Listening to Each Other: How can we listen together?
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘How can we listen together? Where leaders from different organisations come together to listen to those they serve, and work with them in a positive and motivating way to bring about change.’
The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
Collective listening can be a powerful tool. Especially when partnerships are formed first and foremost to build and share knowledge, in ways that can produce social change, rather than simply to design and deliver a set of services.
Listening well is difficult. It matters who is in the room, who is included, as well as who is absent.
It also matters how the listening is practiced. Operating at a level of intimacy, allowing people to enter into each other’s lives and build trust, can produce the best results.
We need to remember that listening only brings about change when it is acted upon. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, it was said.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is ‘How can we listen together.’
Karin Woodley, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, pointed out that listening is hard. To drive people-powered innovation we need to step into our service users’ experiences and understand the limitations of our own biases, experiences, knowledge and judgements, and create safe spaces for people to share their own experiences and desires.
In the current economic and political climate, when organisations are struggling for their own survival, it is a challenge to lead change through partnership. But as leaders we can come together, listen better, and allow the knowledge and lived experience of our service users to be shared. In this way we can gain a holistic view of what is happening in service users’ lives and so better understand drivers of exclusion and poverty.
Some years ago, when Karin was CEO of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, she worked with Imperial College, Oxford University, and local schools in South London. The starting point was listening to Black parents, and it quickly became clear that the parents were highly aspirational for their children, but that their children were being characterised and limited within the school system. As a result of this partnership undertook research to understand the cognitive skills required for different roles in the built environment, from architecture to engineering. This shifted the practice in the participating schools regarding the teaching of STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, maths), and also led to fresh approaches to work with excluded young Black people, for example opportunities to travel to the United States to take part in Nasa-sponsored competitions.
The challenges we face as society are so much bigger than any one of our organisations, said Karin. We need a new era of working together, deploying tools like radical listening, to create systemic responses to match the scale of the challenges we face.
Sally Young spoke from her long experience in the health service and the voluntary sector in the North East on England. She has realised, she said, that she has not always been a good listener. And that it is wrong for those who work in the charity sector to assume they are necessarily superior at listening, compared to those from other sectors.
About ten years ago, she said, Newcastle reviewed its contracts for children and young people’s services with local organisations, and decided it would save money to move to a single contract. A large national organisation won the contract, and local agencies were de-funded. In response, Sally helped to establish a consortium, to encourage local organisations to work together, and this led to some shared contracts, and improved connectivity across agencies. But it was not easy to maintain solidarity. As people changed the values also changed, and organisations under pressure were sometimes less willing to share.
Sally pointed out that beliefs, values and principles, and relationships and trust between people, are needed to bring about change. There is no point in just listening and gathering information if we do nothing with it to challenge structural problems, not just the superficial ones, she said.
Lawrence Walker, from A New Direction spoke next. Listening, done well, is an art form, he said. It is personal and provocative; it disrupts power and inspires new action. It takes years to be a skilful listener. Most organisations listen for their then own ends, and while this can be useful, it limits the potential for change is limited, because no single organisation can account for the complexity of people’s lives, or can have the influence to bring about wider change. We need to open up the process and have more shared endeavours, he said.
Orientation is fundamental to successful collaboration. People need to understand what they are signing up to, and the nature and level of investment required, and they need to be prepared for the nuances and politics of relationships.
Risk-taking, generosity, and giving away power is easier said than done. The process needs to be held by someone, and that person needs to be willing to be accountable to the group.
Collective listening processes can be genuinely exciting. People will bring their wisdom and specialisms, but at a deeper level it is the interplay of cultures – language, filters, frames – which produces appreciation and engagement. ’Be ready to be surprised and have one’s organisational bias challenged,’ said Lawrence.
He described a recent collaboration about young people in the pandemic which involved five organisations. This, he suggested, might be about the limit – collaboration becomes more complicated the larger the number. This particular collaboration was hard, but worthwhile. One of the insights was that allowing voices to be heard is important, but it is not enough. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, he said.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: What does good collective listening look like? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses:
We need a shift in organisational culture and practice
Collective listening needs to be much more integral to how organisations work together, and become part of the prevailing culture, it was suggested.
This requires a big shift in our practice, moving beyond the efforts by individual organisations to gather feedback about their own work or their own plans. It needs to start with an ambition to discover people’s experiences of a system or within a place.
The purpose of collaboration should best emerge not simply from a pooling of organisational interests but rather first and foremost from listening to the people the organisations exist to serve.
Listening can lead to fundamental changes in the practice of an organisation. We heard how Shelter was approached by tenants on an estate in the North of England. They wanted to take legal action to prevent social and private landlords increasing their rents (by 60%). Legal action wasn’t possible (the landlords were operating within the law) but rather than simply saying, sorry we can’t help, the charity then worked with the residents to develop a campaign, using community organising principles, and this led to the landlords backing down. This would not have happened without listening.
This outcome was not simply due to a local community organiser. It also required a different mind-set across the whole Shelter team, with staff in different parts of the organisation being willing to listen and act accordingly, going beyond the confines of their traditional service.
Methods for collective listening
Collective listening needs preparation and structure. When there is a clear reason for listening the exercise is likely to be more productive.
It is important to take account of both the different views of those who want to be listened to, and also the different agendas of those who are doing the listening.
It matters who is present and who is absent. If those who control funding and have ability to make decisions are absent, it will be much harder for collective listening to produce the changes that are needed.
Listening is, however, not just about getting people from different agencies into the room to listen. The process needs to be inclusive. There needs to be human-to-human empathy. Speaking kindly to each other goes a long way.
It can help if listeners and those listened to can mirror each other, and so can more easily relate to each other.
Putting people at ease, paying attention to the layout of the room, can also matter a great deal.
Listening without an agenda is important. Well-meaning organisations often start with a stance, their idea of what might help people. Whereas it is best to start with discovering the skills in the room, recognising the experience and gifts that people themselves have, allowing their insights to inform decision-making.
It was also suggested that citizens’ assemblies can be a useful model for collective listening, particularly in respect of complex challenges, where there are opposing views on how to proceed.
Should we be listening better to voices from the past?
In China, it was explained, there is a different culture, where people are much more likely than in the West often look to historical precedents to find solutions to modern challenges. It was suggested that appeals to historical wisdom can help to overcome short term organisational self-interest.
On the other hand, it was also pointed out that a reliance on historical precedent can perpetuate and reinforce embedded inequalities.
We need to understand when listening is useful (and when not)
We need to develop our understanding of when listening is most useful, and when not. The idea that the voices of lived experience should inform decision-making has become much more prominent in recent years in some parts of the charity and public sectors. But in fact, the value of such voices is far higher for some types of decision-making than for others, it was said.
Failing to recognise this can produce a reductive box-ticking set of behaviours, rather than one that really drives social change.
Final comments
Karin Woodley, in reflecting on the discussion, suggested that a key challenge is how to create strategic partnerships or collaborations that are not just about developing or delivering a service, but more fundamentally about building our collective knowledge, in a way that allows unheard voices to drive decision-making and bring about change.
She also said that in her experience, the best listening results from efforts to make conversations intimate, allowing people to build trust by entering into each other’s lives.