Elizabeth Stokoe is a conversational analyst. This means she studies conversation in the wild. She looks at real-life conversations works to understand how talk works. Her work focuses on social interactions. What are people doing as they interact?

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation.

We build our world through social interactions.

This may seem obvious, yet so few of us pay attention to the things we do and say daily. I have come to believe that the things we say and do build our future. In this conversation, Elizabeth and I tune into the conversations play in shaping our interactions.

Revel in working with people who are better than you.

When I asked Elizabeth about the best lesson, she ever learned she told a beautiful story about her dad. Her dad was a teacher. He taught woodwork. Elizabeth explained that he would revel in working with students who were or would one day be better than he was. I found this to be such a glorious insight. Her dad wanted his students to be better than he was. He wanted his students to pursue and treat woodwork in the same way they would treat traditional professions. Perhaps most insightful for me here is that we then get scared or intimidated by the competition. How would your life be different if you found really talented people and worked to support them?

People show you what matter to them.

We had a nerdy conversation about research, but I love that Elizabeth used a research lesson to demonstrate the impact of what she does. For example, she pointed out that people show you what they care about in the words they use. Someone might say, “oh, you know, there were three girls, sorry, women”. This self-policing demonstrates what people care about. Her research uses examples to show how gender is constructed and how our interactions build our gendered constructs.

Communication science is likely the most important thing to understand in the 21st Century.

I often refer to this as the debate between big data and thick data. Thick data is qualitative research that goes deep. Elizabeth’s work is a great example of how thick data can be so informative. She uses thick data to bust very compelling myths about conversation and communication. For example, there is an extensive belief that communication is largely done through our bodies. It is based on a study that did not actually find that. If however, that was true, we would not be able to communicate in the dark. We would not be able to talk on the phone. Researchers like Elizabeth helps understand the world just a little better so we can bust these very compelling myths.

Conversations are organized and messy.

In our conversation, Elizabeth also described talk as being full of idiosyncrasy, yet massively systematic. She gave a great metaphor for thinking about it. “Imagine you are in a helicopter or a hot air balloon high above a field. You can see from above what the path is. Now imagine that you’re looking down on that field and you can see a dog walker and their dog. The dog is on one of those long leads that extend and retracts. When you look down in one field, you see the dog walker and the dog. They’re basically moving across that field in a fairly predictable way along the path without much variation. They transverse the field. When you look down again, there’s another dog walker and their dog. This time the dog is absolutely all over the place and the dog walkers got to keep going back and get them out of the field and come off the path. But you also know from above that you can see where they’re going to end up because that’s kind of where everyone ends up.” This is what a conversation looks like. We often end up in a predictable place.

What is effective communication?

Effective communication is when you sort of get from one point to another. We hope we can minimize friction, misunderstandings, and having to do it again. We want to smooth out the journey

Just because you talk, it doesn’t mean you understand communication, scientifically.

In our conversation, we talk about how people have strong feelings about conversations. People have conversations every day and as a result, feel they understand communication. Understanding communication scientifically is very different.

We build our world conversation by conversation.

Perhaps my favourite insight in my quest to understand conversations is that we build our world conversation by conversation. This quote sums up much of what I have been exploring when we think about organizations as conversations.

Hope you enjoy this episode with Elizabeth Stokoe.

You find her at https://www.carmtraining.org/ and on Twitter as @LizStokoe.

Hope you enjoy this episode.