Henry Kimsey-House suggested the concept of three levels of listening:
- Internal listening. A situation when in a conversation a user thinks only about their own needs and does not focus on what the other users say. Instead of listening, the user is just waiting for their turn to insert their opinion.
- Focused listening. A situation when in a conversation a user closely listens to the others.
- Global listening. A situation when a user is so engaged in a conversation that their intuition turns on, they begin to understand what the speaker not only thinks but feels, what are the fears and aspirations of the other users and how does this all correlate with the common goal.
We all need to strive for global listening in the conversations we participate in.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.