Getting Better at Listening
Written by Kevin Bray and Jeshua Nanthakumar
If we’re being honest with ourselves, most of us are not great listeners. Sure, we all have moments when we are fully-present in a conversation, actively listening and locked in on our counterpart. But, for many people, listening is a skill that is underdeveloped and inconsistently deployed. Acknowledging this, along with the countless sources of distraction in our modern digital lives, is the first step towards improvement.
At Milkinside, listening to our clients, our colleagues and the outside world is critically important. It feeds our creative process, forms the foundation for our design frameworks and allows us to build relationships of trust with our partners. We view it as a skill to be continuously developed, on par with any technical skill.
And we also acknowledge that it can be hard. The increase in remote work has deprived us all of crucial face-to-face interactions and, at times, forced us to rely exclusively on virtual meetings. Between video conferencing, collaboration software and the extended suite of messaging apps we use daily, it’s never been easier to communicate as remote teams. But the downsides are real. Picking up nonverbal cues on a group video call is challenging, and more so when it is your 6th Zoom meeting of the day.
The good news is that listening is not an innate talent but a skill that can be built through discipline and practice, on both an individual and organizational level. The following examples are some things we do, formally and informally, to continue to improve.
Making room at the beginning of a project
Think of the best listeners you know, both in your personal and professional lives. How do they approach conversations? What types of questions do they ask? How do they respond in times of stress or heightened emotion? What values do you attribute to them?
When we’ve asked these questions internally, the same words show up repeatedly in the answers: respect, trust, empathy, integrity, honesty. What else do these words have in common? They are all foundational elements of a healthy and productive creative process.
We’ve written in the past on the nature and importance of our initial Discovery process, and won’t restate it here. It can be argued that the entire Discovery process is an extended listening exercise. Whether it is listening to the client through stakeholder interviews and brainstorming workshops, listening to the target audience through user testing and research, listening to the market through an analysis of the competitive ecosystem or listening to each other in our internal ideation phase, we are repeatedly asking questions and listening for the answers.
It isn’t just the content of these answers that is important. It is also the process itself. Listening builds respect and trust in partner relationships, without which it is difficult to push the boundaries and take creative risks.
Building feedback loops throughout all phases of a project
It is intuitive and habitual to kick off a project with a period of research, discussion and planning, before shifting focus to execution. What is crucial, though, is making the act of listening a living thread throughout the entirety of the project. It is just as important to listen actively in later stages as it is in the early research and discovery phases.
This should go beyond standard edits and approvals. At both internal and partner-facing meetings, it’s helpful to continue to ask open-ended questions — the type that were asked during the Discovery phase. We appreciate that there is a fine line between identifying breakthrough evolutions in the later stages of a project versus starting from scratch, and aren’t suggesting that you frequently choose the latter. What we stress internally is that curiosity, empathy and yes, listening, should not be confined to specific parts of a project plan.
Find time to revisit conversations with the target audience to see how your designs resonate. Continue to ask questions of your client partners that allow for free-flowing discussion. Don’t let intermediate project deadlines limit your chances of learning something new.
Encouraging 1-on-1 meetings and peer reviews
Group meetings are a common occurrence at creative firms and probably the best venue for brainstorming and ideation. They allow for moments of serendipitous discovery, are great for team morale and help build rapport. Recurring meetings for a project team to check-in and present progress are a must, but they should be supplemented by one-on-one’s and peer reviews to allow for deeper exploration.
The dynamic in a one-on-one meeting versus a group one is considerably different, and this is heightened in the age of video meetings. There is less temptation to drift off or find distractions in one-on-one meetings. You are forced to pay attention, forced to think, forced to interact. You are forced to be at your best as a listener.
In a one-on-one discussion with your colleague, there is freedom to explore all the influences behind the creative decisions that were made. Depth and context are revealed. Follow up questions allow the listener to draw analogies to her own influences and inspirations, and lead to a greater likelihood of further breakthroughs through collaboration. It’s not the first question, it’s the second, third and fourth that happen in a one-on-one meeting that can create moments of magic and drive a design project forward.
Setting rules and committing to the practice
As is often the case, the simplest actions are the most impactful. Having a checklist of rules to follow before group meetings can be helpful. Close your browser tabs. Turn off your notifications. Hide your phone from your sight. Sit back from your desk, away from your keyboard. Take notes by hand. All obvious suggestions, of course, but forcing yourself to take these actions will invariably result in a meeting in which you are more present, more engaged and more likely to retain not only the important points of discussion but the subtler hints from all of the participants.
More importantly, committing to practice these habits as a group is a show of shared respect for the time, thoughts and opinions of your colleagues. As a collective unit, you can begin to take on the traits of the best listeners you know. The result is a set of foundational building blocks of empathy, trust, respect and shared purpose. Which is the very best place for creativity to thrive.
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Milkinside is an award-winning global creative agency intent on making the future of technology beautiful. Our talented and versatile team believes that design is what transforms a technology into a product and that storytelling should be at the center of any user experience. We are headquartered in San Francisco but always looking to hire the most talented creative professionals, wherever you live. If that describes you, please visit us at www.milkinside.com.
