Dear data friends, are you listening?
Why being a good listener can improve the quality of your output — and how to become one.
Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen!
There is this great TED video by Ernesto Sirolli called “Want to help someone? Shut up and Listen”. In it, he explained how, as a 21 years-old, he worked for an Italian NGO which tried to “teach Zambian people how to grow food”.
They successfully grew magnificent tomatoes in the valley down by the Zambezi river — but, as Sirolli puts in his own’s words:
When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians, ‘My God, the hippos!’ And the Zambians said, ‘Yes, that’s why we have no agriculture here.’
Sirolli and the NGO didn’t ask the right questions to the people who were going to be impacted by the work, and more generally, they didn’t listen enough — hence Sirolli’s advice to just “shut up and listen”.
His advice is not new, and you can find it in different flavors, by multiple authors:
- In the famous book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, principle #5 is “Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood”
- Epitectus (from Ancient Greece) wrote “Nature hath given men one tongue but two ears, two that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”
- More recently, Ted Lasso (from Apple TV) said “Be curious, not judgmental”.
It is even more relevant for data practitioners — whose jobs are essentially to answer questions with data. Our professional value is highly dependent on our understanding of the question and the context in which it lives.
So why is it so hard for us to listen?
Don’t we know everything already?
- When working with data, it is especially easy to start developing an ego. You know the numbers. You have technical abilities allowing you to make inferences based on those numbers. And you know methodologies allowing you to assess how reliable those inferences are. That’s a super power right there!
- As such, it is easy for us to stop listening as soon as someone mentions a problem — our brain rushes towards a solution before we get all the information we need. And in most cases, this will lead to a suboptimal solution.
Listen for the why, the what, the who
Let’s imagine you are working for a global SAAS company, and your manager asks you to look into the evolution of sign-ups over the past two years.
- Deep-diving into the why: What is the actual problem and why is it important to solve it? Active listening can help you go beyond ‘surface level’ problems. If the growth of sign-ups is an area of concern — is just looking at a time series sufficient, or should you split the data per region and look at the quarterly growth rate? Or do we think it is an UX problem, due to the redesign of the website, and in that case should you build a funnel view to understand where the sign ups process fails? Or do we think it is a pricing issue, with the market becoming more and more competitive?
- Deep-diving into the what: What is needed for this project? Listening to the requirements from your stakeholders that will ultimately be using your work is key to making sure your project doesn’t die in a slide. For instance, thanks to your study, you discovered that there might be an opportunity to turn some free users to paid customers by offering them a discount. You build a very accurate model to be able to target these free users — but your model is a black box and the marketing team decides not to use it, as they don’t really understand how it works and how the targeting decisions are being made.
- Deep-diving into the who: Who are the main decision makers, and what story would resonate best with them? Finally, when you present your study with your recommendations, in order to get the final green light, you need to make sure the story you tell ‘works’ for your audience. You want to reduce any noise and only focus on the signal. This means you need to listen to your audience to make sure your story speaks to their concerns and any pushback.
Some tips on becoming a better listener
- Be present: Active listening is hard — it requires a lot of mental energy as you have to concentrate on what is being said. It is very easy to just open another tab on your computer or look at your phone while someone else is talking (I am definitely guilty of this). A lot of information can be missed by moments of inattention and your project will ultimately suffer. If being present is difficult, try to ease yourself into it by taking notes during the meeting — it will force you to stay focused on the topic and give you reference material later on in the process.
- Force yourself to ask questions — and then learn to ask better questions. Ultimately you want to increase the information you have — you want people to explain their situation in detail so that you can create as much value as possible.
- Try summarizing what a person just told you, and repeat it back to them (using your own words): This forces you to actively listen to the other person and verifies that you understood them correctly. It also gives them the opportunity to rephrase their point, clarify it if necessary, and potentially give more information.
- Identify your assumptions and keep them in check: In the book You’re Not Listening, Kate Murphy said that “assumptions are like earplugs”. Assumptions bias you — they bias you towards not listening to people you know well (since you assume you already know what they will say), they bias you toward listening to content that ‘matches’ your vision of the world (confirmation bias), etc.
Do you have any other tips to share on how to become a better listener? Let me know in the comment section!
Thanks for reading!
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