Should You Supercommunicate?

It feels like a magic bullet. Learn how better to communicate and you will rule the world. Learn how better to connect with other people and you will be showered with fame and fortune. 

Charles Duhigg offers the answer to whatever has been troubling you. He has written a new book about it all, helping you to become what he calls a supercommunicator.

Most people have enough trouble communicating. Now they must aspire to supercommunicate. 

It is all very tempting. You should learn to say the right thing to the right person at the right time in the right place. Apparently, you need but read Duhigg’s new book and you will learn how to do it. 

One feels compelled to return to a point that I have occasionally made on these pages. Namely, that men and women do not communicate in the same way. Men share experiences; they do things together. Women share feelings. So said New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle, and she was surely correct. 

If you adopt a communication style that is unsuited to your sex, you are going to turn people off and turn them away.

Besides, saying the right thing to the right person at the right time in the right place requires you to have a command of the language. And of the situation at hand.

If you are barely literate and mumble your words you are not going to supercommunicate. You are not even going to communicate. To imagine that you can overcome your deficiencies by feeling feelings or by showering the room with empathy is a ruse to dupe the gullible.

Duhigg explains his point of view:

Why are some people better at connecting with others, hearing what’s unsaid and speaking so others want to listen? Can anyone learn to do this? 

He is highly optimistic about what it takes to say exactly the right thing. If an individual has nothing to say and does not relate to the conversation, his ability to supercommunicate will be easily compromised.

One finding is that some of us seem to be what I call “supercommunicators”—people capable of saying exactly the right thing, breaking through to almost anyone, figuring out how to connect in even the most unlikely circumstances.

Given the limitations of an op-ed Duhigg seems to be ignoring the basic point. You cannot communicate if you do not know your subject. You cannot have a conversation about football if you know nothing about football. The same applies to a discussion of how to manufacture mechanized widgets.

And, lest we forget, social status, occupation and status define what you can and cannot say, to whom, when and where. 

When Duhigg recommends that you ask questions of your interlocutor and that you probe deeply, he does not place sufficient emphasis on the simple fact that you need to know what the purpose of the conversation is. And you need to know who you are and the nature of your relationship with the other person. 

Duhigg recommends deep questions, which is often rude and disrespectful. Why would you confide in someone you do not know whether or not you can trust? Do you want to explain to a stranger your childhood traumas, your sexually transmitted diseases or your plans for future exploitation?

Many good conversations begin with small talk and do not probe too deeply. Asking deep questions is often rude, depending on who you are, your position in society and your interlocutor’s function. 

You do not ask your manager how he really feels. You might offer your opinion about a subject, but larding feeling on it all will often make you sound like a whiner.

Duhigg seems to want people to act more like therapists and less like interlocutors. 

When we meet someone new, it’s natural to ask about facts of their life: What kind of medicine do you practice? Where’d you go to college? But those kinds of questions are often conversational dead-ends.

Rather, ask something that invites someone to talk about their values, beliefs or experiences—such as, How did you decide to go into medicine? What did you love about college? Deep questions are powerful because they invite us to share something authentic and potentially vulnerable. When we match that vulnerability—You decided on medicine after seeing your dad get sick? I became a lawyer when my cousin was unfairly arrested—we trigger instincts that make us feel more trusting and more eager to listen and share. “Vulnerability is one of our loudest emotions,” Harvard researcher Amit Goldenberg told me. “We’re hardwired to notice it.” 

In today’s psycho world, “vulnerability” is a buzzword. It has taken the place of the notion that we should all get in touch with our feminine sides. It ignores the simple fact that we are trying to forge a connection, not to do therapy. We are first trying to figure out whether we belong to the same group as the other person, and whether we can trust him to keep a secret. We are not in it to plumb the depths of his or her soul. 

Great leaders do not become great because they advertise their vulnerability. Being vulnerable is not the same as being trustworthy or reliable. Most often we begin conversations with small talk, with comments that do not probe too deeply into matters that do not concern us. If we cannot make small talk about non-threatening subjects we are very unlikely to advance to big talk.

When we first meet someone we want to know whether they are trustworthy, loyal and reliable. It is not about their biography, their past history, their parents and their siblings. We are connecting as social beings, not as soulful whiners looking for another therapeutic experience.