Listening that creates us

Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.
Ordway Tead

This week I’m heading into a number of “conversations”. In all of them a group of people will be thinking and talking about their work; what it is, what it means and how to organise themselves to get it done. As I think about how these conversations will go, I think about the multitude of theories about “good” conversations. Today this has led me to suggest what I think a “good” conversation might be. I ask myself, when I get to the end of the week and reflect on these conversations, individually and collectively what will I be looking for as a measure of success?

Not a bad question really. If any of them turn into a heated disagreement or a debate will that be good or bad? If they don’t go beyond being discussions, how will I judge that? What does it matter what I think of them anyway?

From my perspective there are two answers to my questions. Firstly, I will judge them to have been good conversations if, at the end of them, the people involved believe they have a better sense of where to go and what to do next? Secondly, my opinion of them will really only matter to me and I’ll be happy if I think that I have help at some stage of the conversation by drawing people’s attention to patterns in their talking and thinking that they may not have noticed otherwise. Of course, if noticing these patterns doesn’t help them to learn something new about how they relate and respond to each other about their work them it won’t matter much. But if it does them I will assume that I contributed to the possibility of learning and different action.

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger

People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Alice Duer Miller

What really strikes me about my answers to my own questions is the extent to which I need to let go of any need or desire or perhaps expectation to “control” the conversations. As a “facilitator” this isn’t as easy as it might seem. Surely its my job to design and “conduct” or facilitate the conversations in such a way as to ensure a result. And yet my experience is that as soon as I start trying too hard to control I will inevitably fail to notice the very pattern that is most significant. I might notice it in the middle of the night after the conversation or, worse still, it may go unobserved.

My growing sense is that the listening that “creates us” and “makes us unfold and expand”, the listening in which “every sound comes back fuller and richer” sits very uncomfortably with attempts to control conversations.

I wonder if this is equally true for leaders who need to enable rich and purposeful conversation about “matters of common interest that have human importance”?