Power Down the Transmitter — The Potential of Listening Exercises

Following the last post a few people asked me how I’d define, international communication, public diplomacy or cultural relations. The frame of reference for the blog is to look for ideas which influence the way foreign populations act. This in Christopher Ross’s phrase is a “multidimensional enterprise”. In this enterprise Wandren PD is channel neutral to slightly mis-use a phrase from marketing communication.

Wandren PD is open to the influences of all dimensions of international communication, both human and mediated, whether from PR, PD, Cultural Relations or elsewhere. A good example of this cross fertilization of ideas comes from Kathy Fitzpartrick’s recent work which shows the possible benefits of applying PR methods to public diplomacy.

The possibilities for international communication exist in degrees of emphasis on a spectrum between listening and telling. This spectrum is discussed in detail in chapter 3 of the recent book Options for Influence.

Listening exercises

For this post I’ll focus on the sometimes overlooked potential of a listening exercise to influence the way people act; if it is done consciously, genuinely and publicly. Listening can sometimes achieve more in changing people’s behaviour than talking to them. This may seem unappealing in a world where getting the message out, has become a dominant mentality; an environment in which listening does not appear to have much of a role.

However, a message can be transmitted in more ways than the sound bite. Showing a willingness to listen can open up new territory for negotiation or collective action.

Clearly, there is a danger that listening exercises will not be credible, if they are perceived as an act, and that a pre-ordained action will be taken regardless of what is said. Instead it is crucially important that organisations engaging in listening exercises are willing to put in the appropriate time, effort, and, most importantly openness to the comments they may hear.

Can’t we just use polling data?

What makes a listening exercise different from the use of polling, echo chambers and focus groups is that it changes the power relationship between the groups involved. Ok, focus groups and echo chambers allow a broader range of response than polling. However, there is still a dynamic in which the respondents are required to engage in answering on certain issues which will have been determined by the host as part of the preparation process.

The recent Canadian eDiscussions represent a positive development in using online engagement as part of the planning process. However, they “request that your responses to the eDiscussion be directly related to these questions”. So no straying off into putting your views on other issues! (there is a moderator). In structuring the engagement in this way it maintains a hierarchy where participants are only allowed to talk about what they are asked to talk about.

Anyone that has taken part in a poll will recognise this hierarchy and will have experienced being required to put your mark in a predefined box (either actually or metaphorically) in response to predetermined questions on a topic chosen by the polling organisation (or their client). Occasionally when agonising over the answers, none of which express your opinion, there is a desire to create a new box, in which to write your actual opinion.

What can listening exercises do about this?

Listening exercises provide a method of engagement through which both sides can change the perspective from which they view the other.

Listening exercises are initiatives which consciously focus on inverting the hierarchy to engage with participants on their terms. Rather than asking for information on specific issues, participants are asked what questions an international actor should be asking if they want to have a better understanding of who the participants are, what they think and why they think it.

Understanding someone’s opinion is not always a matter of getting them to answer a question structured through your reference points, assumptions and ways of understanding. Truly understanding the answer comes through listening to answers structured through the participants’ social and cultural assumptions or language. That means engaging in discussion on the participants’ terms and within their frameworks of understanding.

This sounds like a whole lot more effort – why bother?

Can’t polls and focus groups be refined to put them into the social and cultural language of the audience? Yes, largely (and to be clear I’m not saying that polls are no use – merely that there are times when listening exercises may be a useful alternative). However, polls and focus groups will defined by the international actor and always have a hierarchical producer and participant structure.

The power of genuine listening exercise is that it is on the terms defined by the participants. By inverting the traditional power relationship it is possible to demonstrate that an actor is genuinely open to others views.

The answers in a listening exercise have the potential to be richer, as the questions:

1) Resonate with the participants, as they are expressed within their own frameworks of understanding.

2) Will provide answers that are more likely to be on issues which matter to the participants, as it covers the areas they decided mattered.

3) Provide an opportunity for participants to express themselves in their own terms rather than be confined by those of the ‘host’ or pollster.

In addition, while polling and focus groups are largely information gathering endeavours, listening exercises provide the potential to build habits of engagement – creating an opening for an ongoing dialogue.

For example, if an international actor has a reputation for being arrogant, dogmatic and unwilling to consider other viewpoints, this can create tension. If such an actor merely informs the target audience that they have the wrong perception, such an approach is unlikely to be successful. This is because the message mimics and reinforces the very impression it is trying to counter. Polls and focus groups may provide information about the causes of this tension. However, a listening exercise can do more than just gather information; it can challenge the underlying assumptions through being a working model of openness. As such, there is potential for participants to view the international actor in a different way and to act differently in response.

In line with the current vogue is for talking about two-way communication, (though many still put less effort into actually doing it) a listening exercise provides the potential that in understanding the views of participants, when expressed in their terms, an international actor may even find new ways to act differently and to engage more effectively.

As such the three potential benefits of a listening exercise can be summarised as

1) Richer information on which to base future action

2) A demonstration of a genuine desire to listen – creating the potential for habits of engagement to develop

3) The listening exercise may uncover alternative ways of engaging, that questions predefined by the international actor may not.

(An earlier and shorter version of this can be found in Ali Fisher and Aurélie Bröckerhoff, Options for Influence: Global campaigns of persuasion in the new worlds of public diplomacy )