi-Fi code. But I think this idea of burden runs everywhere. So we did some research looking at patients calling their, their primary care. And one of the things that we found time and time again was at the end of the call that the receptionist who'd, you know, the appointment was kind of made. When you look at the transcript, you see that all of the business has been transacted and the receptionist moves to end the call with a, all right. Thank you. And then the patient has to push back into the conversation. And what they generally want is confirmation. Before they go, they want to hear. So who am I calling? So who am I, who am I saying? When, when will the results be there? And what we found was that the surgeries where the receptionist provided the confirmation and the patient didn't have the burden of having to push into that conversation to, to get the information that they were going to get anyway. So the outcome again is the same. The end of the field is the same, but those surgeries where the receptionist proactively removed those needs for patients to push for things. They did better on then the national, in England, we have this national patient survey and those surgeries did better. than the ones where the patients really, you could see them straining to get the information, dragging it out of the other person. So I think recipient design and removing interactional burdens are two things that we can put everywhere. I think recipient design sounds super interesting in this context as well, because I guess one of the things that we're challenging or we have as a hypothesis is that sometimes we go into meetings, into these recurrent meetings, just expecting for the landscape of the conversation to look some way. And if we had thought about recipient design, maybe that meeting would have looked differently. So, so that, I think that's a really interesting concept. You said, if you're, if you're always the same, like recipient design. So you're, you're literally saying that I should be careful, not to be able not to be always the same. I should go in fresh. If you may, I should go in and be able to, to show up differently every time and just sense what part of me, uh, should hold space for this conversation. Is that right? Yeah, I think so because I, and I think it's not as, it wouldn't be a hugely different thing every time. Sometimes it could be as subtle as changing intonation or, or how much animation you put into your face or something like that. And we do this already, you know, one would hope that, that we tend to greet people in different ways. You know, we don't do a double cheek kiss to everybody, you would hope. And we, you know, greetings changed it almost actually during the pandemic. So, so it, and again, it's all about that. But the fact is that we also can do this kind of stuff very, very subtly. So to give you an example, not from COVID, but from just because I think this is the kind of thing that we, we tend not to think about with regards to listening, because we tend to think that all has to be audio. And as a conversation analyst, we're, we're looking always at embodied conduct as well. Um, so I was in a train coming home from Scotland all the way down, back, back down South. And, uh, it was a really crowded train, even when I got on in Scotland. And then as you know, the train just got, goes to all the big cities in the north of England got really full. And the, and at one point lots of people got on, they'd obviously either been to a football match or going to a football match. So it was very loud, very rowdy, very crammed, lots of drinking. And it felt really, I felt very uncomfortable. And I, I, because I'd got on at the start, I was kind of in my seat, just kind of minding my own business. But there was a woman at the other end of the carriage and we just did this look to each other. It was so, you know, it was infinitesimal. You couldn't have captured it on a video to study it really. And we looked at each other and we knew that we were both reading this situation in the same way. And we somehow conveyed with a glance, um, where we'll look out for each other on this train. And that's what human beings can do. It doesn't have to be overt. It doesn't, we, we do things very powerfully that are very subtle. And we don't, I don't think we think enough about that. That's a beautiful example of a, of a, of a conversation that, that look in the eye. I have a question because a comment to what you said, this thing about not, being the same in conversations. We also know from research that when, as a human, when you've done the same thing three to four times, your personal engagement goes down. So it's actually what you, what you're sharing with us here is actually an invitation to, to, to be experimenting in your conversations, which by the way, would fuel your own engagement. So you would be present differently. If you were showing up differently. Yeah, I think, uh, it's interesting that you say experiment simply because what the, one of the, the founders of the, the broader field within which conversation analysis sits, um, Harold Garfinkel, he, he invented something called breaching experiments, whereby you maybe go a bit further than what you're suggesting. And you, I think he had his students do things like, um, if someone said, how are you doing? They'd say, what do you mean? How am I doing? You know, and kind of breach the things that are routinely expected. Um, and, and what that shows is that people very quickly get very uncomfortable because the, the, and that shows what the norm is because the breach is so avert. And I think those, those how are you moments, um, at the start of conversations are very interesting to think about. And I've, I've done a lot of work and thinking about, first of all, busting the myth that those how are you's are meaningless and they don't do anything because in fact they're, they're calibrated. If you're listening, if you're listening, what kind of interaction this is. If we look at conversations, broadly speaking, I'm thinking about in organizations, can you see shifts in what people are longing for in conversations? So I go into a conversation and is there a kind of a generic longing in, in us as humans? I think, I think, I think there probably, there probably is. I mean, it, it's not my field to kind of try to, try to assess that. But what you, what I suppose I can say is that when you, again, when you record lots of interactions and study them, you can see where all the, the gaps happen, the, the, the repairs happen, the fixes happen, the friction happens. Where's that? Sorry? Where's that? Well, it can be. It depends on the organization. But I know a lot of it is at the start of encounters, you know, where, where one person is trying to have one kind of interaction, and they're not hearing that the other person doesn't want that kind of interaction. And we get, we can get trapped in those sequences really quickly. It's much more difficult than we think, because we know that we can do these things so subtly to show, I have seen that behavior, and I understand it in the same way you do, and I am going to intervene. Because if you're in a space where someone is saying something problematic, if one of the barriers to saying something is not being sure that it was something that everybody else felt as well. And that doesn't mean that you need other people's endorsement to act. But if you can immediately see that someone else has seen that same thing, then that, if you want to say something, it gives you confidence. So you can see all these kinds of things happening interactionally. And so as a leader being available for a train carriage moment, I think it's quite important. And not, and not, not everyone does that. I think one of the things that has surprised me about our conversation is how much we've been talking about a form of empathy, of being able to make space to read the person you're in conversation with, or the people in the room, if you're in a meeting. And also the granularity of, you know, sensing pauses and, and paying attention to your own choice of words, all these subtle things that really constitutes the conversation. None of these things that we've been talking about are, are sort of scientific in, in as much as they're not things that are outside of what people already do. So everything that I find, I'm seeing because people are already doing it. And that's quite important. So it doesn't, there's nothing special in some ways. It's for some, but when we think about someone who's a really good communicator, whatever that might mean, then you can start to pin it down to sometimes these tiny, tiny things, but they're not tiny in a, in a way that is like alien to us, because lots of people do it. It's just kind of showing what it is and showing it, showing it scientifically is important because we tend to think about much bigger pieces rather than think about each building block is going to change the bigger piece in, in the end. And I think that's important. And the other thing that I, because you mentioned empathy, I think it's really important to understand that empathy can be very short and pragmatic. You can achieve that sense that you've really understood and helped somebody incredibly quickly. It doesn't have to be, I think we tend to push that into the territory of long, open-ended, elicit everything from the other person kinds of ways. In fact, I think, you know, that cafe staff member who offered me the wifi code had a deep empathy for what it is. So I'm taking away recipient design. I'm taking away train carriage moment. But when you told that example, I think I had goosebumps. So that was beautiful. And then the surprise about the empathy. After having had this conversation, what is it that you will take into the next? I think the train carriage conversation, which was infinitesimally small, tiny, is something that I want to actually think about much more because I've only really talked about it now with you. And I think it's quite powerful because it says so much with such a tiny, non-verbal, at a distance, hard to capture, but very, it really lands. So I'm going to think about train characters. I'm going to think about making friends with the unknown, being this thing about allowing myself to not always show up the same. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure to talk with you. Likewise. Thank you, Liz. If you're interested to follow up on any of the references in this episode, follow the link in the episode description. Thanks for listening. Remember, you're never not in conversation. So stay curious out there. See you next time.