What's Missing From Communication Books

Issue 237

Milan, 2019

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Whenever I skim through popular communication books, I always wonder about the missing chapters. What feels like a startling, peculiar hole at the center of these books is an absence that I’ve struggled to understand. Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg is a contemporary example, but the same absence comes in popular works by Malcolm Gladwell or David Brooks, or really in any title that’s geared toward speaking or charisma or listening or persuasion or negotiation or, most especially, social connection. Because I’m endlessly fascinated by language, I typically look at these releases, and I occasionally discover some useful information, yet I can’t ignore what’s omitted from all of these books, the unwritten chapters that aren’t really forgotten but that are, rather, completely invisible to the writers.

What I find most striking is the unstated assumption that all conversations should have an objective. That’s a perfectly reasonable claim for some environments, but the claim collapses once you examine most lives. I also find it striking to notice that our most celebrated communicators—lecturers, artists, storytellers—don’t follow the standard techniques that are promoted by most popular communication books. Isn’t it just a little perplexing that our most popular books about communication don’t address the majority of conversations and also fail to account for our most compelling conversationalists?

These books follow a pattern: real stories about tricky conversations are linked to the latest academic research in psychology, with the specific examples explaining the general principles. The goal, for readers, is connection, emotional vulnerability, understanding, and the techniques are listening, questioning, and openness. In Supercommunicators, to select the most recent bestseller, the book begins with the premise that there are three types of conversations—the first relates to decisions, the second relates to emotions, the third relates to the social atmosphere. There’s nuance, and Duhigg stresses that conversations veer and twist and transform, rather than remain static, which makes the conversational types more like dials than switches. Because our culture isn’t exactly suffering from an excess of listening skills, this is all perfectly fine, and there’s some reasonable advice about making better connections when a discussion becomes charged, but these types don’t really match what, at least for me, I see in the world.

Sure, a business meeting should have an objective, and knowing that objective is vital, just as talking about where to eat is a conversation that’s centered on an objective, but the vast majority of your conversations—I do hope—are more unstructured, indirect, circuitous, closer to the extemporaneous conversation that occurs during a long car ride than the prosaic conversation that occurs when you decide to take a long car ride. And I think it is reasonable to want the vast majority of your conversations with friends and family to follow this same principle.

There’s a relentlessness to the unspoken view that every conversation must have an endpoint that I find a little sad, as it implies an endless, futile, search, that we must be moving forever closer to some elusive endpoint. What’s the point of a post-dinner conversation? Or a meandering, haphazard conversation during a walk? How about a conversation over a coffee? In each case, the point is the conversation, with the means also the ends. If you play a game with children, you are, ideally, aware that the goal of the game is to play the game: what you’re doing, in that very moment, is the entire point. To search for an intrinsic meaning that comes by completing the game is to miss the point, just like, when you meet a friend for a drink, the goal is that moment, and not to achieve some endpoint.

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What’s curious, too, is how these books are steeped in American business culture, which is practical and worth studying and occasionally even interesting, but certainly not a universal way of living in the world. At the foundation of these books are techniques—restating your partner’s words, asking emotional questions—that are somehow delivered as general rather than specific principles. My sense is that the writers have visited a reasonably well-run suburban office park and deemed its procedures the ideal form of human communication in all circumstances. And this prompts me to picture a clever American high school student sent to France, who is now required to compose essays with a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, suddenly aware that what felt like a universal way to argue at home was actually a particular way to argue.

And if you’re drawn to vibrant, stimulating, lively conversations, then you might notice an even more glaring omission from these books: the culture’s most artful speakers don’t follow the prescriptions in these titles. Regardless of whom you would describe as an artful speaker, there are some consistent ingredients in the creation of artful speech. But you won’t find chapters about sonorous language. Nor will you read about incisive sentences. There won’t be anything at all about how resonant and spirited and beguiling words are what enliven and engage listeners.

This is very strange: our most universally recognized public storytellers don’t follow the prescriptions in our bestselling books about communication. Everyone will have different preferences, of course, but here’s a haphazard list of artists and public figures noted for their speaking abilities: Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Stephen Fry, Richard Burton, Katharine Hepburn, Mia Couto, Maya Angelou, Václav Havel, Gabriel García Márquez, David Attenborough, Orson Welles. If you listen to a story told by anybody on that list, you’ll hear that the objective isn’t merely to describe a scene, to reach some larger point, but that the articulation of the story itself is part of the delight—the diction, enunciation, the flavor of the sentences. After you notice the lacuna in these books you can’t overlook what’s missing: what draws us closer as listeners isn’t what’s taught in books about communication.

One objection might be that this critique is unfair. Supercommunicators, especially, is focused on connection, on making our most troublesome conversations more fruitful, and it isn’t a literary stylebook or a reference manual about rhetoric. But that’s almost certainly a false choice. You can find connection, emotional vulnerability, and have better conversations, without forcing every conversation to have an objective, without ignoring the most delightful elements of language. And isn’t it just a little odd that a book that’s titled Supercommunicators contains neither the word wit nor the word literary?