In change work, the people who listen hardest tend to get the furthest. Here’s why — and how to actually do it.
Presenting new information to a person or group can be nerve-racking. Emotions are heightened when attachment to the topic runs deep. When the work involves exploring unmet need in a community, designing new services, or leading change, there is almost always an imbalance of information in the room.
The trap is assuming the imbalance weighs in favour of the person doing the presenting.
The imbalance that isn’t
The people on the other side of the conversation — staff, clients, community members, service users — carry deep, practical knowledge about their area of responsibility, their lived experience, or the system they navigate every day. Professional skills and organisational mandates carry weight, but they rarely substitute for the granular understanding that comes from being inside the situation. Finding out what needs to be known to do the work well is harder than it sounds. It involves learning new language (every sector has its own acronyms), learning about new people (not everyone will be easy company), and learning about uncomfortable things (because despite best intentions, many organisations deliver services people quietly resent). The learner posture is not optional if the work is going to land.
Connect before you correct
When engaged in a conversation, the temptation is to convert the audience to a position. But when trying to build a coalition to drive genuine system or service reform, it pays to listen harder — and longer — than instinct suggests.
The psychology adage connect before you correct captures the core discipline. Challenging every assumption or statement made by another person is a reliable way to reduce trust and increase friction. It shortens the conversation and closes the window in which learning can happen.
Stephen Covey made a similar argument in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, where his fifth habit — seek first to understand, then to be understood — proposes that genuine understanding has to precede advocacy if the advocacy is going to be heard (Covey, 1989). It’s a simple-sounding principle that turns out to be remarkably difficult to practise under pressure.
Not defending a position doesn’t mean accepting whatever the other person is saying. Sometimes it simply pays to let things slide in the interest of building rapport. Once trust is established, there is time to revisit perspectives. Without trust, there won’t be a second conversation in which to do it.
Humble Inquiry: The Schein Foundation
The most influential articulation of this discipline comes from Edgar H. Schein, the late MIT Sloan Emeritus professor of management whose career shaped the modern field of organisational culture. In his 2013 book Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, Schein defines humble inquiry as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person” (Schein, 2013).
The concept was drawn from Schein’s twenty years of consulting work in high-hazard industries and healthcare — settings where the cost of people staying quiet about what they really know is measured in lives (Schein & Schein, 2021). Schein’s observation was that most workplaces operate in a culture of tell. Leaders, experts, and professionals default to sharing what they know rather than inquiring into what others know. The consequence is that critical information — often held by the most junior people in the room — never makes it to the decision.
Humble inquiry, as Schein frames it, is both a skill and an attitude. It is the disciplined choice to ask rather than tell, and the genuine curiosity that makes such asking feel welcome rather than interrogative. Co-design, at its core, is humble inquiry scaled into a structured process — asking, not telling, across an entire change initiative.
Four Levels of Listening: The Scharmer ladder
Where Schein provides the mindset, Otto Scharmer — Senior Lecturer at MIT and co-founder of the Presencing Institute — offers a useful framework for what listening itself actually involves. In Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (Scharmer, 2007), he identifies four levels of listening. They form a ladder, and most organisational conversations never get past the first rung.
- Level 1: Downloading. “Yeah, I know that already.” The listener hears only what confirms what they already believe. Nothing new penetrates. Most meetings run on downloading.
- Level 2: Factual. “Ooh, look at that.” The listener notices disconfirming data and lets new information in. This requires suspending habits of judgement — an opening of the mind.
- Level 3: Empathic. “I feel what you feel.” The listener sees the situation through the other person’s eyes. This requires opening the heart — using feelings as an instrument for tuning into another’s perspective.
- Level 4: Generative. “Something new is emerging.” The listener holds space for something new to be born in the conversation itself. Ideas, possibilities, and futures appear that neither party brought into the room.
Scharmer’s observation, drawn from decades of working with organisations in transition, is that change work that stays at Level 1 produces outputs that reconfirm the status quo. Change work that reaches Levels 3 and 4 produces genuine shifts — because the people in the room have actually heard each other and generated something new together (Scharmer, 2007).
Listening to Respond: How we were trained to do it wrong
The hard part is that most professionals were trained, from their earliest school years, to listen to respond rather than to learn. Classroom exercises in reading comprehension were the beginning of that training: listen for the key message, weigh its importance, order it in the mind, gear up to deliver a winning recount.
This is interpersonal performance in action, and Western societies reward it. Confident personal presentation is prized. Those who speak first and speak well receive the accolades. American journalist Kate Murphy, in her 2020 book You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters, traces how a culture of constant self-expression, social media performance, and competitive talk has corroded the capacity to genuinely attend to another person (Murphy, 2020). Her reporting covers everyone from CIA interrogators to bartenders to priests — people whose work genuinely depends on listening — and the common thread is how rare and undervalued that skill has become.
Listening to respond is a performance mindset. Listening to learn is something quite different.
What listening to learn actually requires
Humble inquiry and listening to learn are, in practice, a set of techniques for unearthing the knowledge and perspective of others. Their truth is at least as important as the facilitator’s own. When running a change project, it is often more important. Why is the current solution not working? What is missing? What is absurd about the way things are done? These questions are hard to answer without the benefit of the person who has been on the receiving end of service use — or the person who has tried to deliver it within an impossible brief. Only they can share that wisdom.
Listening to learn involves three disciplines at once:
- Remaining curious, especially when the content is familiar. Familiarity is the fastest path back to downloading.
- Suspending judgement, so that the speaker can offer a view without first having to defend it.
- Probing for story, because narrative often carries the real emotion and gets behind the polite mask that most people wear in professional settings.
Beyond the Polite Surface: Why truth hides
Most people in workplace conversations are trained to be polite and to defer to experts and authority. That means they keep to themselves observations about human foibles, failed systems, and the compromises they’ve made to keep things running. They rarely confess when they have been complicit in something going wrong. They externalise blame, and they discount the small things — the workaround, the missing equipment, the ignored warning — that eventually add up to major disasters.
Listening to learn means leaning into that detail. It means observing people in action and then asking them why they do what they do. It means exploring the situation from every perspective, including the embarrassing truths. Sometimes the absence of simple information, or cheap equipment, has generated a workaround that seems perfectly logical from the inside but is devastating when viewed across the whole system.
By navigating into the daily grind of another’s experience, connection with their truth becomes possible. Rapport builds because the other person has been seen, heard, and — crucially — taken seriously enough to understand. In a fast world where conversation runs on seconds rather than minutes, most professionals jump to understanding without really seeing or hearing what other people face.
Listening to learn digs in deep. And from that position of informed observation, the facilitator is far better placed to correct. Best of all, the person most likely to be corrected may be themselves. Rather than judging others, they are often dumbfounded by how illogical the current system actually is. Armed with that knowledge rather than the previous ignorance, they are much better placed to advocate for change and design solutions that will actually work.
From Asking to Co-Designing: Turning listening into action
Listening alone, however humble and well-practised, does not design a new service or fix a broken process. The insight has to be turned into something. That is where structured co-design methodologies earn their place.
Australian practitioner KA McKercher, in Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-design for Real, sets out four foundational principles for this translation: share power, prioritise relationships, use participatory means, and build capability (McKercher, 2020). McKercher is clear that there is no co-designing without co-deciding — if the people who contributed to the insight have no hand in the decision, it wasn’t co-design. It was better-dressed consultation.
For a more structured approach, the Co.Design4All framework offers a practical 4D methodology — Discover, Design, Decide, Debrief — supported by over 100 tools across fourteen stages. The framework makes co-design accessible to anyone leading or navigating a significant change project, not only trained facilitators. Humble inquiry sits at the heart of every phase:
— Discover is almost entirely humble inquiry in action. The task is to surface who is affected, what they actually experience, and what is already known — without assuming the answers.
— Design applies generative listening at Scharmer’s Level 4 — holding space for new solutions to emerge from the people in the room rather than being imposed by the facilitator.
— Decide tests whether the group has genuinely heard each other well enough to commit to a shared path.
— Debrief closes the loop with structured reflection — the discipline most change projects skip, and the one that turns a single successful engagement into sustained capability.
A tool is only as good as the attitude behind it. The CD4A framework provides the scaffolding. Schein’s humble inquiry and Scharmer’s generative listening provide the posture that makes the scaffolding hold.
The humble advantage
There is a quiet truth about change work: the more humble the facilitator, the more successful the project tends to be. When a leader is genuinely humble, they don’t care whose ideas win the day. They don’t mind abandoning work they have already done if a better idea emerges. They don’t need to be seen and heard. Instead, they value the back-room work of surfacing the true picture and finding the true believers — the people they can actually work with to achieve the change the situation requires.
In a change universe crowded with experts, consultants, and confident commentators, the learners are the ones who make the biggest gains. They are also, over time, the ones others most want to work with. Competence opens the door. Humility earns the invitation back.
Ask, don’t tell. Listen to learn. The discipline sounds simple. The practice lasts a career. Those careers are the ones with impact worth celebrating.
References
- Co.Design4All (2025). The 4D Framework: Discover, Design, Decide, Debrief. Available at: https://codesign4all.com
- Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Free Press.
- McKercher, K. A. (2020). Beyond Sticky Notes: Co-design for Real — Mindsets, methods and movements. Sydney: Beyond Sticky Notes.
- Murphy, K. (2020). You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters. New York: Celadon Books.
- Scharmer, C. O. (2007). Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Schein, E. H. (2013). Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
- Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2021). Humble Inquiry, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
