If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  By the time Matt was in college, Ben was enrolled in a class where he was being taught how to respond to situations he might encounter in public. But he was being taught specific, rote responses, and as Matt realized, the world doesn’t always work in such a predictable way that you can have a rigid set of responses to it. So Matt started devising variations on Ben’s practice sessions. He would deliberately introduce unlikely scenarios, like ordering ice cream on Mars, to throw Ben off and prepare him for the unexpectedness of real life.

  After he graduated college, Matt got a summer camp job, teaching social skills to teens on the spectrum. But again, he was expected to offer them training that he felt was not going to prepare them for uncertainty. He was told to follow a manual that included things like “When you meet somebody, look them in the eye. But not for too long, so you don’t scare them.” The kids pretty much hated this.

  “I have to tell you,” Matt said, “they weren’t too thrilled. Whether you have autism or not, what teenager wants to sit there and be told this is how you’re supposed to behave? They were throwing things at me. They were really upset.”

  Matt was rooming with two actor friends at the time. They stayed up late one night and, over a glass of wine, he told them he was stuck. Matt recalls that before long, “the subject turned to improvisation, and the goals of improvisation—making eye contact, being able to quickly respond to another person’s emotions, being able to resonate with them.” This was what Matt had been looking for.

  Recalling their own training as actors, his roommates started suggesting Theater Games that might open up the kids: mirroring, tossing imaginary balls, reading one another’s body language.

  “We kind of hypomanically stayed up all night, writing down different improv games I could use,” Matt told me.

  The next day, he began introducing the teenagers to games and exercises like mirroring and, eventually, acting out scenes from their daily lives. He saw an immediate response from them. “They were interested,” he said. “They weren’t throwing things.”

  They were no longer following a set script.

  They had to follow the rules of the games, but the teens were now in control of the life experiences the games were preparing them for. They could practice spontaneity on imaginary real-world encounters that they found interesting—which weren’t always totally real-world. As Matt recalls, there were “countless lightsaber fights” in imitation of the duels in Star Wars movies. But they were relating. By the end of the summer, they had even created and performed in their own play.

  After that, Matt returned his focus to the topics he had studied at school. Music and philosophy.

  But the following spring, Ben’s mother called to tell Matt that things weren’t working out for Ben with any of the other social-training–focused summer camps in the area. Desperately wanting help for her son, she said, “You did so well with that crazy idea last summer. Why don’t you start a camp?” Although Matt had never done anything like that before, he managed to get a grant and hired his actor friends to teach improv. He also talked extensively with Ben to make sure that the camp would involve things he thought would be fun, rather than things he would be made to do.

  Without conducting a controlled study, Matt couldn’t make any claims of efficacy yet, but the kids attending his camp began showing a high level of involvement. They were writing their own plays and shooting their own movies, and their social skills were improving. At the end of the summer, the parents of all the children asked Matt to continue the program year-round. They were sure this was working.

  Matt realized that the parents weren’t paying him just to feel better about their kids; they were expecting to see social skills and empathy actually improve. He needed hard evidence that the techniques were working, so he did a controlled study. He and his colleagues published the first study to rigorously measure the outcomes of improv classes for teens on the spectrum.

  He used multiple measures of success in the study: written and visual tests of empathy that were administered before and after improv training. And he tracked the students over time, even going into classrooms, interviewing other students to see if the kids they were studying had indeed been making friends. The program, called Spotlight, was working, and still is. Years later, Spotlight is serving over 350 children a year in the Boston area alone.

  And Ben, the boy who started it all, has graduated from college and, most recently, graduate school.

  It was clear that the ability to read the other person is a powerful tool. And I was about to find out that it helps not just in relating to another person, but even among whole groups of people.

  CHAPTER 8

  Teams

  In 2010, Anita Woolley and her colleagues were trying to figure out what the most important factors were that made a team work well. It had long been established, Woolley said in her research paper, that intelligence tests could predict pretty reliably how well an individual could perform in a variety of tasks. Someone with a large vocabulary, for instance, might also be expected to be good at math. But no one had yet tested whether this was also true for groups of people. Was that same factor, general intelligence, at work in teams? For instance, if you did a study in which you put together a team of high-IQ people, would that team do better than other teams across a variety of tasks? Would IQ be the most important factor, or was there some other deciding factor for a team’s success?

  They found there was a deciding factor—and it wasn’t IQ.

  Woolley’s group gathered 697 volunteers and divided them into small teams of two to five members each. They tested them at a number of tasks and found that the average intelligence of a group could not significantly predict the group’s performance. What could predict it, though, were three factors: the ability of the members of the group to freely take part in discussions, members’ scores on a standardized test of empathy, and, surprisingly, the presence of women in the group.

  Women’s presence seemed to matter at least partly because they typically have higher ratings in empathy than men do. The more women you had in the group, the higher the level of empathy the whole group had, and the better it performed. So, actually, empathy played a part in two out of the three factors that predicted success: higher scores on the empathy test and the presence of women. It’s even possible, I think (although Woolley and her colleagues don’t say this), that the willingness of a group’s members to enter the conversation freely might also be related to empathy. If you get the sense that the rest of the group is aware of your feelings and won’t punish you for speaking up, you might be more inclined to offer an idea. But this could be me being just a tad overenthusiastic about empathy.

  The researchers’ biggest surprise came when they studied groups that were not in the same room, but were communicating online: They found the same results. Whether face-to-face or online, they reported, “some teams consistently worked smarter than others.” And the reasons they worked smarter were the same: They had “members who communicated a lot, participated equally, and possessed good emotion-reading skills.”

  On the theory that women possess a high degree of these emotional skills, at least one large company has already knowingly experimented with having a greater presence of women. Jack Ma, the founder of the Chinese web giant Alibaba, has been quoted as saying, “I feel proud that more than 34 percent of senior management are women. They really make this company’s yin and yang balanced.” The total workforce of Alibaba is 40 percent women. Ma says that what the women contribute is “the ‘secret sauce’ of the company.”

  This was a deliberate decision on Ma’s part. But dozens of other companies have been part of a similar experiment without realizing it—and have been getting the same results. Cristian Dezső and David Gaddis Ross studied the fifteen hundred S&P firms over a fifteen-year period and found that when they had women in the top managerial positions, the firms were more successful. Interestingly, firms that had a strategy of innovation enjoyed the most success (b
ut those that had a less innovative strategy did no worse having women at the helm). The authors suggest that the presence of women in top management positions helps specifically in situations where the focus is innovation. This, they say, is because women’s social skills lead in part to better decision making overall and also because studies have shown that “gender diversity in particular facilitates creativity.”

  URI ALON

  These researchers weren’t alone in exploring how teams work best. At around the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, a scientist in Israel was experimenting with his own techniques to build a smarter, more collaborative team.

  Uri Alon and his team were the scientists who had shown it was possible for two people to mirror each other without a leader.

  When I read an article he’d written in a science journal, I suddenly realized he was using principles from improvisational theater to make teams in his labs work better. Basic principles that work on the stage were working for him in the lab.

  He struck a chord when he wrote about the pitfalls of assuming students are totally responsible for their own motivation, noting that “this can lead researchers to blame group members for their lack of motivation.” Instead, he feels that it’s up to the leader of the group to motivate the students, or else things can break down. This is the very thing that happens in the mirror exercise when the leader doesn’t take responsibility for helping the other person to follow. They lose the connection that could keep them in sync. It happens when a teacher blames the student or a speaker blames the audience for not understanding what they have to say.

  Comedians used to say to an audience that wasn’t laughing, “These are the jokes, folks.” And the audience might have been thinking, Here’s an idea: Try being funny.

  The responsibility really belongs to the person speaking, not the person listening. And now Uri was taking it a step further, suggesting that you can move a whole group to greater motivation. “The goal,” he was saying, “is to provide people with the conditions that enhance their natural self-motivated behavior.”

  One of the ways he does this is to pay attention to their social interactions. The team meets once a week for two hours to discuss their work in the lab, but for the first half hour they don’t talk about science at all. Instead, sitting in a circle, they talk about art, politics, sometimes just about how their week has gone. Only then does someone give a talk on his or her research, with the rest of the team often helping to brainstorm the project. He’s found that the team’s motivation rises along with this increased social connectedness.

  This is very much like the approach we take at the Center for Communicating Science—bringing people together with an eye to social flow as a way to improve the flow of science. I felt I had to talk to Uri directly, so I put in a call to Israel.

  For some reason, my phone company made it impossible to dial the call directly but didn’t tell me the price of having the operator place the call. I was smack in the middle of the joys of communication with a large corporation. Once the call went through, the cost of the operator’s assistance, which I assume involved tapping buttons on a keypad, was somewhat higher than expected. Uri and I talked for a couple of hours, which cost about what you would pay for a small horse. But it was worth every minute.

  Uri began his studies as a physicist and then turned to the field of systems biology. This is the field that uses mathematical models to figure out how a large number of component parts work together in complex biological systems—systems that range from molecules to entire species.

  Uri has done important work in finding patterns of interaction in the complex workings of the living cell. The paper that brought him the greatest attention in this field was actually prompted by a moment of improvisation—something that was probably a natural outcome of his lifelong interests.

  His life traced two paths at once. His mother was a physicist, and his parents had always wanted him to be a scientist. From the time he was born, they called him the Professor. But inside he also knew he was an artist. He decided, “Okay, I’ll choose the science path and sometime when I’m old and gray, when I’m forty, I’ll get back to art, to poetry.” But art caught up with him before that. “In the army, we had these Purim parties, where we’d put on plays and make fun of the commanders. And I was always directing them and writing them and acting in them, and I found it exhilarating.”

  With a broken heart after the end of a love affair, he turned for solace to the guitar. His first taste of improvisation was improvising songs in bars. In graduate school, while he studied to be a scientist, he performed in plays, and one day when his director introduced him to theater improvisation, he realized he had found the art he was looking for. For the last fifteen years, he told me, he’s been performing every Friday night with an improv group called Playback that specializes in acting out the life stories of members of the audience.

  I had found a scientist-improviser.

  For a long time, though, improv and science remained separate paths for Uri. “For years,” he said, “I thought of myself as doing science from the neck up, and then I would go and do theater and feel that my whole body was alive. They were two different worlds, but slowly they started to connect.”

  Now he teaches improvisation to scientists and he’s discovered a strong connection between the two worlds. “I’m very interested,” he says, “in the parallel between going into the unknown in an improvisation and going into the unknown in science.”

  YES AND

  Some of the most basic elements of improv have become useful to Uri. “Improv is listening. I listen now,” he says. Yes And, the fundamental rule of improv, plays a large part in his work.

  For improvisers, Yes And means you accept what the other player presents you with, without blocking it or denying it, and then you react constructively to it. You add to it. As an example, Uri says, “If one player says, ‘Look at all that water down there,’ and the other player completely blocks it by saying, ‘That’s not water, that’s the stage,’ then the scene is over. But if the player follows the principle of Yes And, he can accept what’s been handed to him and add to it. ‘Wow, what a lot of water. Let’s jump in. Let’s grab onto that whale.’ ” And they’re off and swimming.

  In the same way, Uri suggests that collaborators in a lab (or anywhere else) can listen to one another’s ideas, no matter how odd they are, and add constructively to them. “A lot of blocking takes place in science,” Uri told me, “but Yes And frees ideas to grow.”

  Once, after a run of disappointing dead-end calculations, a student said, “I wish we could just make a diagram of this on a piece of paper.” Uri, instead of saying, “No, we’ve done that hundreds of times before,” said, “Yes, and let’s do it on a really huge piece of paper.” Which they did, and the diagram they drew enabled them to see things they had never seen before.

  Until then, the extremely complex system of how genes influenced one another in a cell had seemed like a hopeless mess to untangle. But Uri’s saying yes to one more diagram (and a really large one) allowed him and his team to see for the first time that the genes interacted in three basic patterns that were repeated hundreds of times in the cell.

  “So,” Uri said, “the hopelessly complex network turned out to be simpler than anyone imagined.” Not only was it a happy moment of collaboration in the lab, it was the breakthrough in Uri’s work on systems biology that gained him attention in the field.

  The same rule of acceptance and deep listening works not only among the members of his team but even in their individual observations of nature. Scientists try very hard to avoid imposing their biases on what they observe, and Uri told me it helps if a scientist can say “Yes And” to nature itself. “Instead of talking to the data,” he says, “you listen to it.”

  All of this suggests to me that an inescapable product of improvisation is empathy. And that a combination of empathy and the more rational Theory of Mind is the very foundation of communication.<
br />
  CHAPTER 9

  Total Listening Starts with Where They Are

  We’ve worked with thousands of scientists and doctors at the Center, and I’ve seen many times over that listening begins before you even start trying to communicate. You picture an audience and think, What are they already aware of? Where should I start? How deep should I go? What are they actually eager to know? If I start too far in, will I be using concepts they don’t really understand?

  Once, I came home from a visit to CERN, the European research organization headquartered in Switzerland, where scientists had just found the Higgs boson. All the newspapers were filled with stories of the discovery, and I was at dinner with a friend who was eager to hear what I knew about it. “What’s the Higgs boson?” she asked. I gave it a try, even though I’m better at asking questions about complicated things than I am at answering them.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s a particle that seems to give mass to all the other particles, and…”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “What’s a particle?”

  I had started too far in. I had to back up. But there was even more to it than that.

  You not only have to start with what they already understand, you have to know when to stop, or they’ll feel swamped. If I had gone on into my sketchy understanding of how the Higgs particle is crucial to the Standard Model of physics, I’d not only have been in over my own head, I’d have been in over hers. She might have felt that crushing sense of hopelessness that tells you it’s all too much, and she might never ask a question like that again.