This material is the result of a line of inquiry that started with me trying to learn the craft of graphic recording. Graphic recording involves listening to group conversations, then using visuals to model the content and connections as they emerge.

Spending an inordinate amount of time in the workplace listening as a professional activity - and, in many cases, feeling as though I was the only person in the room that was actually listening - I found myself starting to wonder why some conversations were so easy and enjoyable to model, and why some were so frustrating and painful. As I tried to represent not just the content of the conversations, but also the meaning, I started to wonder about the structure of meaning, and how it gets created between people.

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Some conversations seemed so productive, with new and exciting ideas coming out of the back-and-forth, while others went in circles. I couldn’t help but wonder: why? What was the difference? As my practice shifted more towards facilitation, I found that the muscles I had trained in listening became one of the most valuable parts of my practice.

A few years ago, I wrote a small guide on how to begin training yourself to be a better listener. It was too short to be a book, but it is too long to be a post, and has, instead, just languished in the deep recesses of my hard drive. I’ve chosen to post it all here as a short series, as I have never felt so acutely that we all might benefit from taking a moment to really listen to one another. Hearing each other is not good enough. We need to really listen.

Why Listen

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths - by telling different stories.

Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Our success as a species has been built on our ability to create a shared understanding of reality - to craft a sense of meaning that exists only in our minds, and not in the world around us. Our capacity to communicate our thoughts and ideas with each other allows us, as individuals, to expand beyond what it is possible to experience in a single lifetime.

Through listening we can assimilate the wisdom of others. We can absorb entire lifetimes of experience. We can experience parallel experiences, infinite “what-ifs” and variations on our own chosen path.

Or not.

We are taught to lead, to inspire, to tell compelling narratives, to “fake-it-till-we-make-it”, to add value, to engage, find our voice, win people over and take space. But what happens if we all do that?

A group of people on broadcast-mode is trapped in a kind of social-dysfunction that undermines the very power that has gotten our species to where it is today. Listening enables us to extend beyond ourselves and tap into a collective conscience that is available to all of us, but accessible only to those who consciously choose to do so.

Whether you believe neuroscientists, Daniel Kahneman or Gautama Buddha, we are locked in our own heads interacting with faded and faulty representations of the world around us, and only rarely the world itself. We live in our own mental models.

Daniel Kahneman’s important work on mental function showed that our early life is spent building a set of representations of the world around us - mental models - that allows us to navigate the world in a very low-energy-consuming way of being that very much resembles auto-pilot. He calls this System 1 thinking. We spend most of our time in System 1 thinking, following our mental models’ idea of what the world is, rather than responding to the world itself.

We only access System 2 thinking when we encounter dissonance with our expected results, at which point our full mental faculties are “switched on” to figure out what is happening.

When we spend all our time talking, we generally stay locked within our own representations of the world. Reflexive listening is what we most often do - waiting for an auditory stimulus that triggers us to make a culturally, contextually and situationally appropriate response. “How are you today?”, “How will you be paying?”, “What are you up to this weekend?”, “So what do you do?” all trigger near-automatic responses. Try answering randomly - in many cases, people will often ask you to repeat yourself, as though they hadn’t actually even heard the response, or will become flustered, confused, or annoyed. This is what finding the edges of a mental model looks like.

We live our lives in layer after layer of mental models, some conscious, many unconscious, from how we walk down stairs, to how we structure our tasks to who we believe ourselves to be.

So why listen?

Deeply listening to others can allow us to challenge the limits of our own assumptions, biases and mental models to learn from the experiences of others and become more than only ourselves.

Deeply listening can also be a profound act of service to others, unlocking their own constraints and boundaries by creating a space between you that is more than either of you.

Ways of Listening

When we interact with others, we are aware that there is probably more to that person than just the interaction we are having. Sometimes we interact with just the representation people put out. Sometimes we interact more with the context we are in than the person - the roles we play, whether it is a server in a restaurant, or a colleague at work. The iceberg metaphor comes up so often because we know that beneath the surface, there is more than just the context, and more than just the representation or projection of a person in front of us.

Let’s be honest; we use roles and mental models because accessing our full faculties all the time is exhausting. Part of the path of Buddhism is to free yourself of all the models - assumptions, beliefs, ideas of other and self - that shroud the the world around us from our view.

But that’s kinda hard.

One simple “hack” to start on the path of deeper listening is to substitute an explicit model for how to approach the conversation for all the implicit ones rattling around in our heads that we might not be aware of.

Over the next few posts I will share some models that you can use as a way of thinking about why you are listening, as a way of tuning your ear, and directing your inquiry.

It’s easy to get lost in the details of a conversation, or be in a rush, or be thinking of everything you have to do, and forget about what the purpose of the conversation is. And, when I say purpose of the conversation, I’m trying to set a higher bar. I’m advocating for a purpose that is beyond simply being transactional, and that is part of the assumptions built into the models I’ll be sharing.

In a series of posts, which I will add links to here as they go live, we will explore the use of listening to transform a network, to build community, to shift a system, to build a relationship, to reframe a problem, or to create something new. Each has a different model you can use as a listening lens.

Listening Model #1: Listening With Your Whole Self

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