Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Charles Duhigg on Supercommunicators

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

What happens when a group of hedge fund managers share the last time they cried?  Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter and a best-selling author. His latest book is “Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.” Mary Long caught up with Duhigg for a conversations about: - The habits of Supercommunicators. - How Boeing and Netflix navigated communications crises. - An under-the-radar figure running the technical side of Microsoft. Host: Mary Long Guest: Charles Duhigg Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Rick Engdahl, Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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, Duhigg's experience covering Microsoft right when Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI, and why great investors know how to handle a little disagreement. I want to talk about your book in detail, but up front, 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?

Oh, that's such a good question. It might be this question that you just asked me. Um, well, let me talk a little bit about like what, why questions work, like, because some questions are more powerful than others. And then I think that'll lead into the types of questions that when I hear them, they, they really excite me. So one of the things that we know about super communicators, and these are people who can consistently kind of connect with anyone, right? They're the, they're the people who everyone wants to call when they're feeling down or when they need advice or, or turn to for, for leadership. And it's because they're so good at listening to other people and making themselves heard. And 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. And some of those questions are kind of throwaway questions like, what do you think about that? Or what happened next that invites you into the conversation? But some of them are what are known as deep questions, which ask about someone's beliefs or values or experiences. And asking these deep questions is really important. Like if you meet someone who's 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. And when we ask those deep questions, other people feel closer to us and they become more likely to listen to us in return.

And so 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 key to a deep question is instead of asking someone about the facts of their life, ask them about how they feel about their life. and they're going to tell you something that's very real. Yeah, there's a great segment of your book where you basically talk about this very thing and like going through the practice of expanding the questions that you're asking. And you line up a few examples where you talk about like, okay, well, rather than asking someone, where do you live?

You can ask them like, what do they like about their neighborhood? And that's a really simple pivot that like I've even tried to implement in my own life of, okay, wait, how can I expand this question to get a deeper answer on the other end? Right. And when you ask that, where do you live? Oh, I live in Scarsdale. What do you love about where you live? Oh man, I love my neighbors. There's this sense of community and the schools are so good for my kids. So 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 kindness and neighborliness. I know that you have kids. You've just told me so much about yourself. And it's really natural for

me to answer that same question in response to say, oh, that's so interesting. The reason I love where I live is because we also have this really strong sense of community. And that's how you get this flow, this back and forth that becomes a real conversation. I think, you know, 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, well, wait, how do I come up with good questions? And that expansion technique that we talked about is helpful. But you kind of, you point to a story of like a husband and wife team of research psychologists to kind of tackle this question of, okay, wait, what questions really do get at the good stuff? So this husband and wife team

that I mentioned, how did they come up with these 36 questions that lead to love? So this is Arthur and Elaine Oren. And I love this story because the way they came up with them is they like basically just asked all their grad students, some of whom were like stoners to come with questions. And they use this game called the un-game that was really popular in the 1970s. It was filled with questions. And they tried out hundreds of different questions. And what they found was the questions that make us feel closer to each other are the questions that allow me to share something that's a little bit vulnerable. So for instance, some of the questions are things like, who would you invite to a dinner party if you could invite anyone? And 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 answer 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 or a bad answer. But the fact that I've exposed something makes me feel like I can be close to you. And 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 the last time I cried. Then it's hardwired into our brains that we will feel closer and more trusting of each

other. I think what's scary about that initially is even if you're the person asking and not answering, that asking can be really vulnerable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And sometimes the, you know, follow-up questions are really, really important. And sometimes the follow-up question is as vulnerable as anything you might say, you know, to say like, oh man, I know what that feels like i'm so sorry like like tell me about what happened to you right that's really vulnerable just expose that but but on the other hand vulnerability is the loudest form of language this is what we know about how our brains have evolved is that when when we say something vulnerable other people can't help but listen and again the vulnerability doesn't mean how

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 like, I really like, I really like the Niners and the Superbowl, but I don't like the other guys. I'm exposing some judgment on my part and you might hold it against me and hopefully you won't. But the fact that you can makes it feel vulnerable. Okay. So your book walks through these three different types of conversations, practical, emotional, and social. What do each of those conversations look like? Yeah, it's a great question. And, 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 to call someone who

you know would make you feel better, does that person pop into your mind immediately? Who is it? Oh, my best friend who I've known since I was 10. Yeah, right, right. And there's something, so your friend for you is 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.

And 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 kind of conversation that's occurring. And as you mentioned, there's every discussion we have is made up of multiple kinds of conversations and almost all of them fall into one of three buckets. There's these practical discussions, which is when we're trying to make a plan or we're 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 you just to empathize.

And then there's social conversations where we're talking about how we relate to each other and we relate to society. And those three kinds of conversations are pretty easy to pick up on once you know to look for them. But for most of us, we don't realize that different kinds of conversations are occurring. And 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. There are so many instances of like person-to-person communication where the benefits of super communication and these techniques that you outline 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?

Companies that make this a priority and that have executives who make it 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. And 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. And 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's terrible at communication and one who's great at it. And just think about what a difference it was in terms of your productivity. somebody. To make this a little bit more timely, like I think Boeing CEO, Dave Calhoun, he comes to mind as someone who's in the midst of many crises. Yes. 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? I mean, the first advice I would give is recognize that this, this is not a practical conversation, right? Like when, 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 like, every time you get on a plane, you're going to, you're not going to sit next to that exit road door. You're going to be terrified. And, 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 he can do. And then once we kind of 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 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. 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 doctors is doing. No, 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, right? They would fail to hear what he was saying. And so he went to these Harvard Business School professors. 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. And 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 kinds of things. One guy came in and he, Dr. Adai asked that question and he said, you know, 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. Adai 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 him. I, there are so many things that I loved about that story. But one is that like rather it would have been really easy for that surgeon to like label his patients as stupid, you know, and, you know, this is a processing bias. This is an issue like with them, not with me. But instead, he like 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 like a light bulb moment for a lot of us, even though we kind of already know that less is often more. but still knowing that it's really hard to implement. Why is that so hard to implement? It's, it's hard to implement because oftentimes when we go into a conversation, we're thinking about ourselves rather than, than everyone who's involved in this, right? Like 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 them to, 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 to necessarily 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 your 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. I think the takeaway here for investors, but I mean, also honestly for everyone is that there's so much benefit in striving to understand the best argument of the other side. Someone disagrees with your thesis, your ideas of where a company is headed, but also like you said, you know, your crazy uncle who talks politics at Thanksgiving, understanding their best argument only actually makes you stronger too. And like it bolsters your side as well. Think about how many smart investors,

long investors, talk to shorts and listen 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, right? I listen to your best argument and I think, yeah, that's a really good argument, but here's why I think it's wrong. I'm still going to invest in this 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. We can kind of 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. What's the start and end there? I love this. So Nick is a professor at the University of Chicago who spent his whole life sort of examining how to have deeper conversations. And so he goes into this room of hedge fund folks, a couple of hundred of them. And they're, they, none of them really know each other, right? They're all from all over the country. And he says, okay, I'm going to, 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 each other for each other

is when is the last time you cried in front of another person? And the room freaks out, right? These are all masters of the universe. These are people who control billions of dollars. They're like, 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 this is 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 asks 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 asking 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 a master 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 a peer in a real way, then it feels wonderful. And Nick's point is, you can do this with almost anything, right? 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 like, 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. So, you know, 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. I think you probably would. So many of these tips are so awesome for deepening the content of a conversation. What did you learn in your research about how to initiate conversations with strangers?

It's a great question. So let me talk about one study that happened at an investment bank where these researchers went in and this was an investment bank where like people would not, there's a lot of strangers inside the company, people who don't work together. And they would, the culture was like 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 will only take like 10 seconds, write down what your goal is for this conversation and the mood you hope to establish. So 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 to anyone else. Oftentimes, 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. And 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. And the reduction of that anxiety made talking to a stranger much, much easier. And this is kind of one of the big lessons is that when we are prepared for a conversation, if we just take half a second to think about what we want to accomplish before we open our mouth, that conversation often goes much, much better. 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. Yeah. What was that like?

Oh, it was crazy. I mean, so I went in and I was writing this story about Microsoft and OpenAI and their relationship. And I had written the whole story and I'd sent it to the New Yorker and it was going through fact checking. And then I was flying home for Thanksgiving with my family and I get a call right before I got on the airplane that says, oh, by the way, Sam Altman was just fired. So for Thanksgiving week, while everyone else is eating turkey, I'm like in my hotel room

typing furiously, rewriting the whole story. And 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. And then as I talked 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 and everyone got their nose out of joint and they had a fight. And in doing so, they fired this guy and threatened the, what, the most valuable startup in history. Yeah, it's wild.

My dad has the story where he talks about, he and his brother went to the same college and his older brother sitting on a bench and basically says to my dad, like, oh, Jimmy, this is all just finishing school. And it's like I think about that so often when I hear stories like this. And so like the stakes are bigger, right, than they are in high school, in college and like petty social circles and the drama that unfolds there. But the themes are often pretty much the same. And it's – if you could step away from the size of the stakes, there is something comedic about like – Absolutely. Oh, wait. We're all kind of dealing with the same –

we're going through the same stuff. The scenery is a little bit different, but it's the same general themes underneath each one. 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. And 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. So 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. So that's how we made the deal happen. And 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. We've talked a bit about the importance of characters in storytelling and just how much story matters in something. In your article about Microsoft and OpenAI and the real relationship going on there, you know, it's tempting to kind of 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?

So 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 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. And his basic argument is this. Over time, technology has always been the thing that has made our lives better, right? We have used technology to solve the food crisis. We've used technology to invent vaccines and extend life enormously. Technology and computers.

computers put us all in contact with each other. So in the long term, we should all be optimists about what technology can do. The problem is that as everyone knows, the short-term road can be kind of 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. And we don't know where it's going. And so we should be cautious. We should be really cautious. The same way that a long investor should listen to the shorts, anyone who's a long-term optimist should definitely be listening to the doomers and trying to figure out, are they right? Are they wrong? So 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 you know the invention of dynamite was something that initially helped propel wars and 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 it can you can use an axe to build a house or to chop someone's head off and it's about educating ourselves to use it wisely. And in this article, you paint such a good picture of Kevin's background. And that helped paint him for me as someone who's not just like

falsely optimistic, like his optimism seemed very true and genuine. And the vision that he has for AI and all that it can do is much more compelling than simply a large language model, simply. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you're exactly right. He grew up in Virginia, in rural Virginia, very poor, right? Food stamps, 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. And then all of those went overseas when he was a kid. And it wasn't because of advances in technology. It was because of choices that America made to let those industries go overseas. And his vision for what AI can do is right now we use chat GPT or we use Bing and it's kind of 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 you even do it vocally, and within seconds it can tell you what the most likely diagnosis is. And then a doctor comes over and they say, yep, that makes sense. So 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 in reach 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 our life.

And it's not about the rich guys or the powerful people being able to 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. And it's also not about foregoing human communication and favoring robotic communication instead. it's about, like you said, kind of getting that leg up and then, okay, 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. Think about how much of our days we spend just doing like kind of nonsense, right? Like I need to buy plane tickets. It's going to take me half an hour to figure out the cheapest flight and to compare all the options. And 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 to, to, to start, you know, 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, right? 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. And 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. as always people on the program may have interests 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