Why you don’t listen enough

David Minarsch

Published in

Panopy

4 min readNov 30, 2018

The case for real-time feedback on our behaviours

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
― Ernest Hemingway

You’ve heard it before. Great decision makers, leaders, entrepreneurs and innovators hone one skill particularly well: they strive to be great listeners [1, 2]. It doesn’t however, stop there. You’ll need to acquire many so called “soft” skills on top of listening to excel in today’s uncertainty-rich hyper-growth professional environments.

You cannot improve without feedback

To become better at listening and indeed any skill for that matter, you need some form of feedback. Be it explicit, like someone telling you, or implicit through their behaviours, say.

It boils down to a simple observation: where there is no feedback there is no improvement*.

Feedback loops are at the core of human behaviour and biology [3]:

And in fact, this is also how AI is trained today. AlphaGo Zero became the world’s best Go player with feedback loops (the technical term is reinforcement learning: [4]). In each training round the following loop takes place: an action is taken which causes an effect in the AI’s environment which jointly determine a reward which affects the next action taken. By playing against a version of itself the AI eventually acquires superhuman Go skills.

You don’t have enough feedback loops

Depending on your profession you might get a lot of feedback on your tangible contributions like the code you write, the deals you close or the design you produce. But what about the intangibles, the “soft” skills?

To become a better listener you need to know when you listened well and when you did not. In short, you need feedback! One way to close the feedback loop and get this information is to just ask your colleagues.

Yet, I bet that you hardly ever get feedback on your behaviours in real time. Just pause for a moment and picture the last time one of your colleagues came to you after a meeting and pointed out that they felt you did not listen to what they were saying.

When was the last time you received real time feedback on your behaviours?

Was it yesterday? Last week? Last year? Never?

It’s no surprise then that you don’t listen enough.

The few places where things are different

Some work places already have processes for real time feedback on behaviours. Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates is the most prominent example that comes to mind.

At Bridgewater they practice ‘radical open-mindedness and radial transparency’. An app called the Dot Collector helps employees provide real time feedback on meetings and other interactions. This data is then crunched by algorithms to determine amongst other things the ‘believability’ of each employee on specific topics.

The Dot Collector App — an example of real time feedback on behaviours and other attributes.

This is great. For the first time their employees can see how they are really perceived by their peers. It also has its challenges [5]. I suspect these challenges can be addressed through the way in which the information is collected, used and displayed.

Feedback loops for everyone

I believe it is time that we have a feedback loop on our behaviours, regularly. With ubiquitous mobile technology there are no principle barriers for us to regularly share our feedback for each other in an anonymous, simple and secure way. With emerging distributed ledger technology we can ensure that we stay in charge of our personal data. The right kind of technology can help us create a world where you can collect honest and useful feedback from others and avoid a social ranking dystopia of the type in Black Mirror’s Nosedive [6].

To start with we can measure how we are perceived by the people we have meetings with. This way you can use the insights into how your colleagues perceived your behaviours in yesterday’s meeting to improve in today’s meeting.

Eventually, we can extend it to other parts of our professional and perhaps even personal life. With the added support of an AI we can be nudged towards the behavioural change we strive for and detect biases and blind spots in our behaviours.

What you can do today

In the past I have tested different approaches to real time feedback on behaviours. I am currently in closed beta with my own “behavioural feedback collector”. It allows you to build up an evolving behavioural profile from the real time feedback of people in your meetings. So you can finally treat your “soft” skills like real skills which need to be honed (see for instance [7] for how this can be done).

Share your thoughts on the ‘behavioural feedback collector’.

If you’d like to hear more about this journey then hit the follow button now and drop me a line in the comments section with your suggestions/ideas/comments. I will share more details on the product and how to sign up in a future post.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this article, feel free to hit 👏 to help others find it.

* I am aware that this is somewhat of an oversimplification. As always there are nuances and I am no expert on learning [8, 9].

I thank Karima Semichi, Teresa Döring, River Chen and Jaron Collis for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. Any remaining errors are mine.