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Alison Wood Brooks

ARCHETYPE

The Architect

Structured and legacy-driven; builds the systems and institutions that last.

Alison Wood Brooks reads as The Architect because she treats conversation as something with load-bearing structure. The Harvard Business School professor approaches human interaction the way a designer approaches a system, identifying the components, testing how they fit, and building frameworks others can inhabit. Her appearance on The Diary of a CEO displayed that instinct in full, turning the seemingly improvised business of talking into a discipline with deliberate, teachable form.

IN THEIR WORDS, WHY ARCHITECT

TALK is the most comprehensive, teachable, practical, scientifically rigorous framework in the world for communication. I didn't say it strongly enough. The framework can be used by humans or machines to coach people to be better conversationalists.

DESCRIBING THE TALK FRAMEWORK'S SCOPE

I started in graduate school studying emotions, especially anxiety — figuring out how it affects behaviors like negotiation, public speaking, and then figuring out strategies to help people manage that anxiety more effectively.

EXPLAINING HER RESEARCH FOUNDATION

When you think about talking, there's no way to take the entire contents of your mind and say it out loud. We're always curating. No one is doing that perfectly and I fear that many people are really struggling with it.

ON THE COMPLEXITY OF CONVERSATION

THE DIARY OF A CEO

The Diary of a CEO: “Harvard’s Behaviour Expert: The Psychology Of Why People Don't Like You!”

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Alison's full six-dimension Leadership Index profile is held pending their validation. The archetype shown is the OTA analyst-rated read. How we read a leader →

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