What are you listening for?
Many of the people I work with have responsibility for procedures, standards, risk assessments, classifications, critical controls and other things that need to be understood, followed and implemented. All of those give us something useful to listen for. Is the procedure being followed? Is the control working? What went wrong? Who missed something? But they can also make it surprisingly difficult to hear something that doesn't fit.
Listening is often presented as a skill, ie. something you can get better at with practice. And I used to include it in my training sessions: Ask good questions, make eye contact, and don't interrupt. All of that has value and can be helpful. But I’ve come to believe that the quality and value of our listening is determined by something underneath the technique: What am I listening for?
If you're listening for evidence, if you're listening to confirm something, or if you're listening for something to correct, then you're listening against a frame that you already have. You're looking for signals that fit a pattern or that tell you where something has gone wrong. This kind of listening is often judgemental and opinionated. It can be useful, but it tends to turn conversation into classification: Is this right or wrong? Compliant or not? Safe or unsafe? Ours or theirs?
If you're listening to understand or learn, you'll likely hear something else: What's actually happening here? How does this make sense? What am I not yet seeing? Those types of questions start at the edge of your current knowledge and perspective. You're trying to understand the world from somewhere other than your own already established position. This takes curiosity.
If you're listening for the person, you'll hear something different again. Who is this person? What are they carrying? What matters to them? What are they trying to protect? What has brought them to this point? You are now encountering someone, which takes compassion. Because now, their world, their experience, is the centre point for your attention. Not you, or the boundary of what you know.
All three listening modes above are to different degrees trying to shape a better representation of evidence, meaning, or of a person, of things that already exist ‘out there’. But we can also have the conversation itself as a reference point. As such, it’s listening to what is happening in the space between what has been said and what has not yet been said, how it’s being said, and what is happening between participants.
In conversations there can be a pause, a contradiction, a joke that lands strangely, someone repeatedly saying “I'm not sure”, a proposal everyone politely accepts but nobody seems enthusiastic about, and a question that gets answered too quickly.
Something is happening, but we don't yet know what it means or could become. When that happens, we can stay with it a bit longer to see what it becomes, rather than move on. It can sound like : “I get the impression that this is not landing. Can we talk about that?” or “There seems to be some energy around that idea. What might be possible here?”
This moves us to being more fully participating in a conversation, opening up the conversation to become more real, without the comfort of an analytical distance. And importantly, because you give up the protection of being the person who merely observes or listens and become an actor, participant or player yourself in the conversation, it’s a move that requires courage.
So, these are different reference points, or objects of our listening.
If I’m listening for evidence, I want the conversation to confirm what I know.
If I’m listening for understanding, I want the conversation to expand what I know.
If I’m listening for the person, I want the conversation to deepen who I know.
But if I'm listening to the conversation itself, I may discover something that needed to be said but couldn't find its way in until now.
I don’t want to suggest that these are levels of listening, with one superior to another. They're just different reference point to organise our attention. Each makes something available that the others don't.
The first three share something in common: they're orientations we can choose to bring. We can decide to look for evidence. We can decide to be curious. We can decide to try to enter someone else's experience with compassion.
The fourth is different in kind. It's what becomes possible when we loosen our grip on the orientations we brought and let the conversation itself become the reference point.
We don’t have to abandon the standards, controls or questions we came with to be better listeners. Sometimes those are exactly what we need to listen for. But we can remain open to noticing when something else is happening that our frame doesn't quite account for. And perhaps that's the real challenge for those of us who work in safety. We have many things we are responsible for making sure people hear. Procedures, standards, controls, expectations. The question is whether, sometimes, we're willing to listen for what they don't tell us to listen for.
/Daniel