We Need to Talk

Celeste Headlee

• Éditeur: Harper
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062669025
• Sujet: Personal Development
• Sous-sujet: Communication & Public Speaking

"WE NEED TO TALK."

In this urgent and insightful book, public radio journalist Celeste Headlee shows us how to bridge what divides us--by having real conversations

BASED ON THE TED TALK WITH OVER 10 MILLION VIEWS
NPR's Best Books of 2017

Winner of the 2017 Silver Nautilus Award in Relationships & Communication

"We Need to Talk is an important read for a conversationally-challenged, disconnected age. Headlee is a talented, honest storyteller, and her advice has helped me become a better spouse, friend, and mother." (Jessica Lahey, author of New York Times bestseller The Gift of Failure )

Today most of us communicate from behind electronic screens, and studies show that Americans feel less connected and more divided than ever before. The blame for some of this disconnect can be attributed to our political landscape, but the erosion of our conversational skills as a society lies with us as individuals.

And the only way forward, says Headlee, is to start talking to each other. In We Need to Talk, she outlines the strategies that have made her a better conversationalist—and offers simple tools that can improve anyone's communication. For example:

• BE THERE OR GO ELSEWHERE. Human beings are incapable of multitasking, and this is especially true of tasks that involve language. Think you can type up a few emails while on a business call, or hold a conversation with your child while texting your spouse? Think again.
• CHECK YOUR BIAS. The belief that your intelligence protects you from erroneous assumptions can end up making you more vulnerable to them. We all have blind spots that affect the way we view others. Check your bias before you judge someone else.
• HIDE YOUR PHONE. Don't just put down your phone, put it away. New research suggests that the mere presence of a cell phone can negatively impact the quality of a conversation.

Whether you're struggling to communicate with your kid's teacher at school, an employee at work, or the people you love the most—Headlee offers smart strategies that can help us all have conversations that matter.

PART I

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It’s the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

—GUY DE MAUPASSANT

1

CONVERSATION IS A SURVIVAL SKILL

E-volve comes from “to roll out.” Con-verse comes from “to turn together.” We can rightly say that—as we turn together in conversation, we become the evolution we’ve been waiting for.

—THE CO-INTELLIGENCE INSTITUTE

Nuanced conversation is a uniquely human skill. Biologists think it’s a compelling force behind our success as a species and our ascent up the food chain. Although the precise chronology of when humans first started talking is still up for debate, it is safe to say that we’ve been jabbering coherently for at least a million years.

How has this ability helped us? Well, for one thing, we can lie and other animals can’t. When a cat doesn’t like you, you know it. A dog can’t fake a growl and elephants, so far as we know, can’t pretend to grunt. Humans can dissemble and, while that might be seen as a flaw, it’s often useful.

For example, imagine you couldn’t pretend that you like your mother-in-law or your boss. Imagine you couldn’t tell your friend who’s had a rough day that her haircut looks great. Imagine you couldn’t tell your prospective employer that you planned to stay with the company for at least five years. Lying carries a negative connotation for good reason, but it’s also an essential skill. And it’s one that only humans have, to the best of our knowledge. (My dogs pretend they haven’t been fed in the morning to see if they can coerce a second breakfast out of my son, but I guess science doesn’t consider that “lying.”)

Conversation has long been a crucial asset to us as a species. Compared to other creatures, physical attributes are not among our strengths. We admire the swiftness of the snow leopard, the poison of the Komodo dragon, or the sheer power of a polar bear. I’m sure we all know that we can’t win a hand-to-paw fight with a grizzly bear. We are not at the top of the food chain, of course.¹ On a scale of 1 to 5, we score 2.21. That puts us on a par with anchovies.

And yet, despite all of our physical weaknesses, we are the dominant species. It is perhaps because of our comparatively fragile forms that humans have had to find other ways to compete, and talking was one of our most powerful tools. Seth Horowitz, an auditory neuroscientist, says this:

We think about ourselves as being the new smartest rulers of the planet, but our ears have evolved, and the basic brain circuitry of hearing has evolved over 400 million years, and a lot of it centered on hearing the sound of your own species. That’s the most important signal, even if you can’t see them. Hearing evolved as your alarm system, because we’re diurnal, we don’t see well at night, but our hearing is running all through the darkness and even when we are asleep. A sound, even without a visual tie to it, is very important to us. We’ve evolved to listen to other people talk.²

Many evolutionary biologists posit that humans developed language for economic reasons. We needed to trade, and we needed to establish trust in order to trade. Language is very handy when you are trying to conduct business with someone. Two early humans could not only agree to trade three wooden bowls for six bunches of bananas but arrange terms as well. What wood was used for the bowls? Where did you get the bananas? That transaction would have been nearly impossible using only gestures and unintelligible noises, and carrying it out according to terms agreed upon creates a bond of trust.

Language allows us to be specific, and this is where conversation plays a key role. Your cat can tell you that he’s in pain and in a lot of pain, but he can’t tell you what hurts or describe the injury. We can do that, plus rank the pain on a ten-point scale, tell you when it started hurting, and whether it’s a shooting pain or more of an ache. That’s a powerful survival tool.

Some scientists suggest language evolved as a part of mating. We can observe a similar phenomenon in other species. The ability to make certain sounds and imitate others might make you attractive to a member of the opposite sex. (Although when it comes to human mating, this skill can prove to be a double-edged sword. I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s words: Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.)

Whatever the original imperative for human speech, we have developed languages that rise far above a dog’s warning bark or a snake’s intimidating hiss. “We can use our language to look into the future,” says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, author of Wired for Culture. “[We can] share the thoughts of others, and benefit from the wisdom of the past. We can make plans, cut deals, and reach agreements. We can woo prospective mates and threaten our enemies. We can describe who did what to whom, when they did it, and for what reason. We can describe how to do things, and what things to avoid.”³

In fact, the human body is uniquely evolved for conversation. We started out with the same basic equipment that chimps have: lips, tongue, lungs, throat, soft palate, and larynx. Those tools allow us to make noises.

(Actually, if your goal is just to create sounds and not specific noises, you don’t even need a throat, just a balloon. Inflate it and then let the air out slowly while you change the size of the neck. See the thin plastic vibrating at different speeds as you stretch it out or relax it? That’s similar to what happens inside your throat. Your vocal cords vibrate as breath passes over them.)

But we needed to make more than noises. And one of the ways we evolved differently from our ape cousins is that we developed the ability to form words. Our mouths shrank while our necks got shorter. Our lips became more flexible. We’ve even paid a high price for this evolutionary advantage because our larynx eventually moved farther down our throats. We have an additional open space back there called the pharynx. The pharynx is formed of walls of muscle that move food into the esophagus and warm up the air we breathe before it travels to the lungs.

These changes to our mouths and necks made it possible for us to form words, but they also meant that food must travel farther, past the larynx to the esophagus, in order to be digested. If it gets stuck along the way and blocks our airway, we choke. Consider that for just a moment: the human race risks death in order to communicate more clearly. That’s how crucial language is to our species.

It’s important to note that language is not the same as communication. We can communicate in complete silence, using gesture, eye contact, and touch. But language is required for conversation. Although sign language is silent, for example, it is still a formal language with vocabulary and sentence structure.

There are a number of theories that speculate how humans first developed language, but my favorite is that of Shigeru Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Miyagawa has built on the work of other linguists such as Noam Chomsky and Kenneth Hale; he argues that humans probably developed language as we know it by combining the gestural language of other animals with the songs of birds.

Gestural language is a wave of greeting or pointing to show a direction—think of the dance a bee performs to relay the location of pollen-rich flowers. We can understand the meaning of one gesture, like pointing, that’s used in isolation, just as we understand the meaning of one word, like “fire.”

But birdsong can’t be picked apart. It is the expression layer. The message is communicated holistically. In other words, you need to hear the song in its entirety to understand its meaning; it dissolves into nonsense if you try to separate it into individual pieces, just as a hieroglyph loses its meaning if you pull out individual lines. Miyagawa believes that gestures and individual words were eventually not enough for us to communicate all that we wanted to say, so we added nuanced expression.

This is why Miyagawa’s theory is my favorite—because it suggests that humans sang before they spoke.

We’ve forgotten how crucial communication is to our species, and that has perhaps made it easier to accept the disintegration of modern conversation. We may not realize how dependent we have been, historically, on our ability to communicate. It has been millennia since language and conversation became part of our survival. In that time, we have improved the tools for communication exponentially. But have we improved the communication itself? Have we improved what we say, how we say it, and how we receive what others tell us?

In a word: no.

There are two important reasons why we need to get better at talking to one another. One is economic; the other is human.

First, business: poor communication costs us about $37 billion a year, according to a study from training provider Cognisco.⁴ That boils down to a tally, per worker, of more than $26,000 annually. And that calculation only includes companies with more than one hundred employees. Imagine how much higher that number would be if we included all businesses.

Good communication, on the other hand, is quite profitable. Companies with leaders who are great communicators have nearly 50 percent higher returns than companies with unexceptional communicators at the helm.⁵ When retail giant Best Buy commissioned an in-depth study of the company’s internal communications, one of the more notable insights gleaned was that for every percentage point the company increased employee engagement through communication, stores saw a $100,000 annual increase in operating income.

And according to research by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow,⁶ most people would rather do business with someone they like and trust than someone they dislike. I realize that may seem like a no-brainer, but get this: customers will choose a likable person over a less likable one, even if the likable person’s product is lower quality and higher priced.

Here’s another way to look at it: consumers in the United States return about $14 billion worth of electronics every year. But in 85 percent of those cases, there’s nothing wrong with the merchandise. The consumer just doesn’t understand how to use the device after opening the box. Sometimes weak documentation (such as an indecipherable instruction manual) is to blame; other times the culprit is insufficient “customer education,” the formal term for the casual conversations salespeople have with customers about a product.

That translates to nearly $12 billion a year lost because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. And in reality, this represents only a front-end loss because many consumers won’t go back to a company after they’ve had to return a product they didn’t understand how to use. Billions upon billions of dollars could be saved with good, clear communication.

The research on poor communication is extensive and alarming. I mentioned earlier that lives are affected by communication in hospitals, but dollars are at stake there as well. Researchers at the University of Maryland found that so-called communication inefficiencies cost US hospitals about $12 billion every year.⁷ That’s a conservative estimate. It includes wasted time on the part of doctors and nurses, but over half of the cost stems from extra days that patients spend in the hospital because of information that wasn’t shared in a timely or clear manner.

Communication also affects employee retention. No manager wants high turnover because it’s expensive, regardless of the size of the business. It can cost more than $3,500 to replace one employee making $10 an hour.⁸ A general rule of thumb is that it costs about 20 percent of an employee’s annual salary to replace them. In other words, if the employee makes $35,000 per year, it will cost about $7,000 to replace that employee. So, losing an employee to miscommunication and lack of engagement is truly a waste of dollars and time.

But bad communication negatively affects our decisions on the front side of the hiring equation as well. I’m sure many HR administrators have had reason to think they hired the wrong candidate—but have they taken the time to figure out what went wrong? Hiring mistakes can sometimes be traced back to the job interview, to the questions that were asked and the responses that were offered. When it costs thousands to replace even a minimum-wage worker, those conversations can be measured in dollars and cents.

For example, a lot of hiring managers make the mistake of assuming that someone who talks well and a lot will be a good salesperson. The idea is that if someone is an entertaining storyteller, he or she must be great at seducing a client. But often the truth is just the opposite. Some of the most effective salespeople, the ones who sell the most, are those who can listen and respond.⁹ Those who can hold good, balanced conversations are the ones who ultimately close the deal.

Our communication skills at work are not only shaky, they are also too seldom put to use. Many of us are guilty of firing off a quick e-mail when we could have walked down the hall to chat with a colleague or picked up the phone. Research shows that we are more likely to get our message across through conversation—either in person or on the phone—than we are using a written message. And yet, we...