Knowing when to switch topics in a conversation is a tricky dance. If someone else brought up a topic and you switch things up rather quickly, it may seem like you weren’t listening or don’t care. Even if a topic is getting stale, most people are afraid to change it too quickly because they don’t want to seem rude.
However, according to her research, Harvard Business School Professor Alison Brooks says the key to having a great conversation is changing the subject more often than you think.
Brooks recently shared her thoughts on topic switching in an interview with author Michael Lewis, discussing her new book TALK: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves. “A big way that we see people fail in conversation is stagnating too long on any one topic. When we think of small talk, actually, the problem isn’t with small talk topics themselves. It’s that people tend to stay on them for too long,” Brooks says.
It’s great to switch topics in conversation
Brooks says that one of the easiest ways to spice up boring small talk is to keep the topics flowing. “You get lost in the boring sauce of meaningless chatter, and you’d miss opportunities to move on to more meaningful, personal, exciting other doorknobs into more interesting rooms,” Brooks continues. “The mindset that you should have is just switch more as soon as you start to pick up on something getting boring or disinteresting, longer pauses, uncomfortable laughter. If people start to repeat things they’ve already said—so, redundancies—very clear cue that you need to move somewhere else.”
But what about those of us who feel uncomfortable changing topics because we don’t want to seem disinterested or, possibly, rude? Brooks says you can change topics politely by first affirming the person you’re talking to by saying how much you enjoyed the previous topic. “Thanks for telling me so much about your trip to Palm Springs, Larry. Now, what’s the deal with the new Taylor Swift album?”
Research shows that topic-switching keeps conversations exciting
Brooks’ thoughts on topic-switching are based on her own research, which shows that people are more engaged in the conversation right after a topic change, then it slowly begins to wane.
“When my fellow researcher Mike Yeomans and I measured topic-switching questions over time, we found that people asked more toward the beginning of the conversation, then fewer and fewer as they settled into topics that seemed interesting,” Brooks wrote for Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. “It makes sense. But it’s also likely a missed opportunity—as we’ve seen, many people could stand to switch topics more frequently. Topic-switching questions are the most reliable way to do so.”
Nobody likes sitting through a conversation that goes stale, so people are bound to appreciate your conversation skills if you can move things forward before they get boring. The key to keeping things spicy is first to acknowledge that the last topic was fun and informative, then take it somewhere fresh and exciting.
