This toolbox provides a variety of activities that you can undertake to improve listening and inquiry. Content will be added on an ongoing basis.
CHANGING HOW WE LISTEN
Thinking Space and Thinking Environments
Creating Thinking Space is not difficult, it is a collection of questions and ideas that you can use to engage with people and really hear their stories. It is all about the questions and the pattern in which you use them. In most instances you would have agreed the membrane for the Thinking Space, so you would be thinking about a specific topic, situation, development opportunity etc.
Resource: Thinking Space
Empathy Journeys
Empathy journeys are conducted to enable us as leaders and change-makers to really understand the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others. This is strongly linked to the development of excellent powerful questions and the work around levels of listening and rules of engagement.
Empathy journeys find out what is going on for people in the system. They get underneath titles and dismantle assumption through genuine inquiry and listening. These empathy journeys can take many formats, from a one-to-one conversation to intensive shadowing, to graphic recording and films.
Whatever the methodology, the purpose remains the same to discover what you can’t see and feel.
Resource: Empathy Journeys
Levels of Listening and Inquiry
Otto Scharmer and his colleagues at MIT have identified four levels of listening and inquiry. This is linked to the work on Powerful Questions and Appreciative Inquiry. The four levels of listening are:
Downloading
Listening from the assumption that you already know what is being said, and therefore listening only to confirm habitual judgments.
Factual
You pick up new information… factual, debates, speak your mind. Factual listening is when you pay attention to what is different, novel, or disquieting from what you already know.
Empathic
You see something through another person’s eyes. Empathic listening is when the speaker pays attention to the feelings of the speaker. It opens the listener and allows an experience of standing in the other’s shoes to take place. Attention shifts from the listener to the speaker, allowing for deep connection on multiple levels.
Generative
This deeper level of listening is difficult to express in linear language. It is a state of being in which everything slows down and inner wisdom is accessed. In group dynamics, it is called synergy. In interpersonal communication, it is described as oneness and flow.
Resource: Levels of Listening
CHANGING HOW WE ASK QUESTIONS
Powerful Questions and Appreciative Inquiry
Powerful Questions
The handout below is a selection of powerful questions that I have collected over the last 15 years. Please feel free to use them, amend them, test them out and add to them. It’s not exhaustive but it’s better than starting with a white piece of paper!
Resource: Powerful Questions
Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry is a positive strengths-based change process. Appreciative Inquiry changes the way that we start the ‘change conversation’ by asking what’s working, instead of what’s broken. At its heart, AI is about the search for the best in people, their organisations, and the strengths-filled, opportunity-rich world around them. AI is not so much a shift in the methods and models of organisational change but is a fundamental shift in the overall perspective taken throughout the entire change process to ‘see’ the wholeness of the human system and to ‘inquire’ into that system’s strengths, possibilities, and successes.
Appreciative Inquiry has a process which helps to guide the conversation called the 4D process.
Resources: Appreciative Inquiry