Charles Duhigg on Supercommunicators

Motley Fool host Mary Long caught up with author Charles Duhigg for a conversation about:

• The habits of "supercommunicators."
• How Boeing and Netflix navigated communications crises.
• An under-the-radar figure running the technical side of Microsoft.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Feb. 25, 2024.

Charles Duhigg: The first advice I would give is recognize that this is not a practical conversation. Like when, when a door comes off your airplane, what people don't want to know is how many other airplanes are safe. That what they want to know is they want to know that you understand how terrifying this is.

Mary Long: I'm Mary long and that's Charles Duhigg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the best-selling author of the power of habit. His new book is called Super communicators, how to unlock the secret language of connection. I caught up with Duhigg, for a conversation about what you can do to be a super communicator. Do hicks experience covering Microsoft, right when Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI? Why greet investors. Know how to handle a little disagreement. I want to talk about your book in detail, but upfront, the thesis of this idea of super communication, really to me, comes down to stop talking. Start asking. Is there a question that you've been asked recently that you're still mulling over and thinking about right now.

Charles Duhigg: That's such a good question. It might be this question they just asked me. Let me talk a little bit about like what, why questions work. Because the questions are more powerful than others. And then I think that'll lead into the types of questions that when I hear them, they really excite me. One of the things that we know about super communicators, and these are people who can consistently connect with anyone. They're the people who everyone wants to call when they're feeling down or when they need advice or, or turn to for leadership and it's because they're so good at listening to other people and making themselves hurt. One of the things that we know about them is that they tend to ask 10 to 20 times as many questions as the average person in some of those questions are throwaway questions like, what do you think about that or what happened next that invite you into the conversation.

But some of them are what are known as deep questions, which ask about someone's beliefs or values are experiences. Asking these questions is really important. Like if you meet someone who is a lawyer, if you say, why did you decide to go to law school or what do you love about your job? Those are deep questions. They invite us to explain who we are. When we ask those deep questions, other people feel closer to us and they become more likely to listen to us and return. I think the questions that I've been asked that are most powerful are all variations on what did you think of that, what did you make of that? The Caito deep question is instead of asking someone but the facts of their life, ask them about how they feel about their life. They're going to tell you something that's very real.

Mary Long: There's a great segment of your book where you basically talk about this very thing and going through the practice of expanding the questions that you're asking. A few examples where you talked about like, rather than asking someone, where do you live, you can ask them, what do they like about their neighborhood? That's a really simple pivot that I've even tried to implement in my own life of OK, how can I expand this question to get a deeper answer on the other end?

Charles Duhigg: When you ask that look like, where do you live? I live in Scottsdale. Like what do you love about where you live? I love my neighbors. There's this sense of community and the schools are so good for my kids to like, even in that short response, I've learned so much about, I've learned that you value community. I've learned that you value probably like kindness and neighbor leanness. I know that you have kids. You just told me so much about yourself and it's really natural for me to answer that same question in response to say, that's so interesting. The reason I love where I live is because we also have this really strong sense of community. That's how you get this flow, this back-and-forth, it becomes a real conversation.

Mary Long: I think the idea that you to be a better communicator, ask better questions. That makes sense to a lot of people. But the natural next question is, how do I come up with good questions? That expansion technique that we talked about is helpful. But you point to a story of a husband and wife team of research psychologists who tackle this question of, what questions really do get at the good stuff that has been away team that I mentioned. How did they come up with these 36 questions that lead to love?

Charles Duhigg: This is Arthur Aniline aren't and I love this story because the way they came up with them is they like, basically just asked other grad students, some of whom were likes stoners to come up with questions. They use this game called the and game that was really popular in the 1970s. It was filled two questions, and they tried out hundreds of different questions. What they found was the questions that make us feel closer to each other, or the questions that allow me to share something that's a little bit vulnerable. For instance, some of the questions or things like, who would you invite to a dinner party if you could invite anyone.

Some of the questions were things like, when's the last time you cried in front of another person? Now those questions seem really different to us. But the thing that they have in common is that when I answered that question, I'm exposing something about myself that you might judge. I might not care about your judgment. I might not care whether you think it's a good answer, a bad answer. But the fact that I've exposed something makes me feel like I can be close to you. If you respond with what's known as emotional reciprocity, if you share something similarly vulnerable about yourself, here's the people I would invite to a dinner party, here's last time i cried. Then it's hardwired into our brains that we will feel closer and more trusting of each other

Mary Long: I think what's scary about that initially is even if you're the person asking and not answering at asking can be really vulnerable.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely, absolutely and sometimes the follow-up questions are really, really important and sometimes the follow-up question is as vulnerable as anything you might say. You know what to say like, I know what that feels like. I'm so sorry. Like like telling you about what happened to you. That's really vulnerable, just expose that. But on the other hand, vulnerability is the loudest former language. This is what we know about how our brands have evolved, is that when we say something vulnerable, other people can't help but listen. Again, the vulnerability doesn't mean that, doesn't mean that I have to tell you like about all my heartbreak. It can be as simple as saying like, you know, I really liked the niners and the super bowl, but I don't like the other guys. I'm exposing some judgment on my part and you might hold it against me. You vote, but the fact that you can makes it feel vulnerable.

Mary Long: Your book walks through these three different types of conversations, practical, emotional, and social. What do each of those conversations look like?

Charles Duhigg: It's a great question and it's sometimes it's helpful to explain exactly who super communicators are. Like if I was to ask you, if you were having a bad day and you needed a call, someone who you know would make you feel better. Does that person pop into your mind immediately? Who is it?

Mary Long: My best friend who I've known since I was 10.

Charles Duhigg: Your friend for you as a super communicator and similarly you're probably a super communicator for that friend. Now there are some people who can do this on a more consistent basis. They can do this with almost anyone. What they seem to do that's different from everyone else, is they put a priority on showing they want to connect and on matching the conversation that's occurring. As you mentioned, there's, there's every discussion we have is made up of multiple conversations. And almost all of them fall into one of the three buckets. There's these practical discussions which is when we're trying to make a plan or were trying to solve a problem.

There's emotional conversations where I want to tell you how I feel and I don't want you to solve my problem. I want to empathize. Then their social conversations where we're talking about how we relate to each other and we relate to society and those three conversations they're pretty easy to pick up on once, you know, to look for them. But for most of us, we don't realize that different conversations are occurring. If we're having different kinds of conversations at the same time, we're not connecting with each other. It's really hard to hear each other.

Mary Long: There are so many instances of like person-to-person communication where the benefits of super communication and these techniques that you outlined are really clear. Do companies that communicate well have a stronger track record of success? Is there a difference between individual super communication and organizational super communication?

Charles Duhigg: Companies that make this a priority and that have executives are making a priority, do fantastically better in the book, there's two stories. There's one about the CIA and this new CIA officer who's trying to recruit overseas agents and is just doing a terrible job of finding spies. Then a story about Netflix. Netflix went through this crisis where a senior executive used the N word in a meeting and it threatened to tear the whole company apart. In both instances, what those organizations and that company found was it was all about create, learning the skills of super communication that help them overcome a crisis or get better at their work. I'm absolutely certain everyone listening has a manager, has had a manager who is terrible communication and one who's great at it. Just think about what a difference it was in terms of your productivity.

Mary Long: To make this a little bit more timely, I think Boeing CEO, Dave Calhoun, he comes to mind to someone who's in the midst of many crises.

Charles Duhigg: Yes.

Mary Long: Not the least of which is a crisis of communication, but I think to just call it a crisis of communication, ignore some other issues. Still with your research in mind. Say you've got Dave Calhoun's ear, what advice would you give to him right now?

Charles Duhigg: The first advice I would give is recognize that this this is not a practical conversation. When a door comes off your airplane, what people don't want to know is how many other airplanes are safe and that what they want to know is they want to know that you understand how terrifying this is. That this is something where every time you get on a plane, you're not going to sit next to that exit row door, you're going to be terrified and to engage people, not only stakeholders, not only customers, but also employees and say, I understand this is a hard time.

I want to create space. I don't want to solve your emotional challenge. I want to create space for you to explain it because you need to work through it. And that's the number one thing that I think you can do and then once we have that conversation, then we can move on to the practical because they do have a lot of great things to tell us about safety, about improvements they're making. But if I'm scared, I can't hear what they're saying until they say, I know you're scared, I apologize that you are scared. Let's let's go ahead and acknowledge that fear and now that we have, let's talk about it until we're ready to hear the practical conversation about how we're going to make this better.

Mary Long: You have an awesome anecdote in the book about a surgeon who specializes in treating prostate cancer. How did he convince his patients to stop getting surgery? Not something we typically think of doctors is doing.

Charles Duhigg: No and it's funny because he kept on giving people advice like you don't have to get surgery. This is a slow-growing cancer, just wait and see what happens and people would insist on going under his knife. They would fail to hear what he was saying. And so he went to these Harvard Business School professor, he said, what am I doing wrong? And they said, well, you're starting the conversational wrong. Every conversation is what's known as a quiet negotiation at its start. In a quiet negotiation, the goal is not to win something, it's simply to understand what everyone wants and they said, when your patient walks in, you're assuming that they want medical advice, but you don't know if that's true.

So start with a different question, start with a deep question. Ask them, what does this diagnosis mean to you? And when he started doing that, people would talk about all things. One guy came in and Dr. Dai asked that question and he said, it makes me think about my dad who died when i was young and how hard that was on my mom and I don't want to put my wife or my kids through that. And Dr. Dai had expected this guy to ask questions about pain or treatments but what he wanted to talk about is he wanted to talk about his family and only after they had that conversation, could he hear the medical advice that the doctor was trying to give them.

Mary Long: There are so many things that I loved about that story but one is it would've been really easy for that surgeon to label his patients as stupid and this is a processing bias. This is an issue like with them, not with me but instead he looks inward and says, I'm doing a bad job of communicating. I'm getting too much information and it's not even the information that people care about. I think that's a light bulb moment for a lot of us, even though we already know that less is often more but still knowing that it's really hard to implement. Why is that so hard to implement?

Charles Duhigg: It's hard to implement because oftentimes, when we go into a conversation, we're thinking about ourselves rather than everyone who's involved in this. Think about the number of times that you're in a conversation and you want to say something that proves to the other person you're smart. You want them to like you, you want to change their mind and convince them you're right. The goal of a conversation and super communicators know this and by the way, anyone can become a super communicator, it's just a set of skills that people practice and learn.

The goal of any conversation is not to convince the other person of something, it's not even necessarily to find common ground. The goal of a conversation is simply to understand each other and when we reset that expectation, you're going to go into this conversation. You need to understand what you're crazy uncle is saying about politics. You need to speak in a way that he can understand you. Then all of a sudden it changes the table stakes because instead of having to think about what I'm going to say, instead of having to think like, how do I make this argument? How do I appear smart? What you're thinking is, I really want to understand what you're telling me. I might ask some questions to help me understand and then once I do understand you, I'm going to know how to tell you what I'm thinking in a way that you're going to be able to hear it.

Mary Long: I think the takeaway here for investors, but also honestly for everyone is that there's so much benefit in striving to understand the best argument of the other side.

Charles Duhigg: That's exactly right.

Mary Long: Someone disagrees with your thesis, your ideas of where a company is headed, but also like you said, your crazy uncle who talks politics at Thanksgiving, understanding their best argument only actually makes you stronger too, and it bolsters your side as well.

Charles Duhigg: Think about how many smart investors, long investors talk to shorts and listened to shorts, and are always engaging with shorts and the reason why is because exactly what you just said, they want to understand the best argument for why a stock is going to go down and use that to test their own thesis. Now, that doesn't mean you have to agree with them, I listened to your best argument and I think that's a really good argument, but here's why I think it's wrong, I'm still going to invest in the stock. But if you're not really understanding their argument, you're denying yourself an opportunity to learn and sometimes the shorts are right and you don't know they're right until you really listen to what they're saying.

Mary Long: We can stick on the finance track for a second because you tell a story about a guy named Nick Epley and how he goes from being a teenager with a DUI charge to teaching a room full of hedge fund managers how to listen but he started there.

Charles Duhigg: Nick is a professor at the University of Chicago who has spent his whole life examining how to have deeper conversations. And so he goes into this room of hedge fund folks, a couple of hundred of them, and none of them really know each other, they're from all over the country. And he says, I'm going to ask you to have a conversation for just 10 minutes with a stranger that you've never met who's in the room and the question I want you to ask and answer for each other is, when is the last time you cried in front of another person? And the room freaks out.

These are all masters of the universe. These are people who control billions of dollars, they are you're asking me to talk about when i cried in front of a stranger and they say, we hate this, we don't think it's going to work at all. I don't want to do this, but he gets them to play along. They all divide up. They start the conversations. After 10 minutes, he asked them to stop talking, they're still chatting with each other. He sees people hugging each other. He sees people crying. Eventually he gets them to quiet down and he starts to ask them, how did that go? And people say things like that was the most amazing conversation I have had in months.

Because the truth of the matter is that even if you're masters of the universe, even if your days are spent controlling billions of dollars, you want to connect with other people. In fact, it's hardwired in our brain this desire to connect. That feeling that you get after a great conversation, that's a product of evolution, there's actually a reward sensation that we trigger and all of us want to connect. And when you can connect with someone who's appear in a real way, then it feels wonderful and Nick's point is, you can do this with almost anything. If you see a stranger on the bus, you say, what do you do for a living? And they say, I'm a doctor, you can ask, why did you decide to go to medical school? What do you love about medicine? It is always possible to ask a deeper question and once you do, you really connect with someone.

Mary Long: I love this idea that you can go up and talk to a stranger but I think if I were to approach a stranger on a bus and say, hey, when was the last time you cried? I would get some weird looks out in the real world.

Charles Duhigg: I think you probably would.

Mary Long: But so many of these tips are so awesome for deepening the content of a conversation. Why did you learn in your research about how to initiate conversations with strangers?

Charles Duhigg: It's a great question. Let me talk about one study that happened at an investment bank. These researchers went in and this was an investment bank where there's a lot of strangers inside the company. People didn't work together and the culture was scream at each other and fight and battle and so they go in and they do this thing where they say, look before each meeting, what I want you to do is, I want you to write down one sentence. This only will take 10 seconds. Write down what your goal is for this conversation and the mood you hope to establish. For a full week, everyone writes down one sentence on a little index card before each meeting, and then they stick it in their pocket. They don't show that card anyone else.

Often times, some of the topics that they've written down never come up in the meeting. But the incidence of conflict in those meetings, fights and arguments goes down 80% and the reason why is because people knew what they wanted out of the conversation and other people were prepared to tell them what they wanted in return. And this is the key for having conversations with strangers. A study that was done by Harvard Business School, a researcher asked people, students to write down three topics they might discuss before talking to a stranger. Then they would put the card in their pocket. Those topics almost never came up during the conversation. But the fact that they knew they had something to fall back on reduced the anxiety enormously.

Charles Duhigg: The reduction of that anxiety made talking to a stranger much easier. This is one of the big lessons, is that, when we are prepared for conversation, if we just take half a second to think about what we want to accomplish before we opened our mouth. That conversation often goes much better.

Mary Long: Let's change gears a bit because you had the privilege of spending six months embedded at Microsoft and OpenAI. You had a front row seat to the Sam Altman firing, hiring, rehiring that happened in late November? What was that like?

Charles Duhigg: Oh, it was crazy. I went in and I was writing this story about Microsoft and OpenAI in their relationship. I'd written the whole story and I'd sent it to The New Yorker and is going through fact checking. Then I was flying home for thanksgiving with my family. I get a call right before I got on the airplane that says, oh, by the way, Sam Altman was just fired. For thanksgiving week while the rest that while everyone else is eating turkey, I'm like in my hotel room typing furiously rewriting the whole story. If you'll remember when it first started, everyone was really confused, but they figured, oh, this must be rational. There must be something we don't know about.

Either there's some scandal or some huge technological breakthrough that's really dangerous. Then as I talk to everyone involved and I talked to everyone involved, it really just came down to basically personality differences, like board members didn't like Sam, Sam didn't like some board members. Everyone got their nose out of joint and they had a fight. In doing so, they fired this guy and threatened the what the most valuable start-up in history?

Mary Long: That's wild. My dad has the story where he talks about, he and his brother went to the same college and is older brothers sitting on a bench and basically says to my dad, lake, Jimmy, this is all just finishing school. I think about that so often when I hear stories like this and so like the stakes are bigger than they are in high school and college and petty social circles and the drama that unfolds there. But the themes are often pretty much the same. If you could step away from the size of the stakes, there is something comedic about.

Charles Duhigg: Absolutely.

Mary Long: Oh wait, we're all dealing with the same. We're going through the same stuff. The CRE is a little bit different, but it's the same general themes underneath each one.

Charles Duhigg: I find this again and again and again. I can't tell you the number of times that I've started reporting on a deal and I've asked people why this happened. It comes down to them saying something like, I just really liked this guy on the other side. I thought I really want to work with him. We figured out how to make this merger happen. Not because the strategy aligned and of course the strategy does align, but there's thousands of companies where the strategy aligns. I really liked that woman on the other side and I thought like, oh, it'd be fun to see her every day at work. That's how we made the deal happen. It's true, and this is actually one of the reasons why communication is so important, is because ultimately all of business comes down to people and our ability to connect with people.

Mary Long: We've talked a bit about the importance of characters and storytelling and just how much story matters in something. In your article about Microsoft and OpenAI and the real relationship going on there, it's tempting to think that, oh, Sam Altman is the star here, who I really found most compelling is Kevin Scott, who is the CTO of Microsoft. Why is Scott a self-described short-term pessimist and a long-term optimist.

Charles Duhigg: Kevin Scott for anyone who doesn't know him and there's lots of people who don't, even though he's the CTO of Microsoft, he's key, flies under the radar. He is an incredible guy and he's exactly who you want running a company like Microsoft from the technical side. His basic argument is this, overtime technology has always been the thing that has made our lives better. We have used technology to solve the food crisis. We've used technology to invent vaccines and extend the life enormously. Technology and computers, computers put us all in contact with each other. In the long term, we should all be optimist about what technology can do.

The problem is that as everyone knows, the short-term road can be Rocky, and with artificial intelligence, it's likely to be very rocky. This is a technology that we don't really understand even though we're using it. It gets more and more powerful every single year, far more powerful than any technology in the past, far faster. We don't know where it's going. We should be cautious. We should be really cautious the same way that a long investors should listen to the shorts. Anyone who's a long-term optimist should definitely be listening to the demurs and trying to figure out, are they right? Are they wrong? In the short-term, let's be skeptical, let's be a pessimist.

Let's assume that things are going to go badly and protect against it. But let's not be so much of a skeptic or a pessimist that it stops us from achieving that long-term goal of making the world a better place. Because the invention of Dynamite with something that initially helped propel wars. Yet today we use it in mining all the time. It's something that actually makes the world better. Technology is a tool and like any tool, you can use an ax to build a house or to chop someone's head off. It's about educating ourselves to use it wisely.

Mary Long: In this article, you paint such a good picture of Kevin's background. That helped painting him for me as someone who's not just like falsely optimistic, his optimism seemed very true and genuine. The vision that he has for AI and all that it can do is much more compelling than simply a large language model. Simply.

Charles Duhigg: Exactly. You're exactly right. He grew up in Virginia, in rural Virginia. Very poor. I've food stamps at times when they didn't have enough food for the family. He grew up in a region that had been a huge textile and furniture manufacturing area. Then all of those went overseas when he was a kid. It wasn't because of advances in technology, it was because of choices that America made to let those industries go overseas. His vision for how what AI can do is, right now we use ChatGPT, right now we use Bing and it's fun and answers questions for us.

But think about a world where you can walk into a hospital and if you have a small medical issue, you just input it into a computer, perhaps even do it vocally, and within seconds it can tell you what the most likely diagnosis is. Then a doctor comes over and they say, that makes sense. Instead of sitting there and waiting for hours and hours for a visit, it's something that can happen right away. Think about if you don't work for a huge company, if you don't come from some privileged place, you oftentimes don't have access to the most cutting-edge tools.

But with AI, all of those tools become enriched for everyone because you can ask for it in plain simple language. You can ask what you want to have done. You don't need to know how to program. You just need to know how to describe your challenge. This can change lives in the most positive way we can create education, and Khan Academy is already doing this. Create lessons that are personalized for every single student where it sees how fast you're learning, what you're having struggles with, and it changes the lesson plan to accommodate you. AI can be a huge positive force in her life. It's not about the rich guys or the powerful people being able to like, build robots to take over the world. It's really about people who have been left out of the information revolution getting an access to it on an equal level.

Mary Long: It's also not about foregoing human communication in Louisville and favoring robotic communication instead, it's about, like you said, getting that leg up. Then then the human comes in and you have that super communication perhaps between two people. That builds and bolsters what's already been laid out by an algorithm.

Charles Duhigg: Think about how much of our days we spend just doing nonsense. I need to buy plane tickets. It's going to take me half an hour to figure out the cheapest flight until it compare all the options. If AI can do that for me in three minutes, then now I have 47 minutes to go talk to my family or to call someone up and ask about a deal or go to a conference and start learning a little bit more from industry experts. At the end of the day, intelligence is our greatest asset, our human intelligence, not artificial intelligence, our human intelligence.

The more we can think more deeply, the more we can use our intelligence. Instead of just doing small, little mundane tasks, the more successful we are. Anything, whether it be being able to pick up a phone rather than having to see someone face-to-face or using AI, rather than having to figure out the answer on your own by googling it and coming up with spreadsheets. Anything that lets us use our brains more is something that makes our lives better.

Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Mary Long, thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.