Conversation Analysis is a powerful tool that looks at large numbers of conversations to help build insights about what works and what doesn’t.

Elizabeth Stokoe is a Professor of Social Interaction at Loughborough University, and shares some key insights from her excellent book, Talk, the science of conversation and her well-received TedX talk.

As she suggests in the opening quote, any conversation that you participate in has a landscape to it.

What Conversation Analysis can do - and we are all conversation analysts, just not professional ones - is show us the texture of that landscape, and how to navigate the bumps in the road effectively.

One surprising idea I absorbed from Professor Stokoe is in this quote, when she says that:

“In a way, the best conversations might have some clumsy, awkward moments and through that way, you might move past it and into something more mutual”

We know what is natural and easy because we know what feels clumsy. Seeing, accepting and moving past the clumsy can help us find a smoother path.

We are the Turns We Take

Elizabeth’s idea that we are the turns we take, that speech acts are real acts, is a powerful one. And so is her idea that non-responsiveness or silence in reply to an awkward turn can get things “back on track”. If someone comes in “hot” to a conversation an easy way to cool things down is to wait and let the person fix it themselves, as she says:

“People will figure out that they just did something that was a bit off and fix it.”

What I really loved about talking with Professor Stokoe is that she busts conversation myths with ease - and Science!

There are many popular ideas about conversations, from how they differ across cultures to how much communication consists of body language to how men and women speak differently - both in amounts and type.

Professor Stokoe suggests that there are many more similarities than differences across cultures and genders. She is in fact, more interested in how we construct gender through speech, than how our biological gender influences speech.

And she also reasonably suggests that if body language is 90% of communication, why can we communicate just fine over the phone? There is, as it turns out, very little science to support many such figures.

Working with real conversations instead of simulations

Elizabeth also casts very reasonable doubts on some of industry’s favorite models to explore interactions, like secret shoppers - it turns out that people who are acting like customers don’t act like customers.

She also suggests that using role-play in training is not as effective as it could be.

Conversational Analysis can offer better insights by studying real conversations en masse, in fine-grained detail.

Be sure to listen all the way to minute 45 when we dive into group conversation dynamics and how people learn what behaviors are acceptable in a session in the opening seconds of an interaction. It is shocking how quickly the landscape of a conversation is built and surveyed by the participants.

Links, Notes and Resources

Elizabeth Stokoe’s TEDx talk

A deep dive on her work on the TED blog

More on CARM training

Elizabeth’s excellent book, Talk

On Body language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Mehrabian “Mehrabian's findings on inconsistent messages of feelings and attitudes (the "7%-38%-55% Rule") are well-known, the percentages relating to relative impact of words, tone of voice, and body language when speaking. Arguably these findings have been misquoted and misinterpreted throughout human communication seminars worldwide”

Lenny the anti-cold-calling chatbot

More about conversation and gender from Professor Stokoe here.

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