A listening post

Among my holiday reading was Russell T Davies’ The Writer's Tale, one of the best books I’ve ever read on the process of writing. It’s a hefty tome, but one comment has lodged in my memory. In writing dialogue, says Davies, the key to realism is the recognition that a conversation is not a sequence of one person speaking while another listens, then vice versa, but that while one person is speaking the other is waiting, waiting his or her turn to speak. In other words, we don’t listen: we’re too busy angling to slot the thing that we’ve already decided we want to say into a suitable gap; a dialogue between two people is two parallel monologues.

That’s very relevant to consulting. This is an industry where “listening skills” have always been highly prized, where a constant stream of client meetings gives us enviable access to hearing what our clients want to say. At least in theory: in practice, one of the most common causes of complaint from clients is that they don’t get listened to. This takes various forms, from occasional misunderstandings to poorly-defined projects or an unwillingness to change an established process to fit a special set of circumstances.

As a junior consultant, I remember going with a couple of partners to see a client who was notorious for chewing up consultants and spitting them out. My role was to take notes and my contribution to the proceedings was limited to a “Hello, nice to meet you”, not least because I’d stood in some chewing gum on the way there and spent most of the meeting trying to scrape it off the client’s deep-pile carpet without being noticed. But I had to witness one of the partners repeatedly trying to sum up what the client had told him and fail because he wasn’t listening properly. We were thrown out in the end, although the irony to the story is that when we won the work, somewhat to our surprise, the client wanted me to be on the job because I was good at listening. I’m not sure I was, but I certainly wasn’t trying to talk over him.

Much of the listening done by consultants isn’t that, it’s waiting to get their own, pre-conceived ideas across to their audience. They go with an agenda, with bags full of thought leadership, with a plan for getting where they think the client wants to go. All these things are valuable but only if they’re relevant. So the last thing consultants need is a dialogue: they need to let clients talk and not talk back, that way they might actually hear what’s said. Oh, and keeping chewing gum off their carpet probably helps too.