Chapter 5
This is a brief introduction to learning accurate listening: the most important communication skill.
Engineers spend between 20% and 25% of their time listening, on average; that’s far more than any other single activity they perform.
Accurate listening and note-taking do not come naturally. These are acquired skills that need to be learned and practised. It is hard work, just like physical fitness training. Improving your listening skill is one way to improve your ‘emotional intelligence’, a term used by psychologists to assess your ability to collaborate with other people.
There are many engineering performances that completely depend on accurate listening; below are two examples.
First, gaining finance: nothing is possible in engineering without money, usually lots of it. Most clients with money tend to be verbal people: they don’t typically express their needs in writing or drawings. That’s the first reason why listening is so important for engineers: you need to listen in order to thoroughly understand your clients’ needs. Your clients will usually only approve funding for your work once they are confident that you truly understand their needs.
Second, collaborating with others. Engineers cannot achieve much without a lot of help from other people. You need to be sure that they are listening to you, and you need to listen to them. Accurate communication is one of the best ways to avoid nasty engineering problems. The major contributing factors to most engineering disasters have been communication failures. The Transocean crew operating the Deepwater Horizon rig drilling the BP Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico tried to communicate their concerns about the condition of the drilling operation to their superiors, but the risks of a catastrophe were never fully appreciated. Eleven members of that crew died in the subsequent fire and explosions.1 Knowing when someone else has properly listened and understood is as important as listening itself.
Most people think that hearing is the same as listening. However, just a few minutes of observation will tell you that those two skills are very different. Many people can benefit from improving their listening skills, including you.
When I asked my students about which aspect of communication skills they would most like to improve, their most common response went like this:
I would like to be able to get my point across more often. I find that other people don’t listen to my ideas. I’d like them to listen more carefully because I get frustrated when they seem to misunderstand what I am saying or miss the point completely.
Knowing more about listening skills can really help you in these situations.
The chances are that the ‘other people’ are not listening particularly well, but you haven’t noticed. Also, you probably haven’t listened carefully enough to them to realise that they have, after all, understood more about what you were telling them than you thought. Communication is a two-way street, requiring the effort and attention of all parties involved.
If you can recognise the level of other people’s listening skills and notice when they’re not listening, you can save yourself a lot of trouble. Once you can tell when another person is not listening, you should simply stop talking. Continuing to talk is a waste of your time. Work out how to regain their attention so the information you’re offering can be effectively understood.
Practice exercise: observing listening lapses
Join a group of people talking about something: it could be a project meeting, a casual conversation, or just a group of people trying to organise a social activity. Even better, if you’re living with two or more other people at home, simply observe a routine conversation around the dinner table.
Watch and listen carefully.
See if you can notice when someone starts speaking before another person has finished talking.
When this happens, the interrupting person switched their mental focus a few seconds before they opened their mouth to figure out what they were going to say. They will have missed what the other person said in the last few seconds before that.
Now, think of three other indicators that could alert you to a listening failure.
___________________________________
___________________________________
___________________________________
(See the online appendix on listening skills if you need suggestions.)
Repeat this exercise whenever you can.
The main trick for good listening is to keep your focus on what the other person is saying, right through to the end.
It’s hard, and sometimes tiring, until you have practised this skill and it becomes natural.
If you’re like me, you will often find your attention drifting. How many times have you been listening to someone, perhaps in a meeting, and found yourself thinking about something completely irrelevant?
Additional material can be found on https://www.routledge.com/9780367651817.
Active listening and paraphrasing
Active listening is a special type of interactive conversation, one in which the listener carefully uses occasional participation to help the speaker along. This is a skill that you can easily master, and it can make listening more fun and enjoyable. It is also very useful in meetings: your active listening will help other people in the meeting understand what someone is saying and promote additional engagement.
There are several good texts to help you learn active listening, an important skill. I recommend People Skills by Robert Bolton. A useful text for emotionally charged situations is Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler.
One of the key skills to learn is paraphrasing. It takes practice and can feel embarrassing at first. However, it sends a powerful message to the speaker that you are really paying attention and genuinely respect what they are telling you. When they see your level of interest, the speaker will probably tell you much more than they would have otherwise.
After a speaker has said something that’s important to accurately understand, ask them to listen to your own interpretation of what they just said and tell you if it’s right:
If I heard all of that correctly, what you just told me is ____ ____ ____ ____ ___. Is that what you meant?
or
Did I hear you correctly when you said ____ ____ ____ ____ _____ ____ _____?
This is particularly helpful in meetings, especially if you are the meeting chair. If you are unsure whether you really understood what the speaker was saying, the chances are good that the other people present have possibly also misunderstood what was said. By asking for clarification, or better yet, paraphrasing what you think the speaker just said, you will help other people understand more accurately.
You might think this takes extra time and trouble, or you might feel that you will annoy the speaker by doing this. However, you will actually make the speaker feel more reassured that you are sincerely trying to understand what they have shared.
Writing accurate notes
Being able to write comprehensive notes that capture the essence of what was said is a vital aspect of listening skills.
One common method used by journalists is to write in shorthand.
Another technique that I have used since I was a student is based on ‘mind-mapping.’ When I first started taking notes, I used to write key phrases in more or less the same sequence as my lecturers, something like this:
As you listen to the speaker, write down the main ideas as single words or brief phrases on the page.
It doesn’t matter where you start writing, but the middle of the page is often a good choice.
Leave a little space between each of the phrases or words. As the speaker continues, write more keywords or phrases near those that are related, and draw lines or arrows showing the relationships. As you notice connections that the speaker has not referred to, you can add more arrows and connections, even adding a note or two of your own alongside the lines to explain your mental associations.
You may end up with what seems like a disorganised maze of words and lines all over the page, but the initial layout is not important.
As soon as possible after the speaker has finished, add extra notes to clarify ideas and connections from memory. Highlight important ideas or comments. I enclose any thoughts or side observations of my own in square brackets to distinguish them from what the speaker said.
When you need to recall what was explained, start with the highlighted notes. Then, follow the arrows and lines to recall what the speaker talked about; your memory will fill in the gaps between the words on the paper. After a little practice, you may be surprised that you can remember far more than the words actually written on the page, sometimes even in a more organised way than the original speech.
The diagram below required about 30 words, some lines, and some symbols to represent around 350 words of text. Given that most people speak at around 100 words per minute, you only need to write approximately 10 words per minute to keep up with what they’re saying and still be able to recall everything important.
Contextual listening
The third aspect of listening requires you to develop sensitivity to particular word choices by the speaker. Let’s start with a simple example of a quotation by an engineer:
They stuffed that one up really badly; it took weeks to recover the drill stem they had dropped down the hole.
Suppose this engineer had started with the word ‘we’ instead of ‘they’. Would that have made any difference?
Either way, the drill stem—possibly thousands of metres of steel piping with an expensive diamond drilling bit on the end—has been dropped down a deep well. The choice of words would not alter the situation, but the choice of words can tell us how the speaker views responsibility for the accident.
By using the word ‘they’, the engineer has implied that he or she is not associated with the people responsible for the incident. Using ‘we’ would have conveyed the idea that the engineer is part of the group responsible and is therefore sharing some of the responsibility.
Observations like this enable you to perceive important social relationships. Understanding relationships can help you understand more about the meaning of the words people use, and perhaps the words that they choose not to say, as well as how they might behave in the future. This understanding can also help you ask relevant questions and, with practice and care, avoid unnecessarily causing offence.
Helping others to listen
You can apply your understanding of listening skills to help others listen more accurately when you are speaking.
For example, eye contact helps immensely. If I look into the eyes of listeners, shifting from one person to another every second or two, I can hold their attention longer. I can also detect when I start to lose them, as some people might start to move their eyes around the room instead of looking at me. Soon after that initial sign, if I don’t regain their attention, I will start to hear shuffling feet and papers being moved around. At that point, I know that I’ve lost their attention.
Some people feel uncomfortable being stared at, particularly in a small group or a one-on-one situation, and will actually look away while you are talking, even though they’re still listening carefully. Other people may have a natural squint: their eyes seem to be looking somewhere else, even though they’re actually looking straight at you.
When it comes to lectures and presentations, remember that a PowerPoint presentation is a great attention diverter. People will look at the screen and may soon stop listening to you entirely. It is difficult for many people to read and listen at the same time. With more than ten words on the screen, people who naturally prefer reading to listening will have shifted their attention and likely stopped listening. Among engineers, most will read the text and stop listening to the speaker.
Sometimes, a picture can tell the whole story, with minimal commentary. If this is the case, stop speaking for a few moments so your listeners can devote their attention to the picture. When you want to regain your audience’s attention, simply press the ‘.’ key: the screen will go blank. (Press it again to get the picture back.) Alternatively, you can insert a black slide into your presentation, which is a clear signal for the audience to shift their focus from the picture back to listening.
An imperfect, interactive, interpretation performance
Listening is not a one-way process that starts with hearing and ends with making sense of what we hear. Instead, prior knowledge is needed to accomplish effective listening perception: we cannot make sense of what we hear without some prior understanding of language, for example. However, prior knowledge can also interfere with listening. Partly to try to resolve this potential weakness and partly to evaluate our listening performance, we engage in conversation with a speaker, asking questions to help resolve apparent ambiguity or misunderstandings. Therefore, listening is a truly interactive performance; not a one-way input process.
In some cultures, asking questions, especially with a speaker of higher social status, can cause offence. In these situations, find out from other people how to engage in an extended conversation with the speaker, possibly in private. Sometimes, it will only be possible to resolve ambiguities by discussing what was said with others.
Perfect listening is rarely possible in real situations. Even with the best interaction, the closest relationship, extended conversation, and explicit clarification, misunderstandings persist as a result of the prior knowledge that we use to make sense of the spoken words. Because of this, listening is always an act of reinterpretation: the listener is reconstructing the ideas being explained by the speaker. That reconstruction can never be the same as the speaker’s original ideas.
The challenge for engineers, therefore, is to learn how to ensure that this reinterpretation by the listener still allows technical ideas to be faithfully used or reproduced, even though there will always be a certain degree of misunderstanding.
We shall learn in the next few chapters that reading and seeing are also imperfect, interactive, interpretation performances.
More listening and note-taking exercises
1 At any meeting, or even during a casual conversation, ask permission to take notes. After taking notes for 10–15 minutes, reconstruct what was said briefly as bullet points. Ask the speaker(s) to review your bullet points and check for mistakes, misunderstandings, or significant omissions.
2 Download the listening skills worksheet from the online appendix. Use this to observe different listening behaviours while watching other people in conversation or sitting in a meeting. Make sure you do this discreetly, or ask permission first, as many people can be quite offended if they think you’re trying to watch them too closely.
3 The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Radio National website provides a valuable resource to practise listening and note-taking. The website provides podcasts of many programmes, as well as full transcripts. (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/)
i Each day, listen to any recorded programme that interests you, for which ABC also provides a transcript. Listen to no more than 7–10 minutes while taking notes. Do not press pause: let the recording play at normal speed.
ii After completing your notes, reconstruct what was said as best you can from your notes: a set of bullet points is sufficient.
iii Use a word processor to open the transcript from the ABC website, or print out a copy of the section of the transcript corresponding to the part of the podcast that you listened to.
iv Highlight all the text in the relevant section of the transcript that was accurately conveyed by your bullet points.
v Do not highlight any important words or ideas that you missed, or where a word you wrote does not correspond to the word in the transcript. For example, if you wrote ‘specification’ (or abbreviated to spec’n), but the word in the transcript is ‘requirements’, do not highlight the transcript, even though the words can have similar meanings.
vi Estimate the percentage of the transcript text that you have highlighted to calculate your score.
Many of my students have started with a score of 5%–10%. However, after practising a few times, they have improved to 50% or better. Others who started at a level of about 50% have improved to about 80%, some even as high as 90%. Individuals interpret the evaluation criteria differently, so comparison with others is not meaningful. However, anyone can monitor their own progress using this technique.
Having started on what will normally be a lifelong journey to improve your listening skills, it is now time to turn to reading. Beyond listening, engineers spend almost as much time reading, and, like listening, accurate reading is surprisingly difficult to master.
Additional material can be found on https://www.routledge.com/9780367651817.
References and Further Reading
Bolton, R. (1986). People Skills. New York: Touchstone Books.
Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2012). Crucial Conversations (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Trevelyan, J. P. (2014). The Making of an Expert Engineer. London: CRC Press/Balkema - Taylor & Francis, Chapter 6.