Listen to Ignite Thinking Listening is not a passive act - it's a powerful act of creation

Listen to ignite thinking: We tend to think of listening as a passive act. This is a mistake. The quality of our attention can profoundly affect the quality of another person’s thinking. Listening can be an act of creation.

Twenty or more years ago, this statement from Stephen Covey, in which he discusses his fifth habit, “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood”, helped shape an important way of thinking about listening.

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

Credit: Stephen Covey

Covey’s point is important. Too often, while another person is speaking, we are already preparing our response. We may appear to be listening, but part of our attention is on what we think, what we want to say, or what question we want to ask next.

There is more on listening without the intent to reply elsewhere in this blook.

Listening to ignite

A short video interview with Nancy Kline, author of Time to Think, takes the idea of listening a step further.

In the video, she says:

I want to be listening in a way that is more interested in where you will go next than I am in what I am going to say next.

Credit: Nancy Kline

This is a subtle but important shift.

We are not simply listening carefully so that we can understand what another person is saying. We are listening in a way that helps them discover what they might think next.

Nancy calls this listening to ignite rather than listening to reply.

Attention as an act of creation

Nancy makes an even more striking claim. She suggests that the attention of one human being to another can be an act of creation.

Watch the video below. It’s only two minutes long.

Listening is not a passive act, it is a very powerful action.

Credit: Nancy Kline

The attention of one human being to another is an act of creation.

Credit: Nancy Kline

If I can be profoundly interested in what you think and what you will think next and where you will go with your thinking, you will generate ideas and insights and ways forward that you wouldn’t do without this attention.

Credit: Nancy Kline

What is powerful about this idea is that the listener does not necessarily have to contribute an idea, offer advice or ask a clever question.

Sometimes the most important contribution we can make to another person’s thinking is the quality of our attention.

By resisting the urge to interrupt, advise, correct or demonstrate what we know, we give the other person room to continue thinking. They may make connections they had not previously made, question assumptions they had not previously noticed, or find themselves saying something they did not know they thought until they heard themselves say it.

The listener has not supplied the thought, but neither are they irrelevant to its creation.

Listening and interthinking

This has an interesting connection with interthinking, the idea that we can use language to think together.

It is easy to imagine interthinking as two or more people actively exchanging ideas, questioning one another and building on each other’s contributions. But Nancy Kline’s work points towards something subtler.

Thinking together does not always require both people to contribute equal amounts of content.

One person may be doing most of the speaking while another provides the attention that allows the thinking to develop. The thinking still takes place in the speaker’s mind, but what becomes possible may depend partly on the relationship between speaker and listener.

This is one reason why it is too simple to think of conversation merely as the exchange of finished thoughts between separate minds. Sometimes conversation is part of the process through which the thoughts themselves come into being.

The Knowledge Café

Although it has not always been articulated in these terms, this has long been an implicit principle behind the Knowledge Café.

A good Café conversation is not primarily about displaying what we already know. Nor is it about debating who is right or rushing towards conclusions.

It is about giving each other the conversational space to explore what we think, to hear different perspectives and to allow our thinking to develop through the conversation.

This requires speaking, questioning and responding, but underneath all of these sits something more fundamental: attention.

Without attention, there is little genuine conversation. And without genuine conversation, there is little opportunity to think together.

Listening is not simply waiting while somebody else speaks. When we give another person our full attention, we may help them think thoughts they could not have reached alone. Listening can be an act of creation.