Listening well in a digital age
The topic was ‘What are the digital methods that can build good conversations, including with those that are often left out, and allow people to develop solutions together?’
The first speaker was Karin Woodley, from Cambridge House in Southwark, London. She is the ‘thought leader’ for the Better Way on the theme of radical listening – not least listening beyond the surface level, and framing conversations in ways that challenge the prevailing top-down methods.
The second speaker was Paul White, from eCulture Solutions. Paul has a background in local government and is now developing a digital platform so that those engaged in social action in Devon can more easily discover each other and combine their efforts.
Here are some of the key points made by speakers and in discussion:
We should not remain stuck in old ways. Digital methods can have positive and liberating effects – not least opening up access to events for people who would not be able to afford the cost of travel, or who are time poor. Moreover, digital conversations can have an equalizing effect, with contributions given more equal weight, and no ‘top table’.
There are of course negative aspects. A significant minority experience severe digital exclusion. Digital communications can be shallow, with less opportunity for informal encounters, and less ability to explore ideas together. And because digital meetings operate according to a similar template there is little that distinguishes one digital discussion from another – they all blur into each other, and are easily forgotten.
But these are not good reasons to turn our backs on digital methods – all forms of communication have limitations and can produce exclusionary effects. We shouldn’t become over-protective or paternalistic, it was suggested.
And some of the negative effects can be reduced by the design of online meetings – allowing more time for meaningful engagement, with more space for introductions, and for post-event reflection.
In order to ‘animate the quiet voice’ it can be helpful to start with an in-person connection, then make digital tools available which can add further value.
And what can matter most, whether in the online or in-person world, is learning to listen without an agenda, and learning to listen to those who are raising a concern with you to understand, not to respond. And people need to have confidence that they can manage their story, and that it will not be exploited for the benefit of others (including by social sector organisations).
Where the means of communication is shaped by the users themselves (with assistant from professionals when needed) a digital platform is more likely to be widely used. Karin Woodley gave an example where young people concerned about relationships with the police gathered data via social media channels which they designed - 4,500 young people across the country took part.
Looking to the future, things will continue to change with Virtual Reality, and Avatars opening up new ways to interact online. We should embrace such change positively, some felt.
From Listening to Action
The topic for this meeting was ‘How to turn listening into action, balancing the urgency of what we hear with the complexities of achieving it? ‘
The first speaker was Nick Gardham from Community Organisers, who drew on Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as well as the Operation WiFi campaign led by Community Organisers.
He was followed by Tony McKenzie, who is leading the Re-Connection Tour for Engage Britain, who spoke about the responses to the Hebden Bridge floods, as well as insights from the Experts by Experience panel at the charity Crisis.
We also heard from Emma Sandrey, from Co-Production Wales, who shared lessons from the practice of co-production.
Here are some of the key points made by speakers and in discussion:
Good listening is first and foremost listening to understand, not to respond.
Active listening is action, because it can bring about change in both the speaker and listener, and can open a doorway to a different future.
· As community organisers know, it is important to learn to work with self-interest. Not everyone will be driven by altruism, but self-interest (not selfishness) can lead to shared interest and action.
It is important to be honest and human in our interactions. Listening well builds relationships, and that can have lasting value.
Often an agile, iterative approach is needed, to generate a virtuous cycle of listening–action–listening. It is important to move fast when needed, and not become encumbered by bureaucratic rules.
Every organisation should be willing to say to those they work with, ‘You are allowed to drop the ball and pick it up again’.
Local authorities and other government bodies should sometimes be willing to step back and say, ‘What can we do to support you to bring about the change you want to see?’. There are usually people in a local authority who want to work in that way, and others who have very different entrenched ideas.
There is a great deal of frustration when things don’t change. We need to get better at recognising and channelling the anger in ways that can drive change.
For those confronted with institutions that find it hard to really listen, it is necessary to keep the pressure on, and to remember that ‘a good tactic is one that your people enjoy’ (Alinsky).
Energy and enjoyment can come in various ways, e.g. from being part of a group with a common cause, from being heard, from a realistic sense of hope (not false optimism), from a sense of humour. High energy and enjoyable activities will encourage far more people to take part, and amplify the power of the message.
Listening to Each Other: Inclusive Practice
The topic for this meeting was: ‘Why is it that some groups of people don’t get listened to properly, and what can be done about it?‘
The first speaker was Karin Woodley, CEO of Cambridge House in Southwark, London. She is the ‘thought leader’ for the Better Way on the theme of radical listening.
Our second speaker was Helen Phoenix, Head of Co-Design & Improvement at the South Yorkshire Housing Association.
Here are some of the key points made by speakers and in discussion:
Many organisations are structurally resistant to sharing power and control. The philanthropic tradition may be well intentioned but is often paternalistic in its practice and can stigmatise groups of people. We should guard against a ‘saviour’ mentality.
There can be a lack of cultural competence – poor diversity, at the front line of a service, as well as in management and governance, contributes to this. We need to employ different people.
We should be ‘person-led’ not ‘person-centred’ - inviting those who are outside to step in and take charge.
We need to shift our efforts from an equality agenda to an equity agenda, it was suggested. This means, for example, understanding the circumstances that enable or constrain people’s lives, and taking action accordingly. And wherever possible taking a strengths-based approach, not focusing only on the problems.
We need to invest in small locally-rooted neighbourhood organisation, and be willing to reach out more widely, including beyond ‘professional lived experience’.
When listening we should be aware of power dynamics. Where there is an agenda we should consider whose agenda this is, and be willing to discard it in order to listen properly.
We should ask rather than presume. We recognise that many organisations suffer from ‘fear of what we are going to hear’ – being challenged to do something they feel they cannot do. Rather than closing down the conversation there may be things they can do, for example acting as a bridge to those who can respond.
We need to practice ‘conversational leadership’ it was suggested, hosting discussions that can scale up from the personal to the system. Those in positions of power need to become a ‘river’ allowing the ideas of others to flow.
Listening to each other - learning from Scotland’s Community Empowerment Act
The meeting considered Scotland’s Community Empowerment Act which places a responsibility on central and local government to listen, and asked ‘What can we learn from the experience so far?’
The Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 was designed to empower community bodies through the ownership or control of land and buildings, and by strengthening their voices in decisions about public services. Provisions include:
A set of national outcomes drawn up by government.
Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) for each local authority area, to produce a local outcomes improvement plan (LOIP) with 'locality plans' at a more local level for places experiencing particular disadvantage.
CPPs are required to support community bodies to participate in all parts of the process, ‘in the development, design and delivery of plans and in review, revision and reporting of progress.’
Participation requests: where a community body believes it could help to improve an outcome which is delivered by a public service, it is able to request to take part in a process with the public service authority to improve that outcome.
Measures to achieve more community ownership of land and buildings, including the right to request asset transfer from the public sector to communities.
The Community Empowerment Act is part of a longer story in Scotland, including the earlier Community Right to Buy legislation, the Christie Commission, etc, all broadly pushing in a similar direction, i.e. a shift in the role of the state towards an enabling function, empowering local communities and citizens to do more, and to encourage partnership working.
The speaker was Maddy Halliday, CEO of Voluntary Action North Lanarkshire.
Here are some of the key points made by speakers and in discussion:
The Act is regarded as successful in several respects. It has been widely implemented, and has produced some improvements. For example, it has led to somewhat greater investment in capacity-building at local level, and it has produced a more nuanced balancing of interests in local planning activities, with more community influence in decision-making, and a growth in participatory structures (e.g. participatory budgeting for small grants schemes).
However, as a Caledonian University assessment found, there has been some public sector resistance, and progress has been strongest in rural areas, and less so in some urban areas. Moreover, the impact in areas experiencing disadvantage has not been as great as hoped for.
Overall, participants in our meeting felt that this type of legislation does not necessarily advance the practice of ‘radical’ listening. A key test is what happens when those in positions of authority hear something they don’t like, or which doesn’t fit.
For radical listening to flourish, a formal set of structures or practices, as set out in the Act, may be necessary but is not sufficient, when what is also required is a shift in culture and behaviour that allows relationships to flourish, including among people who may disagree.]
Critically, public bodies need to signal an intention to really listen, not just to confirm or negate a hypothesis.
A shift in culture and behaviour may require a significant and sustained investment of effort, including training in new skills.
Listening to Each Other: Citizens’ Assemblies
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘Citizens Assemblies: are these a good way to generate better solutions to tough problems? ‘
The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
If our political system cannot embrace methods, such as Citizens’ Assemblies, that widen democratic participation, then that system will be seen as increasingly moribund.
It’s no good trying to run a Citizens’ Assembly on the cheap.
It’s critically important who frames the agenda. Combining community organising with Citizen’s Assemblies could be a good way of both framing the agenda and building momentum for change.
Done well, Citizens’ Assemblies can generate fresh and often bolder responses to entrenched and complex problems. And at the same time make a contribution to tackling the democratic deficit.
But they are not the only method, and fundamental change often requires the practice of radical listening, for which smaller more intimate conversations rather than Citizens’ Assemblies may be better suited.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is ‘Citizens Assemblies’.
Karin Woodley, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, said that we need to dismantle the filters that we set up when we set out to listen to people, and offer new types of spaces that allow people to tell their own stories, without interruption.
Andy Mycock from the University of Huddersfield spoke of the drivers that have led to the creation of Citizens’ Assemblies. These include the decline in participation in local democracy, and in the national democratic process as well. Some advocates of Citizens Assemblies see them not only as a way to achieve greater participation in public decision making, but also as a means to build voice and agency, and to exercise scrutiny over the formal political process. It is certainly the case that those who participate do experience a steep learning curve, although the ability to exercise scrutiny is often less obvious.
There are various questions which are difficult to resolve. Should Citizens Assemblies been seen as a complement or a challenge to existing democratic structures? Sometimes indeed they are seen as a threat, by local councillors or MPs for example. But if they therefore have a disruptive effect, could that be regarded in itself as a positive outcome? Do Citizens Assemblies actually improve the quality of decision making, or not? And are they addressing the symptoms or the causes of the democratic deficit?
The cost and complexity of Citizens’ Assembles can be considerable, and this presents a barrier to their more widespread adoption. There are also inherent difficulties about bias and prejudice – they can become vehicles for the projection and perpetuation of established views. And ultimately, because they do not have executive powers, their findings can be rejected or ignored. However, the evidence to date does suggest that in some cases at least they are capable of generating well-informed and well-considered solutions where other methods have made little progress.
Rich Wilson, from OSCA, previously co-founder of Involve, and currently helping to run the Global Citizens Assembly for COP26 spoke next.
The big innovation of Citizens’ Assemblies, he believes, is sortition, in others words, the selection of people by lot (as is also found in the jury system). The benefit of this is not only that Citizens’ Assemblies are by definition more inclusive, but also that they often produce more ambitious policy.
Citizens’ Assemblies have potential to generate change, either because they have been established by politicians who are willing to act on the outcomes, or because they serve as a platform for citizen activism. In the former case they risk a debilitating parent-child relationship, and remain within an ‘old power’ framework centralised on governments. In the latter case, the Citizens Assembly itself can constitute a political chamber, and can become a manifestation of a ‘new power’ framework where the political process is more widely distributed across communities.
Looking ahead, the challenges are to design a form of Citizens’ Assembly which involve larger numbers (beyond the upper limit of 100 or so at present) and which can evolve into a permanent institution.
Discussion
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: Can Citizens Assemblies generate better solutions to tough problems? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses:
We need to encourage politicians to embrace this way of doing things, or if they won’t, the political system itself will need to change
It was pointed out that politicians tend not to like Citizens’ Assemblies as they are seen as challenging their power.
However, this is not always the case and in Newham the elected Mayor has established the first permanent Citizens’ Assembly, using the principle of sortition.
We asked ourselves whether we should we be trying to persuade the existing political parties to adopt more distributed democratic processes such as Citizens’ Assemblies, or whether we need to establish a new political party with a primary aim of giving away power?
Citizens’ Assemblies only add value when they are designed and run to the highest standards
Citizens’ Assemblies run on the cheap can lead to poor processes and undermine the concept.
There is a need for quality assurance, and protocols, to ensure that Citizens’ Assemblies operate well.
Community organising can be a good way to frame the agenda for a Citizen’s Assembly
There is a fundamental different between a Citizens’ Assembly which is set up to inform and guide an existing power holder, and one that is set up to challenge a prevailing system.
It was felt that a prior exercise in community organising, or something equivalent, is needed, to frame questions which are meaningful for the people who participate, and which can also build momentum for action to follow.
What really matters is radical listening
Citizens’ Assemblies function in a political and academic context, and they don’t necessarily lend themselves to a process of listening without a predetermined agenda, especially where the scope of the inquiry is limited by powerful institutions.
Citizens’ Assemblies can have a place in developing solutions to complex problems, especially those where there are not already sharp party political dividing lines.
However, they should not be seen as a substitute for other types of listening exercise, especially small-scale more intimate discussions, which can create spaces for fresh and creative ideas to emerge, and those, some felt, may prove the more powerful means to accomplish a deeper change.
More information
To find out more, see the following articles which were circulated to participants before the event:
Listening to Each Other: How can we listen together?
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘How can we listen together? Where leaders from different organisations come together to listen to those they serve, and work with them in a positive and motivating way to bring about change.’
The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
Collective listening can be a powerful tool. Especially when partnerships are formed first and foremost to build and share knowledge, in ways that can produce social change, rather than simply to design and deliver a set of services.
Listening well is difficult. It matters who is in the room, who is included, as well as who is absent.
It also matters how the listening is practiced. Operating at a level of intimacy, allowing people to enter into each other’s lives and build trust, can produce the best results.
We need to remember that listening only brings about change when it is acted upon. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, it was said.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is ‘How can we listen together.’
Karin Woodley, thought-leader for this Better Way cell, pointed out that listening is hard. To drive people-powered innovation we need to step into our service users’ experiences and understand the limitations of our own biases, experiences, knowledge and judgements, and create safe spaces for people to share their own experiences and desires.
In the current economic and political climate, when organisations are struggling for their own survival, it is a challenge to lead change through partnership. But as leaders we can come together, listen better, and allow the knowledge and lived experience of our service users to be shared. In this way we can gain a holistic view of what is happening in service users’ lives and so better understand drivers of exclusion and poverty.
Some years ago, when Karin was CEO of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, she worked with Imperial College, Oxford University, and local schools in South London. The starting point was listening to Black parents, and it quickly became clear that the parents were highly aspirational for their children, but that their children were being characterised and limited within the school system. As a result of this partnership undertook research to understand the cognitive skills required for different roles in the built environment, from architecture to engineering. This shifted the practice in the participating schools regarding the teaching of STEM subjects (science, tech, engineering, maths), and also led to fresh approaches to work with excluded young Black people, for example opportunities to travel to the United States to take part in Nasa-sponsored competitions.
The challenges we face as society are so much bigger than any one of our organisations, said Karin. We need a new era of working together, deploying tools like radical listening, to create systemic responses to match the scale of the challenges we face.
Sally Young spoke from her long experience in the health service and the voluntary sector in the North East on England. She has realised, she said, that she has not always been a good listener. And that it is wrong for those who work in the charity sector to assume they are necessarily superior at listening, compared to those from other sectors.
About ten years ago, she said, Newcastle reviewed its contracts for children and young people’s services with local organisations, and decided it would save money to move to a single contract. A large national organisation won the contract, and local agencies were de-funded. In response, Sally helped to establish a consortium, to encourage local organisations to work together, and this led to some shared contracts, and improved connectivity across agencies. But it was not easy to maintain solidarity. As people changed the values also changed, and organisations under pressure were sometimes less willing to share.
Sally pointed out that beliefs, values and principles, and relationships and trust between people, are needed to bring about change. There is no point in just listening and gathering information if we do nothing with it to challenge structural problems, not just the superficial ones, she said.
Lawrence Walker, from A New Direction spoke next. Listening, done well, is an art form, he said. It is personal and provocative; it disrupts power and inspires new action. It takes years to be a skilful listener. Most organisations listen for their then own ends, and while this can be useful, it limits the potential for change is limited, because no single organisation can account for the complexity of people’s lives, or can have the influence to bring about wider change. We need to open up the process and have more shared endeavours, he said.
Orientation is fundamental to successful collaboration. People need to understand what they are signing up to, and the nature and level of investment required, and they need to be prepared for the nuances and politics of relationships.
Risk-taking, generosity, and giving away power is easier said than done. The process needs to be held by someone, and that person needs to be willing to be accountable to the group.
Collective listening processes can be genuinely exciting. People will bring their wisdom and specialisms, but at a deeper level it is the interplay of cultures – language, filters, frames – which produces appreciation and engagement. ’Be ready to be surprised and have one’s organisational bias challenged,’ said Lawrence.
He described a recent collaboration about young people in the pandemic which involved five organisations. This, he suggested, might be about the limit – collaboration becomes more complicated the larger the number. This particular collaboration was hard, but worthwhile. One of the insights was that allowing voices to be heard is important, but it is not enough. ‘Voices need to have consequence in the context of now’, he said.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: What does good collective listening look like? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses:
We need a shift in organisational culture and practice
Collective listening needs to be much more integral to how organisations work together, and become part of the prevailing culture, it was suggested.
This requires a big shift in our practice, moving beyond the efforts by individual organisations to gather feedback about their own work or their own plans. It needs to start with an ambition to discover people’s experiences of a system or within a place.
The purpose of collaboration should best emerge not simply from a pooling of organisational interests but rather first and foremost from listening to the people the organisations exist to serve.
Listening can lead to fundamental changes in the practice of an organisation. We heard how Shelter was approached by tenants on an estate in the North of England. They wanted to take legal action to prevent social and private landlords increasing their rents (by 60%). Legal action wasn’t possible (the landlords were operating within the law) but rather than simply saying, sorry we can’t help, the charity then worked with the residents to develop a campaign, using community organising principles, and this led to the landlords backing down. This would not have happened without listening.
This outcome was not simply due to a local community organiser. It also required a different mind-set across the whole Shelter team, with staff in different parts of the organisation being willing to listen and act accordingly, going beyond the confines of their traditional service.
Methods for collective listening
Collective listening needs preparation and structure. When there is a clear reason for listening the exercise is likely to be more productive.
It is important to take account of both the different views of those who want to be listened to, and also the different agendas of those who are doing the listening.
It matters who is present and who is absent. If those who control funding and have ability to make decisions are absent, it will be much harder for collective listening to produce the changes that are needed.
Listening is, however, not just about getting people from different agencies into the room to listen. The process needs to be inclusive. There needs to be human-to-human empathy. Speaking kindly to each other goes a long way.
It can help if listeners and those listened to can mirror each other, and so can more easily relate to each other.
Putting people at ease, paying attention to the layout of the room, can also matter a great deal.
Listening without an agenda is important. Well-meaning organisations often start with a stance, their idea of what might help people. Whereas it is best to start with discovering the skills in the room, recognising the experience and gifts that people themselves have, allowing their insights to inform decision-making.
It was also suggested that citizens’ assemblies can be a useful model for collective listening, particularly in respect of complex challenges, where there are opposing views on how to proceed.
Should we be listening better to voices from the past?
In China, it was explained, there is a different culture, where people are much more likely than in the West often look to historical precedents to find solutions to modern challenges. It was suggested that appeals to historical wisdom can help to overcome short term organisational self-interest.
On the other hand, it was also pointed out that a reliance on historical precedent can perpetuate and reinforce embedded inequalities.
We need to understand when listening is useful (and when not)
We need to develop our understanding of when listening is most useful, and when not. The idea that the voices of lived experience should inform decision-making has become much more prominent in recent years in some parts of the charity and public sectors. But in fact, the value of such voices is far higher for some types of decision-making than for others, it was said.
Failing to recognise this can produce a reductive box-ticking set of behaviours, rather than one that really drives social change.
Final comments
Karin Woodley, in reflecting on the discussion, suggested that a key challenge is how to create strategic partnerships or collaborations that are not just about developing or delivering a service, but more fundamentally about building our collective knowledge, in a way that allows unheard voices to drive decision-making and bring about change.
She also said that in her experience, the best listening results from efforts to make conversations intimate, allowing people to build trust by entering into each other’s lives.
Listening to Each Other: recruiting the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘How can organisations recruit the right people, those best placed to listen and act on what they hear?’ The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
It is possible for organisations to recruit extensively from within the communities served, and so become mirror images of their communities.
But recruitment is only a first step. Organisations need to enable people who are appointed as staff or volunteers to be comfortable, creative, and accepted.
Flexible working practices, and a working environment that supports well-being, can make a big difference, as well as enhancing levels of team commitment.
It is possible to go further, to establish teams with a high level of autonomy which are of the community, rather than of the organisation.
Organisations constantly ‘other’ those who come from the communities served, thereby marginalising them. Overcoming this, and establishing a ‘team of us’ requires a profound power and culture shift.
By that mustn’t mean patronising these who have lived experience. And we need to establish teams that are truly diverse, even (and especially) when that feels uncomfortable.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is ‘How do we recruit the right people? The people best placed to listen and act on what they hear are most likely to come from the very communities the organisations serve.’
We started with two presentations:
Arvinda Gohil, CEO of Central YMCA
Arvinda explained that we need to start with listening, as the first rung on a ladder, then move to dialogue, to engagement, to involvement, to empowerment, and then to passing on power. But as a sector we have failed at the first step. We haven’t made our organisations mirror images of the communities in which we operate.
When people say, ‘You are not the right fit for us’, what does that mean? It means essentially that those leading organisations are only comfortable with people who are the same as themselves.
Good leaders have to challenge this, all the time. Questioning who we who we work with, who we entice into the organisation. This requires great tenacity, said Arvinda.
Opening the door is not enough. The organisation needs to enable people who enter to be comfortable, creative, and accepted.
The strategies we have tried on the past have failed, and we need to try new things. We have to take risks and be willing to make mistakes, learn from them, and evolve.
For example, leaders can seek out the ‘hidden gems’ within their team, those who are often unrecognised, and invest in them as bridge-builders, giving them time, empowering them to link to the community and to make changes in the ways things are done.
And it is better to ask people ‘What are the terms that would work for you?’ rather than ‘Can you work within the terms we offer?’
Nasim Qureshi, CEO of Inspired Neighbourhoods
Nasim described how Inspired Neighbourhoods started just eight years ago, and now provides a range of services, across four different communities within or close to Bradford. This includes, for example, mental health and physical health support, domiciliary care, employment advice, enterprise advice, and a library.
For each of its locations, the organisation drew a two-mile radius and sought to understand all the networks and communities within that area.
Before any project is started, there is a period of co-design with the community. This makes it harder to apply for grant funding, which usually requires that what will be delivered is already pre-determined. For this reason, earned income is preferable, because this allows the organisation to operate more flexibly.
Each centre has a community advisory Board, and the Chair of each advisory Board sits on the main Board. So community voice travels continually up and down, and this achieves a level of intelligence that could not be obtained from any number of surveys. There is no need to spend money on marketing and promotion to the community, said Nasim, because the connections are already in place.
The process is not just about co-design, it is also about co-delivery. People from within the various communities become volunteers, and they have written roles and responsibilities, and training opportunities. Most of the paid employees started off that way. There are now 60 employees and 42 volunteers. The library service is entirely run by community volunteers.
Staff are employed on a competency basis. 95% of the workforce is peripatetic. Nasim has a simple principle: ‘If we are sitting in a room, we are not working with the community.’
The organisation does not use time sheets, and employees work the flexible hours that are needed to deliver services, often outside standard hours, responding to emergencies, while balancing their own childcare or other family needs. Nearly all staff give more than their 37 contracted hours, and turnover is very low.
Many employees have lived experience of the difficulties the organisation is seeking to address. It is a disability-friendly organisation, and a lot of attention is paid to mental well-being within the team.
The Board composition in 90-95% local.The organisation is responsive to its communities because of the people in it, the informal conversations that happen all the time.
Inspired Neighbourhoods decided to establish a summer school service, to gain greater insights into how lives of children and young people have been changing in recent years. In the area selected for this service, the organisation partnered with a large number of local community organisations, building on their strengths, and reaching people they were not otherwise in contact with. They also involved the police, schools and statutory bodies, and were able to influence the City-wide strategy, inviting the Council Chief Executive and others into discussions with the young people, letting them speak for themselves.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can we build teams that mirror our communities and as a result are better at listening and following through? In the feedback and further discussion participants offered the following responses to the question:
Establish teams which ‘are the community’
In the past some organisations have taken a community development approach (employing people with specialist community development skills to enter a community and work with local people), or they have taken a partnership approach (forming partnerships with local community organisations to reach more people).
A more radical approach is to build local teams which are the community, in other words entirely or predominantly made up from the local community, who may be actual or potential service users, and who will be able to act as authentic community connectors. The challenge of an organisation supporting such a team is to provide it with genuine autonomy, so that it is able to operate as the community’s team, rather than the organisation’s team.
To do this well can take considerable time, and it is not easy, especially where organisations already have a deeply embedded way of operating, and it is made even more difficult when funders don’t allow sufficient flexibility.
But it can be surprising and encouraging to discover that quite a few organisations are now going in this direction. (And some funders too. For example the National Lottery Community Fund in Wales has introduced a funding stream to encourage more co-production.)
And it is always important, it was felt, to go where the energy is, building on what is already there.
Reduce ‘othering’
Organisations struggle to reduce the distinctions between those who are staff and those who are service users. How can we genuinely become a “team of us”, rather than professionals on the one hand and lived experts on the other?
We ‘other’ all the time in our language, our service models, our business planning, and the moment we do so we create a power imbalance.
For example a local community organisation run by Asian women immediately becomes ‘othered’ and then marginalised, because they are seen as niche and not mainstream.
We need to shift our perception of value, it was suggested, towards people and organisations which are from the communities served, instead of seeing them as niche and therefore as of less value.
Avoid patronising those with lived experience.
Designating people as lived experience experts, or as co-production partners, can lead to patronising behaviours, where those people are not challenged in the same way as other colleagues would be.
Those with lived experience are often more ready to tell their own story than to listen to others. It is important to recognise that listening is a distinctive skill, which needs to be nurtured.
Sometimes people with lived experience can become gatekeepers, and end up becoming a barrier for others, including those who have lived experience but different interpretations of their experience.
There is a difference between lived experience and lived expertise. Reflecting only on one’s own experience is different from possessing sufficient emotional and mental distance to critically assess what you are offering as an insight.
Build diversity even when that is uncomfortable
The recruitment processes matter, for example establishing balanced panels, not asking for qualifications that are not required, considering where best to advertise the roles.
Mirroring the community must not just become a tick-box exercise in representation.
There is a danger of focusing only on protected characteristics, instead of remembering the importance of diversity of thinking and approach. We need to be more willing to work with people whose political or social views we find difficult. And to establish safe spaces where people can test each other and learn from each other.
We mustn’t be afraid of diversity in our teams.
Shift and share power
We cannot share power, we reminded each other, without leaving our egos behind.
One suggestion was that leaders should always take on a direct delivery project, however small, so that they understand the system, and gain experience at first hand. Rather than simply telling others what to do they will find themselves entering into real conversations.
Now is a good time to shift our practices, it was suggested. Not least because many organisations have recognised that many things went better during the pandemic, when those at the front-line of services were making independent decisions, while office-based staff were on furlough or sitting at home.
It was felt that people from the communities served, who are playing advisory roles, should be given real power to review and shape services.
There might also be something to learn from the retail world, where consumers play a role in determining the success or otherwise of the stores they shop in. In the social sector (bearing in mind that relationships rather than transactions are usually what matter most) can we arrange things so that the success of our organisation is in the hands of our customers/service users?
Listen and engage better
There are challenges of personality – some people find it easier to be present, others have to work hard at this. Nancy Kline’s ‘Time to Think’ describes a practice of listening which fosters an environment where people can do their best thinking together as equals.
Does a flatter organisation produce better engagement? Not necessarily, it is culture rather than structure that matters most, it was felt.
We need to find better ways to engage with people without designating them as a class of people who need to be engaged with. Technology might help, it was suggested, for example by delivering constant feedback in the course of everyday activities.
Listening to Each Other: changing how we lead so that we listen better
Summary of key points
The theme of the discussion was ‘how can we change how we lead so that we listen better’. The main points which emerged from the discussion were:
Radical listening is transformative, shifting the balance fundamentally in favour of the people and communities we work with, building confidence and agency, and the ability to influence and shape how things are done.
But many things, not least the conventional expectations of leaders, managerial cultures, and organisational hierarchies, can make the practice of radical listening very difficult.
Therefore courage and determination are required to change the way we lead.
There are some well-established techniques (action learning, appreciative inquiry, reflective practice etc.) that can be helpful.
But what is really needed is for leaders to make space for themselves and for others to listen, in a conscious way, and not react defensively when assumptions are challenged as a result.
Leaders can develop a less hierarchical and more participative leadership culture, so that radical listening can happen at every level.
At the same time leaders can build a much more diverse and inclusive team, in composition more like the people and communities served.
And finally leaders can challenge themselves to go further, by reaching out to the ‘silent society’, in other words those people whose voices are never heard or listened to, and also by building a practice of listening well right across the voluntary public and private sectors.
In more detail
Steve Wyler, co-convenor introduced the model of change set out in the recent Better Way publication Time for a Change.
In this cell we are exploring the ‘listening to each other’ element of this model while noting that there are connections between all four elements, and indeed that applying them in combination makes each more effective.
Our focus this time is how we can change how we lead so that we listen better, even when that’s hard – recognising that it’s not about knowing all the answers or finding the solutions for others, but about creating an open-ended culture where others can participate. We started with two presentations:
Karin Woodley, CEO of Cambridge House, has agreed to be the thought leader for the cell, and she opened the discussion. She spoke about radical listening, explaining that this starts from the premise that everyone deserves to be part of a conversation about societal reform. It aims to change the way we engage with the communities in which we work, so that people from those communities become more powerful.
Radical listening requires those who listen to be genuinely curious and inquiring, and enter into discussions where the purpose is not to provide evidence for what we already think. We have to learn to stop waiting for things that justify our own beliefs, said Karin. We have to be brave enough to have our assumptions challenged, and be willing to listen beyond the surface level to discover what most matters to those we are listening to, making time to do this well.
We need to be conscious of our own behaviour, avoiding for example summing up for people, re-organising their words, and telling them what the next stage is.
We can start practicing this with colleagues in our own organisations and if we do so we will make it easier to challenge traditional internal patriarchies, and well as creating the conditions to listen better to those outside.
Venu Dhupa, previously CEO at Community Links, and now working independently, then spoke about what makes good listening so difficult. Operating in an untidy world, she said, we have a tendency as leaders to want things to be well ordered, and it is difficult to live with ambiguity. Listening is time-consuming, and requires people to be present, but people with very busy diaries will struggle to make space for this. Leaders are under pressure to provide answers, and identify metrics, and even when they are genuinely curious they find it hard to say ‘I don’t know’.
However, Venu explained that when she makes space for others, and trusts that something worthwhile will happen, it often does. For example, Community Links was visited by the UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and Venu decided not to arrange formal presentations. Instead she created an opportunity for women from the local community to tell their stories, and this had far greater impact.
Listening can have multiple benefits for leaders. It can open them up to them to considering different kinds of evidence. It can help them more reflective judgements. It can create useful frameworks that others can fill. It can allow more careful questioning, especially when faced with a complex challenge. It can help leaders go beyond the impulse to control and get to purpose. Leaders can find it hard to manage different opinions and conflict, but teams that are able to work their way through disagreement by listening well to each other can become stronger. And leaders who listen can pick up clues, often given respectfully, but which can be easily missed.
Venu shared her wish that leaders would make more space to listen, allowing people opportunities to explore an issue, and thereby place more emphasis on judgement rather than quick answers. To do so would be a sign of a mature organisation and mature leadership, whether in a Board or Executive role.
Breakout sessions were then held to consider the question: How can people in leadership roles create a culture where others can participate? In the feedback and further discussion participants made the following points:
The difficulties of listening
We need to name the difficulties people have in listening well, if we are to have a chance to overcome them.
Often we listen because there is an end in mind, and we are listening to clarify certain things, for example, how we can best assist someone in a crisis. This can be valid in itself, but is limited, but often those who are listening don’t have the mandate to listen more widely, or are caught up in a treadmill of activity which prevents listening.
To pursue co-production and radical listening requires trust and courage.
Working to meet the interests and needs of beneficiaries, and listening to them, should be the primary consideration, but this can be difficult, if, for example, this means turning down contracts that would pull the organisation in another direction.
Hierarchies in organisations can affect how we listen to each other. But the real expertise is often held by those working on the front line.
It can be hard to hear certain things, and a message might need to be repeated several times in different contexts by different people before it takes effect.
Techniques to listen well
Action learning is a technique to share challenges with others, allowing people to discover their own solutions, put them into practice, consider what has improved, and reflect on what has been learned.
Appreciative inquiry can help people, whether they are service users, those with lived experience, service providers, or commissioners understand how a system works and how to change it.
Active listening can include a process of feedback to check whether something has been properly understood, and inviting the person to suggest possible solutions.
It is the spaces between the formal interactions that produce the reward. There is value in informal conversation and incidental listening, and it can be worthwhile to engineer opportunities for this.
Listening is more than hearing, it is possible to use other senses to build awareness of what is happening, and even where there are barriers to communication it is possible to be creative to overcome them.
The experience of advice services is that often the presenting problem masks an underlying problem that needs to be addressed, which may not be immediately obvious but which can been be brought to the surface.
Changing the way we lead
Leaders don’t need to have all the answers, they need to be good at coaxing/coaching them out of others.
There are conflicts inherent in the role of managers, who need to take account of their Boards, their team, their users, their community, their funders. It is not easy or always possible to please everyone. There is often no single correct solution. There are dangers of raising expectations that can’t be met, because the resources are not there, or because the change required would be too difficult.
Traditional top-down hierarchical management does not encourage good listening, and we need to shift away from patriarchal management models towards more participatory forms of leadership where listening is part of what everyone does.
Indeed, one implication of the Better Way model for change is that we need to dismantle traditional organisational hierarchies, it was suggested.
Large and small organisations
It was noted that in large institutions a hierarchy of experience can be useful, where if someone is able to solve a problem on their own they will, but if they reach a dead end they can escalate it to someone who has more experience.
In smaller organisations, or in community settings, hierarchies within meetings are usually not useful, because it is more important that people (including those who come from large institutions) have an equal voice and are respected and valued equally.
Shifting the organisational culture
Within organisations is necessary to have some people who are driving the change, putting in place ways of operating that can help people become more confident about listening and being listened to. This includes making time available for listening in its own right, holding back from offering answers even when invited to, and enabling people to take action on the basis of what they have heard.
Empathy, especially with those who have been most marginalised, is aided where organisations are more representative of those they are working with. Many charities have become more like public bodies in their staffing structures and composition, but diversity within staff teams should ideally take many forms including class and education, and this can disrupt traditional hierarchies because lived experience brings knowledge, insight, and empathy, thereby helping to redefine what constitutes good leadership.
Decisions are best made as close to the people affected as possible, with assurance given to people on the front line that if they listen well they will have authority to act. Over the last year in the Covid pandemic we saw more of this, especially in the first lockdown, with some very good results, although more recently this way of operating has become less evident.
Changing the wider system
We need to create a shift from passive service users to active and empowered co-producers of solutions, and this will only happen if we listen and provide conditions necessary for people to generate the outcomes they want (one example of this, it was suggested, is direct payments, where funds are made available to people in ways that enhance choice and control, rather than simply setting up a care package).
Most people do not want to be drawn into the management of the services they use, but they do want to be listened to and have some influence, so that services are run in a way that are responsive to what they actually need.
The pandemic has helped people see weaknesses in their organisational models and the ways in which services are designed, and there is an appetite to develop strategies for organisations to help them do things better. The Better Way model of change can help with this, but changing structures and methods to make them less hierarchical and more inclusive, and which can generate the practice of radical listening, will be a long journey, and will need to engage the efforts of people at every level.
Going further
There are parts of society which appear silent, where there are deeper levels of structural inequality and voices are not reached or heard. We need to challenge ourselves to enter into that part of society and listen.
It can be difficult to listen well across the different sectors, voluntary, public, private, but this is becoming ever more critical.