Jefferson Fisher | The Next Conversation Workbook | Talks at Google

Jefferson Fisher was an esteemed Texas trial lawyer whose very job when communicating was to win, right? And although he came to reconsider that goal when it comes to communication, he did find that a lot of the tactics that worked in the courtroom could also benefit those of us in our day-to-day lives. In the communication from our dining room table to our boardroom seats. And he has come out with not one, but two rather splendid books to help us with just that, one of which we are going to be talking about today, "The Next Conversation Workbook." So without further ado, let me introduce you to Jefferson, and we're going to have a little chat about chatting. Jefferson Fisher, everyone. Welcome to Google. Good to have you. I'll pass you right over here.

Hey, everybody.

Jefferson, this isn't your first time in New York. When were you last here?

Oh, I was here back in, I don't know, March.

March? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A little bit different.

Right, but from Texas originally, right?

That's correct.

Yeah, yeah. What's your general views on the city? How do you like being in New York?

You know, there— I don't understand really. You'll have these gases that, like, come under the ground and above the ground. And I'm like, does anybody question. This feels like it's opening up my pores like at a spa, and like nobody really cares. Uh, it's great. New York is awesome. The food is great, and the people are even greater, so I'm loving it.

Food is pretty great. Um, look, I imagine you might have been experiencing a little bit of déjà vu recently because it's pretty hard to talk about your new book without also talking about its best-selling predecessor, The Next Conversation. Um, now tell me, what is the relationship between these books? Is it a codependent relationship? Do they Do they need each other or can they stand alone?

They can stand alone.

They can stand alone.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit about what these books have to do with each other.

Sure. So last March I had a book called The Next Conversation come out and I was honored for it to be New York Best Times and I was at the— it's like that big 3-story Barnes Noble somewhere here in New York. Sweet. I'm not really sure where things are yet. It's pretty big, but that was a wonderful time. And the workbook is based on that, but it gives practical exercises. So a lot of prompts, a lot of places to journal and write things down to actually apply it. So it's practical exercises for arguing less and talking more.

Mm-hmm. I like this because we can sometimes get very bunged up in the theory, especially in a place like Google. We talk a lot about, like, ideas, and I think putting things actually into an application-focused context is often really important for us. So I'm very glad that you've accompanied what was already an excellent book with an excellent companion. So look, you, you do communication videos online. They gather tens of millions of views. Clearly, your advice resonates very deeply with everyone from engineers to executives and everything in between. You will have a range of those people in the audience with us today. Who did you write this book for? Who do you most hope in the room today will pick up a copy and take a read?

The person who is that middle, finds himself in the middle. Usually, they have people who are underneath them and also have to talk to people above them. They have to manage these relationships where you also have to lead, but also you have to report. And so I find a lot of my content resonates a lot with teachers because they have, of course, students and faculty and parents, of course. And so as a son of a teacher, and my sister's a teacher, and my mother-in-law is a principal, there's a lot to be said for good communication when it comes to our education.

What was it like being raised by amazing teachers like that? It must have taught you a lot about communication from an early age.

It taught me a lot about sitting still and keeping my mouth quiet when they were talking. My brothers had my mom for a teacher, and Lord, I don't wish that I didn't have to have that. But yeah, it taught me a lot about being very disciplined.

Being very disciplined. Okay, well, before we dive into some specifics about some of the ideas and rules and principles in your book, let's set the stage a little. When I was preparing to chat with you today, I was looking up some quotes about what people tend to say about communication. And I found one from George Bernard Shaw, who famously cautioned that the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. Now, I wonder if an Irish playwright and a Texan lawyer would see eye to eye here. What do you think is the single biggest problem in communication?

That what was said was what was heard. Usually we get into this conflict, and anybody who's been in any kind of relationship knows what it feels like to go, "I didn't say that," and they go, "Yeah, you did," and you're like, "That's not what I said," and they're like, "I wish I had it recorded. You know what? I wish I had a video camera to show you that you said this," and you're like, "That's not how I said it." So we have this skewed understanding of just because I said it is exactly how the other person receives it. So instead of saying, That's not what I said. What I would consider you to try after the principles in my book is instead saying, "Well, what did you hear? What did you hear?" That allows you to at least have some kind of perspective that we're terrible subjective judgers of what we say because we not only will say my words, I also will interpret them for you, and that's where we get in trouble.

Fascinating. Actually, it turns out an Irish playwright and a Texan lawyer might actually share something in common there. I think there's a fascinating idea about if what George Bernard Shaw was trying to do was like write something for an audience to hear, and what you're often doing in the courtroom is, you know, delivering something that a jury or a judge or some kind of adjudicator is going to hear. Actually, maybe those things are more similar than they might in some ways appear on the surface. Anyway, I am neither a Texas playwright nor a Texan lawyer, but I'm a British behavioral scientist, which is hard to say but fun to do. So I share your fascination with human behavior and communication, and I think a lot about how behavioral biases influence how we talk, how we argue. And you talk about several such phenomena in your book, from fundamental attribution error to confirmation bias, the autonomic nervous system, to the idea of flooding. The one that really stands out to me though, slightly selfishly because it's what I wrote my thesis on, is cognitive dissonance.

Mm-hmm.

Tell me what cognitive dissonance has to do with communication, how it shows up, and for better or for worse and what we can do about it.

I come from a small town in Texas, and so though this is not going to be the best use of my vocabulary, cognitive dissonance is that part in a conversation when you're listening, you go, "I don't really like that." I hear an opinion, "I don't really agree with that opinion." Cognitive dissonance really, in my opinion, shows up when you hear something without even thinking about it, you go, Like you just start to frown. You start to go, "I don't know if I agree with that. I don't know if I like that." Anything that somebody says, any kind of opinion that they give, we have this filter of saying, "Does this agree with me or is this something that does not agree with me?" Every opinion that is different from yours, however big or however small, it hits that system to where you feel that dissonance of going, That doesn't agree with me. So you might hear an opinion that disagrees with something you learned when you were 6. It's an opinion that disagrees with something your grandmother believed. It's something that's deeply rooted within you, and all of a sudden when you hear an opinion that's different from yours, we just put up our walls, and all of a sudden we get into confirmation bias. We get into different types of modes where we start defending and filtering out everything. You see this a lot with juries. In an opening argument is crucial. In fact, even before that, when I'm picking a jury, what they call voir dire down in Texas, voir dire up here in the Northeast, and that's simply a process where it's my first chance to paint a frame about the case. And instantly, without even knowing it, every jury and every person even here is, you're starting to sniff of, I don't know, does this guy know his stuff? Does he not know his stuff? Like, I don't know if I really like him. And you start looking at every little micro expression. And once you decide, I like this side, you immediately filter out everything that doesn't go with that side. We do that in every little argument, every opinion that we hear.

What can we do about it? If you're talking to someone and you're trying to convince them of something or explain a concept to them, and I think we can also see it happening in the people we talk to, you can notice when you're saying something, it's just hitting a membrane wall around them where they're like, "Nuh-uh, I don't agree with that," or, "That doesn't align with what I already believe." What can we do about it when we're trying to communicate with someone like that?

It's an understanding that the person you see is not necessarily the person you're talking to. We all have a surface. We all have a depth. And usually, if I were to tell you, you're wrong, I might also be saying, your grandfather's wrong, your mom's wrong. All these deeply held beliefs that you've had your whole life, that experience you had when you were at camp when you were 8, is all wrong, and you will go to the ends of the earth to keep that comfort rather than reject it because you keep to what you know. That's why a lot of times in arguments, evidence doesn't work. Facts don't work. You have all this stuff online and in news articles and politics where they do fact-checker. Does anybody— does it really sway anybody? Generally, no. Because a lot of the times the facts don't matter, it's the strongly held belief that we've had. So what do you do instead? It's, um, if there's something I want you to remember from our brief time, it's this: when you go into that difficult conversation, you want to change somebody's mind, have something to learn, not something to prove. So the more you can stop pushing your opinion and instead flip it and start trying to learn more about their opinion, it opens them up, and all of a sudden their drawbridge starts to come down because they start to share, and then they kind of get curious about where you are. So instead of the, "Why do you believe that?" It's— instead of the why, use an open-ended question. "Well, how long have you felt that way? What led to that? When did you first take to that opinion?" Find ways to get them curious, and that's where real conversation happens.

Because we're not talking with a machine where it's like input in equals input out, where it's like if I give you this fact, you will ingest it in an entirely detached way.

Claude or anything.

Yeah, exactly.

Or whatever.

Exactly. Yeah. We're not talking with machines here. We're talking with people.

Or Google AI.

I don't know.

Sorry.

Gemini. Yeah.

Yours? Yeah. Sorry. I don't know which one.

Appropriately named after the idea of being two-faced. There we go.

That's what I meant.

Actually, this is a great segue because we're in a tech audience today. Like many others here, I spend a lot of time thinking about how technology interacts with communication, specifically how technological shifts influence our communication trends and tendencies. Today, smartphone revolution made innumerable changes to the way we tend to communicate. You can FaceTime a far-flung family member anytime, anyplace, but we tend to actually text over popping on a call. These days, whereas in the past we probably did more voice-to-voice communication. And as with most things, there's two sides to this coin, right? There's the ways in which the smartphone revolution made communication, you know, easier and deeper in some ways, but also ways in which it maybe made it harder and more superficial. And now we're no longer in the smartphone revolution, we're in the AI revolution. What do you see as the ways that AI is affecting how we communicate, and what are the two sides of the coin here?

Well, let's just go ahead and put it out. A lot of people use AI to say, hey, I'm about to have a conversation, or I want to change this email, and we use it as a tool to help us go, this is kind of what I want to talk about. I think it's fantastic because it gives you another way, another picture, because sometimes our minds can be pretty stubborn. Sometimes our minds can be, well, this is how I want them to interpret it and I wanna interpret it for them. AI can give you words, but it can't, how can I put this? AI can build sentences, it can't build trust. AI can't build character. AI can't build the integrity of wherever you're working. So it can give you tools, but it can't do things that only human connection can do. So if I want to build trust with you, I can't be like, "Hold up real quick, let me— you want to trust me?" You know, it doesn't happen that way. And so we will always favor the in-person smile and the in-person touch rather than the winky face.

And it's funny, I sometimes think from a behavioral science perspective, one strategy that can work for people who are both like feeling very resistant to using AI, whether to improve their communication, draft an email or otherwise, and people who are like really leaning into it, is the idea of like a veto list. Like saying to yourself, I'm gonna decide what things there are in my life that I'm not gonna use AI for ever, right? Like I always think of the example of like your wedding vows. Right? Can you imagine being stood across from your partner on your wedding day?

Yeah.

And they're like, you know, they're saying their vows, you're like, that sounded like ChatGPT. Yeah, exactly.

That would be a little rough.

And I think we can all— there are parts of our lives we wouldn't want AI to encroach in, but sometimes actually setting that boundary can— for people that are feeling resistant to AI, setting that boundary can then actually help them feel more open to the parts of their life where they actually like, okay, Now, actually, I can be more receptive to the idea that there are parts of my life I would be comfortable using AI for.

And I find that it's very good at helping me see blind spots. So maybe if you have a conversation that's coming up and ask it, what are the blind spots of this conversation? How are they going to interpret it? What's a way that I might be able to approach it? And so using it as a thought partner is, to me, invaluable. It just can't say the words for you. It can't make you say things confident. So it can give you the actual words and you could recite them, but unless you say them in a way that's you, in a way that's genuine, it doesn't mean a thing.

Yeah, and I know you love to get to the practical. So what's a practical way that you've been using AI in your work or communication lately to your benefit?

A lot of times I might have a thought So I have a rule in my company, it's 3 sentences or less. That's what I try to keep emails to. And sometimes I have a big thought and it's hard for me at the moment to kind of condense it down to 3 sentences. And so I might just get it and verbalize my whole thought. I'll say, give me 3 sentences. And then helps me distill like what are the essential parts that I really need them to know? 'Cause most of the time, and this is the same thing in jury trials, you feel like they need to know all this information. All the evidence, every file, every record, but really they don't. They only need this little bitty thing that makes a difference. Because a lot of times you'll have this piece of evidence that you think this is really what the whole case is about, and the jury goes, no, I didn't care about that, I cared about this. And so when I can use it to say, help me kind of map out my thoughts, as long as they're my thoughts, I feel good about it.

I see this all the time in like public speaking forums like this, whether a fireside or a keynote, you'll talk for like, I don't know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, and you'll always feel like there was stuff you didn't get around to saying. And then you'll talk to— maybe lucky enough to cross paths with an audience member, like, the next day or a week later, and they might, if you're lucky, have remembered one specific thing you said. So, like, the— it's a numbers game. It's like you're going to say all this stuff and very little is actually going to, like, truly go through and stay.

Oh yeah, you know, yeah, I've done it before where I've spoke and, and I— the next day I saw somebody And they were like, yeah, I just, I remember you had that shirt. That's the same shirt that my cousin had. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. And that just happens. What you think is the information that they remember, it's not. And that's the same thing. People rarely remember what you taught them. They remember how you talked to them. It's not the things you say. It's often how you made them feel with it. And so it's that same underlying thing of what makes them go, you know what, I kind of like that person. Usually, it's not the thing that we think, it's something else.

I know that saying, well, yeah, it's not what you said, it's how you made them feel. Yeah, totally. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about, I alluded to this in my intro, like subcultures of communication and how we move through them. So, big tech, like most industries, is actually pretty incestuous, right? Like most of us have either worked at Apple or Microsoft or Meta in the past or will do at some point in the future. That's the way most industries work, right? Big tech also, like most industries, has particular kinds of communication culture, both practically in terms of the tools that we use. People always talk about Slack messages, and I'm like, that always goes right over my head because we don't use Slack here. Compared to say, you look at how big law tends to communicate, or how the arts, or how education have cultures of communication. In Google, for instance, we have this word called Googliness. Very aptly named, right? It captures our unique emphasis on moving quickly and not taking ourselves too seriously.

Can you use it in a sentence?

Keep being Googly. Right?

Okay.

That's often a thing you'll see.

It sounds great, right?

Yeah.

Keep doing that.

We have great peer recognition incentives around where you can give a colleague a little peer bonus for helping you out with something. Often, in the text of that peer bonus will be something like, They're so groovy, or like, you know, great Googliness or something.

Yeah.

I'm seeing a mixture of emotion. It's great. It was something I was excited to be a part of when I joined Google.

It sounds awesome. Yeah.

There's a whole, like, thing about all the things that Googliness represents above and beyond what I just talked about, like, you know, moving fast and not taking ourselves too seriously. But it's just one way in which, like, we have a culture. It shows up in our communication, right? Now, in the book, you acknowledge that, like, our communication habits are heavily influenced by the cultures we grew up in and that we find ourselves around, right? What advice would you give to people as they are moving between cultures of communication, whether it's, you know, someone moving from Google to Apple and back to Google? How do we balance, um, you know, assimilation with authenticity, with like some sense of who I actually am, how I somehow intrinsically communicate, you know, being ourselves with fitting in. How do we balance that as we move between all the different cultures and subcultures of communication in our lives?

Yeah, I, I find that it doesn't matter what company— it could be a corner store deli— like, we're all just people. We're all trying to figure it out. And so the more often, quicker I can get to sharing my struggles, the quicker I can get to understanding you. Because perfection is not relatable. Struggle is. What is it? How does that sound in communication? It sounds like I'm going to tell you, hey, look, I know I'm not going to say this the right way. Here's my thought. It might sound like I'm struggling with this thought, and I would really love your help. I'd really like to put your smart brain to this. If I can find a way that signals I don't know everything— see, confidence has that way of signaling this. Confidence is not, you know all the answers. It's knowing that you don't. And so when I can— the more I can show that I don't have that ego, in fact, I want to be part of the collective, the better everybody's going to feel. I see this sometimes with people coming into a new role and there's other people who might feel they either deserve it, don't deserve it, and they feel like they have to be kind of protective about things. And so I have a woman one time say, hey, look, I got into this new role and I got kind of promoted and other people don't feel like I'm really qualified. And I was like, well, do you feel qualified? She's like, well, not really. I said, okay, that's cool. So why don't you use that to your advantage. When you hear that, you get to say, "You know what? I know that I have a way to go here, but what makes me so excited about that is..." Find ways to add into your conversation and use what you think is your struggle and your weakness as something that you can use as an advantage. It's something you can share with one another, and that's, to me, that's one way of kind of talking about this throughout, no matter what culture you're in. And I will also say, find a way of sharing perspectives rather than trying to prove points. So if somebody has an idea, it's a whole lot easier instead of saying whether their idea is good or not, instead to talk about perspective. So instead of saying, "I don't agree," say, "I see things differently. I have another approach. I have a different take. I have a different perspective." Use words of perspective, and that tends to make things go a lot better for communication.

And there's also— is it the operator's manual that you talk about as well? It's kind of like this, this practical thing that you can use to help people know how to communicate with you. Tell me a little bit about that and how that maybe can help in these sort of like culture transition moments.

We invest a lot in all kinds of things. Most people care more about how they make their coffee and how they drink their coffee than how they think about how they communicate. And what I created was to help you make an owner's manual, meaning what you say is who you are. If you want to be a kind person, you have to use kind words. If you want to be seen as aggressive, well, there's words for that too. So how do you find a way of going, this is what I allow, this is how I will allow myself to be spoken to, this is what I will permit, and this is what I will not allow, and this is what I will not permit. I have a lot of these kind of fill-in-the-blank places to where you get to sketch out, like, how do I want to be spoken to? What will I— that goes into boundaries, right? Then also, what words am I going to use to say this is how I want to communicate? If you want to be remembered, what you say is who you are.

While we're on the topic of tech culture, I have to say, throughout the book, you call out several phrases that I see all the time, every day, show up in how we talk to each other. And they tend to be phrases which undermine our credibility or our confidence. You know, like, close your eyes for a moment, okay? Do me a favor, close your eyes. Put up a hand if you've ever said, "Sorry to bother you." Okay, keep your hand up. Add your hand if you said, "This might be a dumb question." Yep, a few more. And finally, Does that make sense? Okay, open your eyes. Lots of hands up around you. Everyone's in good company here. Does that make sense is a particularly big one here at Google, right? Personally, I do the thing where I use just in moments where I don't need to. Just to clarify, just to ask something, right? You call out these phrases as things that we don't really need and that are undermining us in ways we might not fully appreciate. If you could eradicate one phrase from tech culture communication tomorrow, what would it be?

Why?

And what would you replace it with?

Oh, there's several. The one that I tend resonates the most is, does that make sense?

Yeah.

It's real easy to kind of tag on to the end of your sentences and it often becomes a crutch. And I know why you do it. All right. You want to make sure that what you said made logical sense, right? And what happens is the other person hears something different, right? They hear one of two things. Either one, you're making sure that they got it because you're not sure they're smart enough to get it. Does that make sense to your little brain? Or, or you're not really sure what you're talking about. And so you kind of have to say it out loud. Does that make sense?

Like, I'm not sure it makes sense.

Yeah, does it make sense? And so instead of that, that question really does not mean anything. And in fact, it puts the other person in a position of like, it's a lose-lose, because nobody wants to go, no, that doesn't make sense. They all go, yeah, yeah, and then they walk away like, that doesn't make sense at all. So instead of that, ask a real question like, do you have any thoughts? Do you have a question? How does that feel to you? What's your take? Questions that invite them to do something rather than just nod out of fear. That would be my— that would be my fear.

Or insults.

Yeah, that—

yeah. You argue that in communication, silence can be a very powerful tool, as I'm currently demonstrating. Um, can you explain the difference between a short pause and a long one and how we should use each, especially in a fast-paced environment like ours.

Whenever you hear somebody pause, kind of like I just did— I gave it about 2 more seconds— it signals to you that I'm thinking. If I just give rapid responses to everything you say, it often signals that I'm all about speed. I'm not actually thinking. But imagine asking somebody a question and they're going, "Give me one moment to think about that." You go, "Oh, okay, that's different. They're actually thinking. They're actually appreciating what I'm saying." I can tell you the people who sound and look the most confident in interviews are the people that when you ask them a question, they sit back and go, "Hmm," rather than having some rapid-fire nightly TV show talking head response. You go, "That's a great question. Let me think." Take time to actually think. People appreciate that. Short pauses are great for capturing the point. Long pauses are great for when somebody's saying something that's mean or rude or belittling. 5 to 7 seconds of saying nothing often reflects back as like an echo to them. Somebody says something ugly, imagine you saying something really mean to me, and instead of responding, I just gave it 5 seconds. Becomes uncomfortable for them because now their words are out in the open, and I get to kind of say, "Are you good with what you just said? You sure you're good with that?" And often they'll take it back or they'll apologize, or maybe they'll double down, but silence can never be misquoted, so it's much better to leave it there. Also, when it comes like email or text, take time. If you're not really sure what to say, that means you shouldn't send anything at all. You should wait. Often if I am heated about something and I just like rapid-fire, I decide like that message was really rude because of course we always read that it's rude. It could be like, "Have a good day." Like, "Have a good day?" You know, we always read it negative, and you're like, "Come here. Can you read this? Can you see what they said? They said, 'Have a good day.'" And instead of that, just wait even to the next morning. Whatever is most urgent typically is not, so don't let somebody's urgency become your priority.

And I wonder if some folks might worry that using a pause might be misinterpreted as uncertainty or not knowing what to do. Is there anything we can be doing with our other vocal noises, like, "Hmm," or our face to just convey that, "Hey, I'm not glitching right here. This isn't a system loading moment. I actually am thinking." Is there anything you tend to do subtly to just signify This is an intentional pause.

No, I like—

No, we just run the risk.

I know, I like the full sentence. I'm going to rather say, I'm not ignoring you, I'm thinking.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, a lot of the times, like in an argument in a relationship maybe, and there's a big pause and you're like, did you hear me? Like, are you just thinking of— like, it's much better to go, no, I hear you. I'm thinking of how I want to respond. Or I need time with that. 'Before I respond, I need to think a moment before I say something.' Like, that signals strength. It does not signal weakness. So just use the full sentences.

I think that will actually be especially important in a video call context, because this was another thing I was going to ask you about. I was like, at Google, we spend a lot of time on video calls, and we're not alone. The video conferencing industry is booming, $10 billion and growing, right? Tons of people are on video calls these days. And it's not just team meetings that are happening on these calls. You talked about interviews, like a lot of job interviews are happening on video calls. These days. You're a keynote speaker as well. Keynotes are happening virtually these days more and more often. So, you know, big stakes moments happening on a screen, and communication can be a little different on the screen than face-to-face. And I can imagine, for instance, in a pause on a screen, you don't want people to think like, has their internet dropped? Like, I've had that before where I'm thinking and they're like, oh, are you still there? And I'm like, yeah, I'm just thinking. So like, yeah, sometimes, um, there are nuances to communicating via screen than via face-to-face. Do you have any any notes on how we can be communicating better on screen when we can't be face-to-face with someone?

Well, one, it's going to be something y'all all know, even though you may not want to do it. Smiling on a video screen is never a bad thing, so let me just put that aside. Two is your hands. The more people can see your hands, even in screens, rather than if it was just cut off and that's all they see is a talking head, it's hard to kind of place things in a context. We use hands a lot when we talk, as well as our facial features. So I would treat it just as any kind of normal conversation. What I would— I'd say number 3, what I try to emphasize on video calls, the shorter the answer, the better it typically tends to go. Because on video, it's much easier for your mind to wander. You're on the screen, and all of a sudden you're like, what am I having for lunch? Like, you start wondering about, like, It's because what? You're probably not wearing pants. You may be looking at a screen. And then you're like, ah, my feet are kind of cold. I need to get socks. And you're thinking about other stuff. And so if I can keep the answers really short and concise, the faster that conversation is going to go. So when you give that long information, it's hard. So what I like to teach is rather than being a waterfall, be a well. Rather than over-explaining, and telling them things they probably already know. Say your sentence, at least limit it to 3 sentences if you can, and then if they have a question, they will ask. Everybody that's on your Zoom call is highly intelligent, despite what you might think, right? Allow them, trust them enough. They have the agency to ask a question.

Please join me in giving a big hand to our terrific guests today.

Thank you very much.