Supercommunicators Summary (Charles Duhigg)

The Supercommunicator is more than a guide to understanding others; it’s a blueprint for becoming understood.

Who and what are supercommunicators?

As its name revealed, They are the kind of people who are capable of effortlessly guiding a conversation. They know how to ease others and share what they think.

In this eye-opening exploration, author Charles Duhigg explores the mysteries behind successful communication. He explains the anatomy of conversations, explaining why some flow smoothly and others fail to do so.

This book will change how you think about what you say and how you say it. Let’s take a journey through the wonderful book, chapter-wise.

Chapter 1: The Matching Principle

Studies make clear an essential truth: to communicate with someone, we must connect with them. When we absorb what he is saying and they comprehend what we say, it’s because our brains are aligned to some degree.

It’s common for our body to start synchronizing at that point, too, with our pluses, facial expressions, and the feelings we’re going through.

Something about neural simultaneity helps us listen more closely and speak more clearly.

Sometimes, this connection occurs with just one person, but sometimes within a group or a large audience.

Neuroscientists say that our brain and body are affected because we are neurally entrained.

• When we are not neurally aligned, we have trouble communicating.
• When we start thinking alike, we understand each other better.

Charles explained it using an example: Scientist Sievers experimented: A group of volunteers watched a deliberately perplexing movie clip: a foreign-language film with audio and subtitles removed.

As researchers monitored their brain activity, it became clear that each participant reacted uniquely. Some were bewildered, others amused, but no two brain scans mirrored each other.

It was in a foreign language, and later, the audio and subtitles were removed. Researchers monitored the volunteers’ brains as they watched the clip and found that each person reacted slightly differently.

Some were confused, while others were entertained, but no two brain scans were alike. After watching it for an hour, they were put back in the brain scanners and shown the same clips.

After an hour of individual viewing, the volunteers were reunited and placed back in the brain scanners, where they watched the same clips again.

This time, a remarkable phenomenon emerged: their neural impulses began to synchronize with their group mates. The act of conversing and debating about the film had aligned their brains, creating a shared understanding.

This experiment reveals a fundamental truth: When people experience things in isolation, their thoughts diverge. However, the simple act of communicating—sharing perspectives, debating interpretations, and engaging in dialogue—has the power to align our minds.

Through conversation, we bridge the gaps in our understanding, find common ground, and create a shared reality.

Chapter 2: Every Conversation Is A Negotiation

As the conversation started, how did we decide what to talk about? Did someone announce the topic, or did a focus emerge gradually?

Researchers have studied subconscious dance in conversation and found a delicate, almost subconscious dance that usually occurs at the start of a discussion.

Occasionally, a conversation’s aim is stated explicitly until we realize midway through the people’s real preoccupations lie elsewhere.

Sometimes, we cycle through various starts-someone tells a joke, someone else is overly formal, and there is awkward silence until a third person takes the lead.

Eventually, the conversation’s focus is tacitly agreed upon.

Researchers call this a quit negotiation:

• The first goal of this negotiation is to determine what everyone wants from the conversation.
• The second goal is to establish rules for how you will speak, listen, and make decisions together. We don’t always explicitly state rules aloud.

Rather, we conduct experiments to see which norms will stick.

We can introduce new topics, send signals via our tonne of voice and expressions reacting to what people say, project various moods, and pay attention to how others respond.

How does a surgeon learn to communicate?

In 2014, a prominent surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York was admired for his warmth, kindness, and medical expertise.

Dr. Behfar Ehdaie specializes in treating prostate cancer; every year, hundreds of men sought his advice after receiving the news that a tumor had been discovered deep inside their groin.

However, after the best efforts of Dr. Ehdaie, they failed to hear regardless of their disease.

Treating prostate cancer involves a complicated trade-off because, in the case of surgery and radiation to prevent the cancer, the prostate gland can be impacted. Many patients have incontinence and don’t feel important after surgery.

Ehdaie believed these patients had come to him for practical medical advice, so he followed what seemed logical.

However, his patients repeatedly failed to hear what he was saying. After facing this problem for a long time, Ehdaie started asking friends for advice, and after some time, he found a professor from Harvard Business School named Deepak Malhotra.

Malhotra was a part of a group of professors studying how negotiations occur in the real world. Malhotra was intrigued.

After the decision, Malhotra advised Dr. Edhaie to take a different approach. The simplest method for converting everyone’s desires is simply asking What do you want?

Instead of starting the conversation by presenting patients with an overview of options, you should ask an open-ended question. So, do you learn about their values and what they want from life?

Now, Ehdaie asks what a patient wants to talk about by asking basic questions in different ways. Patients are willing to listen to him.

Dr. Ehdaie failed to communicate with so many patients over the years despite having great expertise in his field because he did not ask the right questions.

He had not been asking about their needs and desires and what they wanted from the conversation.

He only suggests what he knows about the database and what his knowledge says. He had deluged patients with the information they didn’t care about.

Chapter 3: The Listening Cure

Emotions are the silent architects of our conversations, shaping not only what we say but also how we interpret the words of others. They often work under our conscious awareness and affect the dynamics of every interaction.

Effective communication extends far beyond simply hearing words. True listening involves paying attention to the emotional undercurrents and decoding the messages through tone, body language, and subtle cues.

Let us understand it by an example.

How does the power of question work?

Once upon a time, Nick Epley was a very bad listener—so bad that he almost ruined his life. He had grown up in a small town in Lowa, a high school football star who was confident and strutting.

Then, one night, during his junior year, he was driving home from a boozy party, weaving across lanes, when he was pulled over for drunk driving.

The cop caught him and gave him a lecture, then he called Epley’s parents and asked them to come and get their son.

Over the next few weeks, his parents lectured him relentlessly about the dangers of his path. Epley hardly paid attention to them. A few months later, a cop arrested him again, and they also lectured him.

Now, Nick’s parents are thinking about hiring a professional counselor. But the counselor was entirely different.

She did not say she understood where he was coming from or give him advice. Instead, she asked questions.

• “Why were you drinking?
• “How would you have reacted if your car had hit someone”?
• “What would happen to your life if you had been arrested, injured yourself, or killed another person”?

The questions themselves did not ask about Epley’s emotions, but inevitably, he became emotional as he responded to them.

After the second meeting with the counselor, Epley decided he wouldn’t drink anymore. Then, he decided to get serious about school. By 2005, Epley was a professor at the University Of Chicago.

To understand the others and persuade them to listen to us. Should engage in what is known as perspective-taking. We should try to see a situation from the other person’s perspective and show them we empathize.

Chapter 4: How Do You Hear Emotions No One Says Aloud?

Chapter four examines how we can improve our ability to hear unspoken emotions and how our bodies, vocal tones, gestures, and expressions say as much as our words.

From early infancy, even before we learn to speak, we absorb how to infer people’s emotions from their behavior. As we age, this capacity diminishes.

We start paying increasing attention to what people say rather than what they do, and nonlinguistic clues are not noticed at that point.

Some people have the talent for detecting emotion, even when it is unspoken. You can find it in close relationships, like your family and friends. When you are sad without saying a word, they feel your emotion.

NASA Astronaut Nominations

There was an incident with a NASA Astronaut. In the 1980s, a NASA psychiatrist named Terence McGuire valuated astronauts’ psychological readiness for stress in space and selected the correct astronaut.

In 1984, Ronald Reagan ordered NASA to start work on an International Space Station, where people would live for a year. At that moment, NASA faced a new challenge and had a high selection standard.

But now McGuire was convinced that NASA needed to start screening to start something else: emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence involves monitoring one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions.

People with emotional intelligence know how to build relationships, empathize with colleagues, and regulate their emotionality and those around them.

A few months later, McGuire walked into the room to interview. The applicant was physically fit, with a PhD in atmospheric chemistry and fifteen years of experience in Navy services. In other words, he was the perfect NASA candidate.

During the interview, McGuire asked the candidate to describe the difficult time of his life. He said when his father passed away one year ago.

McGuire told the candidate about his sister’s unexpected death. As he spoke, his voice waved; she had meant for him.

After a few minutes, McGuire asked another question about his father. He said he was a kind man,” Kind to everyone he met.”

The candidate did not describe his father’s qualities and did not ask any questions about McGuire’s sister. The man was not selected.

After some time, another candidate came for an interview. McGuire asked the same question he had asked previously.

The man tells him about his best friend’s death and describes how, a month after his friend’s passing, he talks to him in his dream, and when McGuire tells about her sister’s death.

The candidate began asking questions: Were you closed? How did it impact your mom? Do you think about her, even now?

The candidate has been selected as an astronaut because his emotions say a lot.

Chapter 5: Connecting Amid Conflict

Let’s discuss how emotions can fuel conflicts or help solve them and how to create a safer environment for discussing disagreements online and offline.

How Do We Feel? Conversation is essential to connection. These three chapters—three, four, and five—explore how to express and hear what we feel.

• Why do some conversations change so abruptly?
• Why, at times, can it feel like we’ve made a real connection with another person, and then our environment shifts or a small conflict gets bigger, and suddenly, we find ourselves so far apart?

In the 1970s, a group of young research psychologists began wondering about this question.

Scott Stanley, a professor of psychology, said,” Couples problems are something that pastors and Friends usually deal with.”

There is research done on couples, husbands, and wives brought into laboratories and asked to describe their marriage, sex life, conversations, and fights.

Within a few year, more than a thousand arguments had been recorded. These studies reveal an interesting result.

Many couples were quite good at listening to each other and even proved they were listening. Stanley said, “That’s kind of the minimum for a marriage.”

“If you can’t show that other person you are listening to, you probably won’t get married in the first place.”

• If the couple were so good at hearing each other and proving they heard one another, why were they still splitting up?

Eventually, two findings appear. First, that nearly every couple fought; about 8 percent of Americans fought at least daily. But regardless of frequency, nearly every marriage contained some degree of conflict.

The second discovery was that those conflicts and arguments didn’t seem to last very long for some couples. They said they were happy with their marriage and choice of spouse, and didn’t think about getting divorced.

For the other couple, things are very difficult. Even small conflicts in these relationships could turn poisonous.

Two types of couples are present: the unhappy couple and the happy couple. The unhappy couple said they frequently consider divorce.

The scientist suspected that the unhappy couple were battling over more serious issues, such as money, health, drug, and alcohol use. While happy couples fought about trivial matters, such as where to spend their vacations.

Nevertheless, they discovered that their hypothesis was incorrect. Both types of couples fought over the same kind of issues.

The next hypothesis was that they could easily compromise and were solution-oriented.

Perhaps they grew bored with fighting more quickly? But wrong again.

• For example, happy couples often spend much time controlling their emotions.
• They take breaks when they feel themselves growing angry.
• They worked hard to calm down through deep breathing or by writing down.

In a conflict, focus on controlling :

• Yourself
• Your Environment
• The conflict boundaries

It allowed happy spouses to control things they could control together.

Chapter 6: Our Social Identities Shape Our Worlds

How to harness our evolutionary instinct to trust those who are like us and distrust those who aren’t.

Use it to connect, even if our backgrounds and beliefs make us different. The following two chapters, chapters 6 and 7, explore social conversation and how it can succeed, even amid discomfort.

“ It is not the differences that divide us.” “ It is the ability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”
Audre Lorde

Who Are We? Conversation explores how our social identities make us and the world richer.

Jay Rosenbloom graduated from medical school in 1996, but before he became a practicing doctor, he spent much of his first year doing the run-of-the-mill “well baby” exam.

Every day, anxious parents visited him and asked about feeding schedules, dippers’ rashes, swaddling techniques, and burping methods.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommended starting vaccinations against diseases such as polio and whooping cough within three months of birth, and most parents were enthusiastic about their infants getting the shorts.

Some parents, though, were skeptical. They had heard these vaccines caused autism, physical deformities, or infertility.

They worried vaccines were a profit-making ploy and made more kids more susceptible to disease so that companies could sell them more drugs.

And some parents objected simply because they did not like anything the government recommended.

Rosenbloom knew that it was irrational. He tried to convince the parents about the vaccination, and children came in with easily preventable, life-threatening diseases.

He tried everything he could think of—usually to no avail. Sometimes, he shared his research, thinking that parents would thank him.

However, a week later, he finds that his parents switched to another clinic. As Dr. Rosenbloom encountered more and more parents who refused vaccinations, their refusal was tied to their social identities.

We are skeptical about the medical establishment or we don’t like the government telling us what to do.

This is a discussion between the parents. However, to Rosenbloom, the problem was not just his patients.

Doctors were also influenced by social identities. In early 2020, he started hearing the news that the COVID-19 virus had spread worldwide, and nations were closing their borders and initiating lockdowns.

The United States population reached two million, and the Federal government announced that vaccines would eventually be provided to everyone.

According to the National Institutes of Health, approximately 85 percent of Americans would require an injection to achieve hard immunity.

Rosenbloom’s first thought? That’s ludicrous. There’s no chance that many people will agree to get a shot.

Now, what changed here? The social identities. Millions of people took vaccinations because everyone saw one another as members of the command tribe.

Chapter 7: How Do We Make The Hardest Conversations Safer?

The most challenging conversation pertains to the systematic manifestations of injustice.

For example, if we think more intentionally about how they should occur, they can be elevated.

Reed Hasting started Netflix in 1997. His business philosophy was that the fewer rules, the better.

At Netflix, the culture deck explained, we seek excellence,” and in return, employees were granted unusual freedom.

Workers could take many vacations, work whichever days or hours they desire, and be authorized to make any kind of purchase, including a first-class plane ticket.

They could acquire a new computer or millions of dollars to acquire a film without prior permission, as long as they could justify their choice.

Netflix employees were encouraged to submit applications to other companies if they offered a higher salary.

First, they try to meet the salary, and second, they motivate him to move on. The company expected an “amazing amount of important work.”

Whenever someone was dismissed—which happened frequently—another Netflix ritual kicked in, a note was sent to the person, team, department, and sometimes the entire company.

This mail discusses the departing employee’s disappointing work habits, questionable decisions, and mistakes—all of which are spelled out in detail for everyone.

Actually, it’s helpful when you read a few of those emails, you come to know what company expectations are.

As the company expanded, there was a growing pain. In 2011, Hasting, without much internal debate, decided to split the company into two parts.

One company would handle DVDs by mail, and the others would provide online streaming services.

Top executives told Hasting they disagreed with him and he had to take his decision back.

The culture deck was amended to note, “Silent disagreement is unacceptable.”

One advantage of this culture is that nothing is off the table. Employees can present their views.

Hasting regularly sent emails to employees criticizing them for his strategies or comments during the meetings. Reed would publicly thank them,” said the executive. “I have never worked in a culture like this before. It is amazing.”

It was also effective. Netflix’s stock recovered, and the company got larger every year.

Its unusual culture enables it to hire some of the world’s best software engineers, television producers, tech executives, and filmmakers.

It quickly became one of the most admirable and successful firms in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Fortune magazine named Hasting Businessperson of the Year.