Matt Abrahams: Communication is a vivid, visceral experience, a true connection between you and the other person.
I'm Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
Today, I'm excited to speak with Alan Alda.
Alan is an acclaimed actor, writer, and director.
He is also the founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University.
Where he has dedicated his efforts to helping scientists and health professionals communicate more effectively with the public.
He is the author of several books, including his latest on communication, If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
And finally, he hosts an awesome podcast called Clear+Vivid.
Alan, thank you for being with me today.
I so look forward to our conversation.
Alan Alda: I do too, Matt.
Thank you.
Thanks for talking with me.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah.
Should we get started?
Alan Alda: Yeah, let's go.
Matt Abrahams: Excellent.
So you've dedicated a large part of your career to helping technical scientific folks communicate more clearly.
Can you share with us what drives that energy and passion for this topic?
Alan Alda: Well, I'm passionate personally to know more about the way the universe works.
And that means scientists explaining to me in terms I can understand it.
Science can't do its work unless it gets funded.
And it can't get funded if people don't understand what the scientists are trying to do, what they're trying to accomplish.
And that means they have to really understand what's going on in the minds of the policy makers, the public, so they can feel comfortable funding it.
But also so they have the ability to caution the scientists about concerns they have that are ethical.
But you can only raise a question if you understand what the basic stuff is about.
Matt Abrahams: So you were motivated, it sounds like, out of your own curiosity.
But the real driver is to help these very technical scientific people be able to communicate in a way that those of us who have less knowledge can better understand what it is they're doing.
And you've highlighted a really important topic that we've heard many times on this podcast, which is it really boils down to understanding your audience.
And the way you speak to politicians, the way you speak to the lay public, the way you speak to colleagues in a different discipline, has to be different based on your appreciation of what they know and what they don't know.
Alan Alda: And you have to do some work to find out what they do know and what they're interested in, how they understand certain things.
You know, there was a landmark meeting of nanoscientists and neuroscientists when President Obama brought together a group to work on the brain.
I've been told by several people who were actually in the room that they argued for hours, the neuroscientists and nanoscientists, about the meaning of one word.
The word probe.
It meant something to each group in a different way, so it can be very important.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah, absolutely.
And it comes down to the words we use, and often people will use lots of jargon and terminology that people don't understand.
Or maybe a word that everybody understands, but they understand it to mean something differently.
Which leads to my second question.
I have seen you often talk about communication pitfalls and mistakes people make, such as jargon and assumptions.
What strategies do you recommend and teach for avoiding these issues and ensuring that our messages are accessible for everyone?
Alan Alda: The way you get an understanding of other people, I don't think is through tips.
At the Center for Communicating Science, we put people through experiential learning.
We use exercises drawn from the study of improvisation, for instance, not to get the scientists able to make things up on their feet.
But the experience that's much more central to improvisation, which is connecting to another person, to being aware of what their face is telling you, what their body language, what their tone of voice is telling you.
And to speak to that to make that connection.
For me, the difference between tips and experience is really it's a vast difference.
For instance, there's an example that kind of lingers in my mind, is there's a speed sign in the country near where I live and it says twenty miles an hour.
And I routinely have gone past that at forty miles an hour until I was stopped by a policeman and given a ticket.
The speed sign is the tip.
The ticket is the experience.
Matt Abrahams: I appreciate the analogy.
I would love for you then to share with us perhaps a specific experience that you helped these scientists work through so that they can learn that, how to read a room.
And what I hear you saying, the core essence of avoiding these pitfalls, is really being other focused and not self focused.
It's really thinking about how the message is landing and observing that.
What kind of activities and exercises and experiences do you put these folks through to help them develop that skill?
Alan Alda: One of the most basic things we do is mirroring.
For instance, you would be my mirror and every move I make would be mirrored by you in real time with no echo.
Matt Abrahams: Mirroring is a phenomenon that I'm very familiar with and it's one where you mimic the other person.
And the activity you're doing requires to be very present oriented and to be very other oriented so that you can be in that moment.
And what it does is it opens up the aperture, if you will, to paying attention to a lot of things that many of us when we communicate, we just don't see.
We're just so wrapped up in saying what we want to say.
So it truly is an experience that people can learn from and sensitize themselves to those other folks.
In your teaching and most recent book, you discuss the importance of clarity and vividness in communication.
Why are these so important and what advice or guidance do you have for enhancing clarity and vividness?
Alan Alda: I think clarity is really important.
Clarity and vividness.
And that's why I call my podcast Clear+Vivid.
Vividness is important because that's how things stick in the mind.
You know, I'm fond of that story about the speed sign and the ticket because it's visual.
You see the idea visually.
Matt Abrahams: Vividness is very important, and I certainly see how vividness and clarity together can really help someone absorb the information that you're communicating.
Do you have reflections on reflection about communication?
Do you encourage people to think about what worked and what didn't?
Alan Alda: I do, and I do it myself.
I'm very, very interested in watching a YouTube of two people talking, or two people at a dinner table, and judging where they're on the rails and where they go off the rails.
And it's when they're not connecting with one another.
And what you get is two dueling monologues.
And each monologue is mainly interesting to the person making it.
And the other one is waiting for the cue that now it's their turn to talk and generally stay on topic, but not necessarily.
Matt Abrahams: Right.
So a conversation is not just turn taking monologues, there's a connection there.
What have you found helps bring that connection about?
I'll use an example.
When you and I did not know each other before we started this.
But when we started before we hit record, I felt that you did a few things to help connect to us.
You connected through a common experience that I thought brought us closer together through a third shared experience that we both had.
Alan Alda: I think I did do that deliberately, maybe not consciously.
But I do that at the beginning of every conversation that I do on the podcast.
And we've done three hundred of them or more so far.
And I always feel the first few seconds are very important to establish that we're just two folks talking because everybody needs to get a little relaxed.
When I was a young actor, I'd be nervous on opening night.
I'd hear the roar of the crowd through the house curtain, and I'd think, they're here to judge me.
And then I began to get the awareness, finally, that they paid money to come see the show to have a good time.
And I thought, all I have to do is what I know how to do, and they'll probably have a good time.
And I not only got relaxed, I got eager to see them, eager to be among them.
Matt Abrahams: The last point that you made, I think, is critical for all of us to understand.
It is, I believe, and those of us who study communication and anxiety that goes with communication believe that we are being judged when we communicate, but how we frame that judging.
In your case, as an actor who people were paying to come see, see you perform, they wanted to be there.
And in most cases, when people present in a meeting or at a conference, people are choosing to be there, they're not coming there saying, I want to judge this person presenting.
They're there to learn or to have an experience that you get to contribute to.
And by reframing that in much the way it sounds like you did, it can change your whole approach.
Instead of something that is one where you have to be defensive and guarded, you can actually embrace that connection and that offering that you have to make.
And I think that's really fundamental in helping people feel more confident.
Alan Alda: And that feeling of confidence leads to something else that you might not have expected.
Which is, well, it brings the real you out.
There's nothing more engaging than the real you.
Not the prepared you, not the rehearsed you, not the you that's wondering if your tie is straight or is there a smudge on your coat, you know.
It's who you really are in your openness, in your weakness, and in your strength.
And to allow yourself to do that, and you can only do it through connection, in my opinion.
Through accepting the presence of the other person and respecting that presence.
When you have that, then you let you out.
And if you're talking with another person, it lets the other person's person out as well.
Matt Abrahams: It certainly is a virtuous cycle.
And that's where I think the paralysis of anxiety and concern blocks that from happening.
And if we can move ourselves beyond the insecurity and the doubt, then we can allow that to come out as you shared happened for you.
It strikes me that in the latter part of your career, you've gone from speaking words, maybe words that you wrote or others wrote, to asking lots of questions.
Do you have advice and guidance on how to ask good questions to get good answers and good connection?
You interview for your podcast.
I know you do a lot with scientists.
What makes for a good question?
Alan Alda: I think really wanting to know, really being curious.
If you want something interesting to come out of the person, ask that person the question you really want the answer to.
It's not, tell me about chapter one, now tell me about chapter two.
Matt Abrahams: I would be delighted if you asked me a question that you're curious about either our conversation or the things that get talked about on this podcast.
Alan Alda: I am curious to know how you started getting into this?
Because it's something that's interior to our souls more than it is something like the mechanics of a car.
Matt Abrahams: I grew up as a son of a teacher, an elementary school teacher and a lawyer.
My mother was very creative and her language was very flowery and it was all about engagement.
I mean, she was teaching fourth graders.
And my father, on the other hand, was a lawyer and it was very regimented and had to be structured and concise and clear.
And I remember watching their communication patterns and being fascinated by it.
When I was about seven or eight, my mother got very frustrated with my brother and me for all the toys and tchotchkes we had around.
And she said, we're having a garage sale.
And I grew up in a community, Alan, where there were lots of garage sales.
And my mother said, we need to make sure our garage sale signs stand out.
Because otherwise nobody will see it.
So she had us insert a B in the middle of the word garage, which made it a garbage sale, not a garage sale.
And we sold more stuff that weekend than anybody in our whole neighborhood.
And my mother to this day thinks it's because our sign stood out.
I think people thought we were stupid.
But my point is, I learned at that age that words, that language can actually change behavior.
And ever since then I've been fascinated by it, went to school, graduate school, studied it, and now have the pleasure of teaching it.
And that's really where I think my origin comes from.
Alan Alda: How old were you at the garage sale?
Matt Abrahams: Seven or eight.
I can still remember the toys she made me sell.
Alan Alda: That's great.
But talk about being vivid.
To put the B in the garage sign is really eye catching.
Matt Abrahams: Yeah, I want to come back to this notion of what makes for a good story, because you have told several stories, and vividness is clear.
Are you strategically thinking as you're telling your stories about inserting vividness or is it just something that you do naturally?
Because not everybody is an equally good storyteller.
I think you can learn to be a better storyteller.
How conscious or unconscious is it for you personally?
Alan Alda: I think a lot of it has become unconscious, the way I talk.
But good storytelling goes back to Aristotle, and although he talked about what made the story on the stage work, how a play works best, I really think it applies to almost every kind of communication, where there's a story involved, where somebody is trying to achieve something.
Something gets in the way and they have to overcome that obstacle to get what they want.
And for me, the joke is that if they get what they want, it's a comedy.
If they fail to get what they want, it's a tragedy.
But that idea of being in motion, being in action, you can identify with the person.
I tell a story about myself and I encounter something like the cop giving me a ticket.
I think I'm the hero of that story for a while.
I don't want the ticket and I don't like having learned the lesson, but I got it now.
Matt Abrahams: Right.
What I hear in that answer is that there's a structure to story.
And you then hang on that structure, vivid description, personal experience, revealing information, disclosure, and that's what makes for a successful story.
I think having a structure is really important.
Alan Alda: You brought up in my mind something that I do deliberately, which is being aware that the person I'm talking to is probably saying to themselves at some point, why is he telling me all this?
So unless I know that a memory that I have associated with the story, unless I know that it is connected to the punchline, I leave it out.
I don't give every detail I remember happened.
When people tell stories, it's seductive, you're reminded of elements.
I was in Grand Central Station.
I was going to visit my brother, but he wasn't going to be there because he was on vacation.
Who cares?
It's not connected to the point you're making.
Matt Abrahams: Right.
My mother has this saying, tell the time, don't build the clock.
Alan Alda: That's good.
She's a good teacher.
Matt Abrahams: Yes, but I think what you're highlighting there is a lot of us add detail.
We build the clock that's not necessary to be built.
Well, Alan, before we end, I like to ask three questions of everybody.
One I create just for you and the other two, I ask all the guests who've ever been on the show.
Are you up for answering these?
Alan Alda: Sure.
Matt Abrahams: So my first question, just for you, you are quite an accomplished communicator and somebody who spends a lot of time thinking about communication.
I think you and I both agree that we can always get better in our communication.
Uh, what is one area of your communication that you're working on to improve?
Alan Alda: I work probably every day, most of the day, on being able to really listen to the other person.
But you can't learn it well enough.
There's always more to learn and there's always more, a new way to realize that if you do that, you're listening better.
Matt Abrahams: I tried my best to listen to what you said, and I would agree that listening is a great skill to work on.
Question number two.
Who is a communicator that you admire, and why?
Alan Alda: Two guys, Brian Greene and Steven Strogatz, because they love physics and mathematics.
They really love it, and they really love helping you understand it.
There's no fakery about it.
Let me see if I can find a way to say this, that you have the same excitement about it that I do.
And I really admire that in both of them.
Matt Abrahams: So it sounds like some authenticity and passion for getting the information across is key there.
My third and final question for you, what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?
Alan Alda: Connecting, communicating, and clarity.
And the thing about all three of them is that they're all based on hearing what the other person is really saying.
Really getting inside the person, letting the person be real to you.
Accepting them.
Letting them in.
Matt Abrahams: That notion of accepting and having the person be real to you I think is really powerful.
I thought you were going to say the three things they all have in common is they start with the letter C.
And that's true too.
Alan, it has been a true delight to speak with you.
Talking to somebody who has spent the time you have reflecting on what makes for effective communication is beneficial for me and hopefully for all of our listeners.
The idea of being vivid, being clear and being connected are essential for communication and for furthering the goals that we have.
Thank you for your time.
Alan Alda: Thank you, Matt.
I enjoyed our conversation very much.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast, Talk Smart, the podcast.
To learn more about connecting with your audience when communicating, please listen to episode 82 with Nancy Duarte.
And to learn more about becoming a better listener, please check out episode 117 with Julian Treasure.
This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder.
With thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
Please check us out on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts.
Be sure to subscribe and rate us.
Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram.
And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.