As a consultant, I spend a lot of time talking to business people about what they do, why they’re doing it, and what’s “keeping them up at night”. It’s really interesting to see the world that people create around them to get things done. I’ll often get the feedback that ‘it was great to just talk about things’. Aside from being chuffed that I must be doing an okay job, I never really thought that much about it.

Then recently, I received this feedback three times in the one week. While it’s quite common for consultants to cram a lot of interviews into a short period, this time the frequency and intensity (it wasn’t just a: “thank you for listening”, one was a heartfelt “it’s good to be heard”) was unusual and got me wondering… These people aren’t just happy about sitting around a table having a chat, they obviously feel like they haven’t been listened to until now. Why?

I mean, it’s not like the people I interview have never talked to someone from “IT” before. More often than not, I’m asked to investigate their system because it’s been around for a long time and has had a colourful history. With even the most ‘rogue’ systems, IT is involved in some way—even if it was in the distant past.

And I don’t think I’m necessarily any better an interviewer/listener than other people—while I do use whiteboards and visual facilitation techniques in my work, my ability to listen comes from being a son, a brother, a friend, a partner… And I hardly have a monopoly on that. A colleague once told me that he and his wife gave free marriage counselling to people in their community. I said to him: “Wow, what a great skill to have! Being able to really listen and understand people must be so useful in work situations” — the way he slowly nodded his head in response told me that he hadn’t actually thought of it that way before. Why not?

What I suspect is that it’s a symptom of the way in which IT organisations have shaped the way they operate over recent decades. There’s been a lot of effort put into increasing the level of quality and discipline in the way IT delivers. But somewhere along that journey, IT just stopped listening.

We all know that in order to listen and really hear someone we must engage our empathy; our compassion; our affinity for the other—we need to be human beings. But our IT world is full of “processes”, “governance”, “structure”, “management”, “resources”, “risk mitigation”, “analysis”, “architecture”, “systems”, “best practice” (seriously?)—a lexicon which exists to separate the work from the people; to turn IT into a production line; to actively de-humanise our work. That is not to say we should (or can) throw it all away. But we mustn’t forget that words are tools; that tools can be used to build bridges as well as prisons; and that by surrounding our office-lives with these frameworks and abstractions, we detach ourselves from the human beings sitting across the room from us, and their challenges which we profess to care about.

When we listen deeply, we listen to understand and confirm. We develop an appreciation for subtlety and complexity that positions us to respond appropriately. Methodologies from Design Thinking to the military’s OODA loop (“observe-orient-decide-act”) begin with “discover”, “understand”, “observe” for that reason—to ensure a concerted phase of active listening simply to comprehend. What do IT people do? We “analyse”, “gather”, or “define”; we “map” or we “document”: words that suggest a very mechanical, cataloguing approach to building knowledge. As architects and analysts, we have to be especially careful—our ability to identify patterns has the power to both enlighten (through insight) and to impoverish (through oversimplification) — and no-one appreciates having their world trivialised.

It’s only by truly “standing in someone else’s shoes” that we start to see things as they see them, and we begin to know their experience; their motivations; the logic behind the world they’ve created.

And the best part? People can always tell when you’re really listening to them. It builds trust. It makes them want to try and understand you—and your challenges—in return. This mutuality is not only of immense value, it is the foundation for leadership. And boy—don’t IT people talk a lot about leadership these days?