There’s more to listening than an open mind

Imagine yourself as a team leader facing a critical decision — do you approve budget to rebrand a recently upgraded product?

You want to keep an open mind, so you listen carefully as the branding team leader presents data suggesting that tired, dated package design can hurt sales. But you don’t think you can justify the extra cost, so you thank them and suggest revisiting the issue in the next financial year.

Jump forward in your imagination, now, to a year later. The product is struggling to make a dent in the market. Worse, a competitor is stealing share because their package design is more contemporary and engaging.

Your team member was right, and you’re facing the consequences of being wrong.

A better approach

To be fair, you listened with an open mind and made a business decision based on the best information you had. But is there a better approach to listening? One that yields more information and makes for better decisions?

According to Otto Scharmer, a change management guru at MIT’s Sloan business school, there is.

Scharmer created a model that organizes listening into four levels. Let’s look at each level and see how this framework could have helped you.

He calls the first two levels “rational listening.”

Downloading, factual listening

At Level 1, Downloading, listeners are closed-minded and acquire only information that’s familiar. They don’t hear or process information that challenges their beliefs. To your credit, you weren’t closed-minded. You went to the next level and allowed your team member to make their case.

In Level 2, Factual Listening, listeners are open-minded. They pay attention to information that’s different from what they already know. At this level your team member presented data that was new to you and you listened with an open mind, but you made no connection between the facts and the person expressing them. The human context of the exchange was missing. And though you felt you had enough information to make the right decision, you didn’t.

Empathic listening

What you needed to do, according to Scharmer, was engage in “emotional listening.” Level 3, Empathic Listening, occurs when the listener is open-hearted and attempts to connect with the feelings and emotions of the other person. If you had listened empathically, you’d have listened not just to your team member’s words but to their whole person.

For example, you’d have expressed curiosity about the passion the person felt for their idea. You might have said, “I can tell from your tone and body language that you feel very strongly about this. Why?”

The team member might have responded, “Because at a previous company we had a crushing product failure due to complacency about a packaging update. I don’t want that to happen here.”

By listening open-heartedly, and probing for what was behind the emotions you observed, you would have learned that the person had critical life experience you needed to factor into your decision.

Generative listening

At the fourth level of listening, Generative Listening, the listener is open-willed as well as open-hearted. This means being willing to change one’s mind and achieve what Scharmer calls the “best possible future.”

If you had gone to this level, you might have considered the risks your team member highlighted, factored the consequences of inaction into your decision, and perhaps made the right call.

To sum up, listening with only an “open mind” means we’re intellectually willing, but we risk making decisions based on limited, mostly factual, inputs. When we engage in conversation with an open heart — listening to the entire person — and an open will — being willing to make real changes — we connect at a higher level and achieve the kind of clarity that makes for better decisions.

This blog entry is adapted from the BTS Total Access micro video “The Four Levels of Listening: Why an Open Mind Is Not Enough.”  If you’re a Total Access customer, you can watch the video here. If you’re not, but would like to see this video (or any of our other programs), request a demo and we’ll get you access.