The Conversation Superpower

In a world of AI, conversation matters more than ever

Recently I was standing at the lights waiting to cross the road on my way to the gym.

Next to me were two people speaking French. I couldn't understand most of what they were saying. My School Certificate French didn't accommodate that. But I knew they were having a good conversation.

I could hear it in their voices. The rhythm and the warmth, and the way one responded to the other. I didn't need to understand the words to understand something about the relationship between them and it got me thinking about tone.

We talk a lot about communication in business. We spend a lot of time getting the words right. And now, with AI, we have an extraordinarily capable tool for helping us find those words.

But words aren't conversation.

I use AI daily, and it can help me summarise my thinking, make something clearer, or find a more elegant way of saying something. What it can't experience is what happens between people when those words are spoken.

It can't feel the hesitation before someone disagrees, or notice that someone who is normally vocal has gone quiet. It can't hear the difference between "that's interesting" meaning genuine curiosity and "that's interesting" meaning I really don't agree with you. And it can't feel when a room becomes uncomfortable or when that discomfort might actually be exactly where the useful conversation is beginning.

A conversation includes tone, timing, body language, trust, history, humour, and silence too.

Organisations and projects don't move forward because everyone has learned to communicate more politely. They move forward because people are willing to say:

I don't think that's right.

I see it differently.

What are we missing?

Why are we doing this?

I'm uncomfortable with that.

Convince me.

That's healthy, and caring enough about the outcome -and trusting the people around you enough -to put a different perspective into the room.

A recent Harvard Business Review article by Alison Wood Brooks and Andy Atkins argues that every strategy, decision and transformation begins as a conversation. Their research suggests that the best leaders don't simply run meetings - they deliberately shape the conversations within them.

That resonated with me. Because at times we can treat meetings too much as information-transfer mechanisms with an agenda, an update, a slide deck, an AI summary, actions.

Efficient? Possibly. But where was the conversation? And are we making space for curiosity, disagreement, for the half-formed thought someone hasn't quite worked out yet, for the person who sees something differently, for laughter, for awkwardness, for changing our mind, for saying something imperfectly and having someone else help make sense of it.

I think conversation is becoming a superpower

As machines become good at producing language, genuine human conversation becomes more valuable.

Not talking more, but talking with more intent. Listening properly and being curious. Reading the room. Knowing when to push and when to back off. Being willing to disagree without damaging the relationship. And creating enough trust that other people are prepared to do the same with us.

Standing at those traffic lights, I still don’t know what they were talking about. But I understood its tone and knew it was a conversation I wouldn’t have minded being part of. There were two humans connecting. We shouldn't underestimate how much information lives in that space between the words.

Sarah is Redvespa’s CEO. Her ability to use a curious conversation to keep things moving is absolutely a superpower.

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Header photo adapted from Aashish Yadav on Unsplash