Listening for complexity

For a while I’ve been intrigued by the Listening Guide method developed by renowned psychologist, Carol Gilligan. Gilligan developed the Listening Guide as a qualitative research methodology, but the steps it outlines are a guide to more effective listening in general. It can also help us understand our own, and others’ stories more fully, by teaching us to listen for complexity.

The Listening Guide method starts with asking what Gilligan calls a ‘real question’. By this, she means a question that comes “from a place of genuine curiosity or not knowing” — from a place of curiosity, rather than judgment. This sort of question opens us to surprise and discovery, as well as the possibility of having our entire worldview shaken up.

There is a lot more to it, but essentially the Listening Guide outlines a process of three ‘listenings’. This is best done with a written text — such as the transcript of a conversation. According to Gilligan, the method can be used in understanding a wide range of materials where there is a first-person voice — such as diaries, letters, speeches, narratives, and court opinions. In the context of my writing about strategy as story, I am thinking about its usefulness in probing the stories we tell about ourselves, as individuals or organizations. Anytime we talk about ‘I’ or ‘we’. 

The first listening  (or reading) involves listening for the plot. It’s descriptive — paying attention very literally to what happens, and what stories are being told. In the context of strategy, this is our description of who and what we say we are, the context we are working in, and what we plan to do in the world.

The second listening focuses on the voice of the “I” who is speaking and entails the creation of so-called ‘I-poems’. There are two rules: (1) highlight every I phrase within a given passage, (2) record these phrases in the order of their appearance in the passage, each on a separate line, as in a poem. Isolating and structuring ‘I’ statements in this way, enables listening to what the person says or knows about themselves, in a way that can yield startling insights. 

For example, here is part of an ‘I-poem’ from something I wrote a while ago:

I remembered listening

I loved

I was deeply conflicted

Now I’m sitting 

I’m deeply moved

I decide to take a deeper look

I can see

I can name

I realize I cannot hear

I have been mistaken

I cannot ultimately know

I can imagine

All I can do

For me, this ‘I poem’ captured the essence of what I was trying to convey in my much longer prose piece, in a powerfully distilled way.

In the context of strategy, I’m interested to see how ‘I-poems’ or ‘we-poems’ might reveal deeper levels of insight into who we are, and our identity and purpose.

The third kind of listening entails paying attention to what Gilligan calls contrapuntal voices. This listening reveals multiple layers of the person’s (or organization’s)  identity and experience, along with internal tensions or conflicts. This step not only picks up on what is being said, and being said differently at different times, but it is also sensitive to what is not being said or what may be silenced. In the context of strategy, this listening step might help show us what we are avoiding, what we are leaving out, or where there might be internal conflict, hesitation, or confusion. 

Taken all together, I believe these steps can be extremely helpful in developing a much more layered and complex understanding of a story or a conversation (our own or others’). I’m interested in applying this to strategy stories, to see whether it can unlock new insights about purpose, and help surface and resolve underlying tensions, doubts or silences that need addressing.