Felix Sigala was known as someone exceptionally easy to talk to. People enjoyed consulting with him, and even when they had nothing in common, they felt an inexplicable sense of connection with him.
Sigala worked at the FBI for two decades and led the Crisis Negotiation Unit in hostage situations. He was one of those rare individuals who could persuade suspects to cooperate or convince fugitives to turn themselves in.
When young agents asked Sigala for advice, he would say, “Never pretend you’re anything other than a cop,” “Never manipulate or threaten,” or “Ask lots of questions, and, when someone becomes emotional, cry or laugh or complain or celebrate with them.” However, what ultimately made Sigala so good at his job was a bit of a mystery, even to his colleagues, wrote journalist Charles Duhigg in his book “Supercommunicators.” Felix Sigala is a pseudonym used by Duhigg in his book.
The mystery surrounding Sigala’s communication skills began to unravel in 2014, when the Department of Defense tasked a group of psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers with exploring new methods for teaching persuasion and negotiation to help military officers improve their communication skills. As the researchers searched for an expert in the field, Sigala’s name came up again and again.
He was eventually invited to one of the labs.
After a brief introduction, one of the lab’s leading researchers asked Sigala a general question: “Can you tell us how you think about communication?” The FBI agent suggested that instead of telling them, he would show them.
“What’s one of your favorite memories?” Sigala asked the researcher who, as the head of a large lab, was not used to nostalgia in the middle of the day.
After a few seconds of silence, he said, “Probably my daughter’s wedding. My whole family was there, and my mother died just a few months later.”
Sigala asked a few follow-up questions, and between them occasionally shared memories of his own.
“My sister got married in 2010,” Sigala said. “She’s passed away now—it was cancer, which was hard—but she was so beautiful that day. That’s how I try to remember her.”
For the next 45 minutes, Sigala spoke with other researchers in the room. He asked them questions and occasionally talked about himself. When someone shared something personal, Sigala responded with a story from his own life.
“One scientist mentioned problems he was having with a teenage daughter, and Felix replied by describing an aunt he couldn’t seem to get along with, no matter how hard he tried. When another researcher asked about Felix’s childhood, he explained that he had been painfully shy—but his father had been a salesman (and his grandfather a con man) and so, by imitating their examples, he had eventually learned how to connect with others,” Duhigg wrote.
As their scheduled time came to an end, one of the researchers, a psychology professor, burst out with a question.
“I’m sorry, this has been wonderful, but I don’t feel any closer to understanding what you do,” she said. “Why do you think so many people recommended we talk to you?”
“Before I answer, I want to ask: You mentioned you’re a single mom, and I imagine there’s a lot to juggling motherhood and a career,” Sigala said. “ This might seem unusual, but I’m wondering: What would you tell someone who’s getting a divorce?”
The woman paused and then said, “I have lots of advice. When I separated from my husband. …”
Sigala gently interrupted her.
“I don’t really need an answer,” he said. “But I want to point out that, in a room filled with professional colleagues, and after less than an hour of conversation, you’re willing to talk about one of the most intimate parts of your life.”
Sigala said that one of the reasons the professor felt so comfortable had to do with how he had guided the conversation over the past hour and the connection that had formed between them.
“It’s a set of skills,” he said. “There’s nothing magical about it.”
‘High Centrality Participants’
Duhigg deals with communication daily as part of his work. Yet he always felt difficult to connect easily with people, in hallway conversations, at family gatherings, or at work.
“I had a fancy MBA from Harvard Business School and, as a journalist, communicated as a profession! How hard could it be? Very hard, it turned out,” he wrote. “This book was born, in part, from my own failures at communicating.”
Why people “click” with certain individuals but not others is one of science’s unresolved mysteries.
Over the past two decades, neuroscientists around the world have tried to understand this with brain scans that reveal synchronized activities in specific brain regions of participants engaged in interpersonal or group conversations.
The researchers asked dozens of volunteers to watch short film clips that were difficult to understand. Some were in foreign languages; others were brief and lacked context. To make the task even harder, the researchers removed the audio and subtitles. Participants might see, for example, an angry bald man talking to a blond man. Researchers wanted to observe how participants’ brains behaved while watching the clips.
Each participant reacted somewhat differently—some were confused, while others amused—so no two brain scans looked alike.
Next, participants were assigned to small groups and told to answer questions about the movie scenes.
After the groups discussed their answers for an hour, they were shown the same clips again.
This time, their neutral impulses had synchronized with those in the same group. In other words, the act of conversing and deliberating together caused their brains to align to some extent.
There was another discovery: some groups became far more synchronized than others, as if everyone had converged on the same way of thinking. The researchers suspected that certain individuals in those groups were driving this effect, but who were they?
In the groups with the highest synchronization, there were one or two people who communicated differently from the rest. They spoke less, and when they did speak, it was usually to ask questions. They repeated others’ ideas, readily admitted their own confusion, and laughed at themselves. They encouraged their peers (“That’s really smart! Tell me more!”) and laughed at others’ jokes.
They didn’t stand out as particularly talkative or intelligent; instead, they made it easier for others to talk. They made conversations flow, Duhigg said.
The researchers began calling these individuals “High Centrality Participants.”
It turned out that high centrality participants asked 10 to 20 more questions than other participants.
When a group got stuck, they helped everyone by introducing a new topic or cracking a joke to break the silence. Most importantly, they constantly adjusted their communication style to match others. When someone became serious, they became serious too. When the discussion was light, they followed that tone. They frequently changed their minds and allowed themselves to be influenced by others.
High centrality participants, the researchers wrote, were more willing “to adapt their own brain activity to the group” and “played an outsized role in creating group alignment by facilitating conversation.”
Ultimately, they had an outsized influence on how people answered questions.
Three Types of Conversations
By observing how Sigala and high centrality participants communicate, Duhigg noticed that people who easily connect with others tend to do several recurring things: they ask questions and follow-up questions; they share relevant personal memories, especially when someone else opens up; and they are comfortable admitting confusion or laughing at themselves.
But is that all it takes to become a supercommunicator?
Duhigg encountered another line of research that added a crucial layer to his findings—a lot depends on matching your communication with the type of conversation taking place. “Different conversations activate different neural networks,” he wrote, categorizing discussions into three types.
The first is a practical conversation about decision-making.
The second is an emotional conversation about how we feel.
The third is an identity conversation about who we are.
“[Each] type of conversation operates by its own logic and requires its own set of skills,” Duhigg said, adding that when we discuss a practical choice, we activate different parts of the brain than when we discuss our emotions.
The key point, he emphasizes, is that when two people are engaged in different types of conversations, their brains will not synchronize and they will feel as if they don’t fully understand each other.
For example, your partner complains emotionally about their boss (“Jim’s driving me crazy!”), and you respond with a practical solution (“What if you just invited him to lunch?”). Instead of creating connection, this can cause conflict—“I’m not asking you to solve this, I just want some empathy.”
Researcher John Gottman wrote in the “Journal of Communication” that the fundamental mechanism sustaining intimacy in marriage is the creation of symmetry. Happy couples ask each other questions, repeat what the other has said, joke to ease tension, and get serious together. In other words, they notice whether their partner wants to talk about feelings rather than decisions.
But how does one reach such synchronization in conversation, especially with strangers? The story of Jim Lawler, a CIA agent who recruited spies, can illuminate a path.
Duhigg said that Lawler, early in his career as an agent in 1982, was not very successful in his role. When he chose to join the agency, he did not imagine that most of his time would be spent communicating with people.
He didn’t know that field officers don’t necessarily sneak into secret bases or pass envelopes in dark parking lots. They talk to people at parties and befriend foreign officials at embassies, hoping that one day one of them might reveal a crucial piece of intelligence.
“Communication is so important that a summary of CIA training methods puts it right up front: ‘Find ways to connect,’” Duhigg wrote. “A case officer’s goal should be to have a prospective agent come to believe, hopefully with good reason, that the case officer is one of the few people, perhaps the only people, who truly understands him.”
Lawler graduated from CIA spy school with high marks and was sent to Europe. His mission was to make contact with foreign officials, cultivate friendships with embassy attachés, and develop connections with other sources who might be willing to hold candid conversations.
“Lawler’s first few months abroad were miserable. He tried his best to blend in. He attended black-tie soirees and had drinks at bars near embassies. Nothing worked,” Duhigg said.
Eventually, an opportunity arose: one of Lawler’s CIA colleagues told him that a young Iranian woman working in her country’s foreign ministry was coming to Europe for a short vacation. Lawler jumped at the chance to recruit her.
He managed to “bump into” her at a restaurant, introduced himself as an oil-market trader, and invited her to lunch. The young woman, Yasmin, told him she hated the radical religious leaders who had taken over her country, and that she longed to move to Paris or New York, but to do so she needed money she didn’t currently have. In response, Lawler told her that his oil company was looking for a part-time consultant, a job he believed she could do alongside her work at the foreign ministry.
“We ordered champagne, and I thought she was going to start crying,” Lawler told Duhigg years later. “She was so happy.”
At the CIA, they were pleased to hear that Lawler had recruited his first spy, but then came a surprise.
His boss told him, “Now you need to tell her you’re CIA and you’ll want information about her government.”
Lawler thought it was a terrible idea. If he spoke to Yasmin honestly, she would never speak to him again.
However, his boss explained that it was not fair to ask her to risk her life without knowing who she was doing it for. If her government caught her, she would be imprisoned and perhaps executed. She needed to understand the risks.
Lawler kept meeting with Yasmin, looking for the right moment to tell her. The more time they spent together, the more candid she became, speaking bitterly about her authoritarian government.
Lawler took it as a sign, and at one meeting, he revealed that he was an intelligence officer with the CIA. He told her the United States wanted to undermine the theocracy in her country, weaken its leaders, and stop the oppression of women. He apologized for lying about his identity, but the job offer was real. Would she consider working with the CIA?
“As I talked, I watched her eyes get bigger and bigger, and she started gripping the tablecloth, and then shaking her head, no-no-no, and, when I finally stopped, she started crying, and I knew I was screwed,” Lawler told Duhigg. “She said they murdered people for that, and there was no way she could help.”
There was nothing Lawler could say that would persuade her to consider it. “All she wanted was to get away from me,” he said.
Lawler had no idea what to do.
“No amount of money or promises would have convinced her to take such a suicidal risk,” he told Duhigg.
The only way forward was to persuade Yasmin that she could trust him and that he understood her and would protect her. But how do you do that?
“I knew, at most, I had one more chance to talk to her,” Lawler said. “I had to figure out how to break through.”
A More Meaningful Life
They sat in an elegant restaurant. Yasmin sat quietly, anxious about Lawler’s proposal.
“She was flying home soon and was nervous and discouraged. She had hoped this trip to Europe would reveal something, like to show her how to live a more meaningful life. But here she was, about to go home, and everything would remain the same. She felt as if she had disappointed herself,” Duhigg said.
Lawler tried to cheer her up with small jokes and funny stories, but nothing worked. After he gave up, he began to talk about what he truly felt.
Lawler told Yasmin he was worried he wasn’t suited to this kind of work. He had worked hard to get into the CIA, but now he realized he lacked something, the kind of confidence that other people of his age seemed to have. He told her that every time he approached foreign officials, he was terrified that they would report him and that he would be expelled.
He even described his humiliation when he discovered a KGB officer that he tried to recruit was actually recruiting him. He said he felt like a failure just for telling her all this and that he understood, at least a little, how she felt when she thought about going home.
Instead of trying to encourage Yasmin, he talked about his own frustrations and disappointments, in a way similar to how she had been talking about herself. It felt to him like the most honest thing he could do.
“I wasn’t trying to be manipulative,” Lawler said. “I knew I wasn’t going to change her mind. So I stopped trying.”
Yasmin listened.
The worst part, she said, was that she felt as if she was betraying herself. She wanted to do something, but felt powerless. She began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” Lawler told her. “I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
Then Yasmin pulled herself together.
“I can do this,” she whispered.
“What do you mean?” Lawler asked.
“I can help you,” she answered.
“You don’t have to!” he replied. “We don’t have to see each other ever again! I promise I’ll leave you alone.”
“I want to do something important,” she added. “This matters. I can do it. I know I can.”
Yasmin underwent a polygraph test and training in secure communication methods. After she returned to Iran, she began sending Lawler messages detailing the memos she saw, the officials the foreign minister hosted, and the gossip she heard.
“She became one of the best sources in the region,” Lawler said. “She was a gold mine.”
Over the next two decades, as Yasmin’s career in the foreign ministry flourished, she communicated regularly with the CIA and helped them understand what was happening behind the scenes.
Lawler did not understand why Yasmin changed her mind that evening. In the years that followed, he asked her several times to explain it, but even she struggled to say what caused it.
She told him that somehow, during that dinner, when it became clear that both of them were so unsure of themselves, she suddenly felt safe with him. They understood each other.
For the first time, she could hear what he had been trying to tell her: this could be important; you could make a difference. And she felt that he was truly listening to her. They agreed to trust one another.
In fact, Duhigg wrote, what Lawler did was adapt himself to the type of conversation Yasmin wanted to have. He empathized with her and shared a story from his own life.
In the years that followed, Lawler tried to refine his skills in an attempt to recreate his success with Yasmin.
Duhigg wrote that he ultimately became one of the CIA’s most successful overseas recruiters. By the time he retired in 2005, he had persuaded dozens of foreign officials to take part in sensitive conversations.
Afterward, he began teaching his methods to other officers.
A Cancer Doctor’s Frustration
Sometimes, it is not easy at all to identify the type of conversation others want to have.
In 2014, Dr. Behfar Ehdaie, a prominent surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, realized that for years he had been communicating with patients in the wrong way, an insight that enabled him to better help his patients.
Hundreds of men would come each year to Ehdaie, who specializes in prostate cancer treatment, to get his advice after a tumor was discovered deep in their groin.
Every year, many of those patients, despite Ehdaie’s efforts, somehow failed to hear what he was trying to tell them about their disease.
“Treating prostate cancer involves a complicated trade-off: the surest course of action is surgery or radiation to prevent the cancer from spreading. But because the prostate gland is located alongside nerves involved in urination and sexual function, some patients, after treatment, experience incontinence and impotence, sometimes for the rest of their lives,” Duhigg said.
Therefore, doctors often advise most low-risk patients not to have surgery, but to choose “active surveillance”: blood tests every six months and a prostate biopsy every two years to see whether the tumor has grown.
Of course, this method has risks of its own: the tumor may metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body, though prostate cancer generally grows relatively slowly.
Almost every day, a new patient would enter Ehdaie’s office, stunned by a prostate cancer diagnosis and facing a difficult choice: undergo surgery and face the possibility of incontinence and sexual dysfunction, or pursue prolonged monitoring, hoping that if the cancer grows, tests will detect it in time.
Ehdaie believed patients came to him for practical medical guidance, so he recommended to most of them active surveillance and provided evidence supporting that approach.
He typically began by presenting data showing that for 97 percent of men who choose active surveillance, the risk of cancer spreading is roughly the same as for those who undergo invasive treatment. Then he said, therefore it is better to wait and monitor developments.
Ehdaie even gave them studies, with the key sentences highlighted in yellow explaining that the risks of waiting are tiny, while surgery has disadvantages that can be life-altering.
“I figured they’d be overjoyed to hear they could avoid surgery,” he told Duhigg.
Yet again and again, his patients didn’t listen to his advice.
Instead of looking at the charts and studies and feeling relief, patients asked questions: What about the 3 percent who didn’t benefit from active surveillance? Did they die? Was it painful?
“We’d spent the entire meeting talking about the 3 percent,” Ehdaie said. “And then, when we’d met again, the 3 percent was all they’d remember, and they’d say they wanted the surgery.”
No matter how many times he told them they didn’t need surgery, many insisted on undergoing it.
Sometimes patients took the highlighted studies home and started searching online for evidence contradicting them. They dug through obscure journals and medical abstracts until they convinced themselves the data was contradictory—or that doctors didn’t know what they were talking about.
Some also said, “I have a friend who had prostate cancer and he told me surgery is fine.”
“When it happens again and again, you start to realize: This isn’t a problem with my patients,” Ehdaie said. “This is a problem with me. I’m doing something wrong. I’m failing at this conversation.”
Ehdaie sought advice from a Harvard Business School professor named Deepak Malhotra. Malhotra was part of a group of professors studying how negotiation unfolds in the real world, and after receiving Ehdaie’s email, he flew to meet him to gather more information.
“An important step in any negotiation is getting clarity on what all the participants want,” Malhotra told him.
Ehdaie had made a major mistake—at the start of every conversation, he assumed he already knew what the patient wanted: objective medical advice, a broad overview of treatment options, and help making an informed decision.
Malhotra suggested that instead of beginning each conversation with a general presentation of the options, Dr. Ehdaie should ask open-ended questions designed to get patients to talk about their values and what they want from life.
A Life-Changing Conversation
“What does this cancer diagnosis mean to you?” Ehdaie asked a 62-year-old patient a few weeks later.
The patient didn’t talk about medical concerns or ask about pain. Instead, he said, “It makes me think about my father, because he died when I was young, and it was hard for my mother. I don’t want my family to go through similar suffering.”
The man talked about his wife and children and wanted to know which treatment would make them worry less. He didn’t care about the data. He only wanted to understand how to avoid making his loved ones sad.
A similar pattern emerged in other conversations.
Ehdaie would begin with a broad question, “What did your wife say when you told her about your diagnosis?”
Instead of talking about their disease, patients talked about their marriages, memories of a parent’s illness, or non-medical traumas such as divorce or bankruptcy. Some talked about the future, how they hoped to spend their retirement, what they wanted to leave behind as a legacy, and more.
Some patients were frightened and wanted emotional reassurance. Others wanted to feel in control. Some sought social proof that they were not taking unusual risks, and they wanted to hear how other people had made their decisions.
There were also people who wanted the most innovative treatment available.
Ehdaie understood why he had failed to communicate with so many patients over the years: he hadn’t asked the right questions.
In fact, he hadn’t asked questions at all.
He hadn’t asked about patients’ needs and desires in order to understand what they wanted to achieve from the conversation with him. He assumed he already knew. And because he didn’t bother to understand what mattered to them, he flooded patients with information they didn’t care about.
He decided to change his communication style, to stop lecturing and start asking better questions, to begin conducting more appropriate dialogues, Duhigg wrote.
Within six months of adopting the new approach, the number of patients who chose surgery dropped by 30 percent, Duhigg wrote.
“Today, he is training other surgeons to negotiate topics such as opioid use, treatments for breast cancer, and end-of-life decisions.” Duhigg wrote, explaining that all of us can use this approach in everyday conversations we have about relationships, work, and raising children. “In many conversations, there is a surface topic—but also a deeper, more meaningful subject that, when we bring it into the light, reveals what everyone wants most from the conversation.”
Duhigg said that discussions generally fall into one of two buckets. Some conversations are practical, such as how to solve a problem, how much money to offer for a house, or how to hire someone for a role. Some conversations are emotional in nature and don’t always align with logic and reason. These are conversations in which people want to talk about values, feel compassion, and draw more on their experiences.
“In these kinds of conversations, facts are less persuasive. If someone says something about their feelings, their partner doesn’t start debating with them. Instead, they sympathize, laugh, share a sense of outrage or pride.
“In general, in these kinds of discussions, we make decisions not by analyzing costs and benefits, but instead by looking to our past experiences and asking ourselves, ‘What does someone like me usually do in a situation like this?’
“We apply what psychologists call the ‘logic of similarities.’ This kind of logic is important because, without it, we wouldn’t feel much compassion when someone describes sadness or disappointment,” he said.
This article was originally published by Epoch Magazine Israel.
