Let's Have a Look

Written by Jamie Thursday, 07 October 2010 11:51

I have a book on my desk called The Lost Art of Listening. It’s flashy, what we’d call in England, very American. The author is not Michael P. Nichols but Michael P. Nichols, PhD. Phd no less. There is a spiky star announcing ‘Over 100,000 in Print!’. Etc.. I live in Amsterdam and so a lot of my books come from the states and not from England. Cover aside, it’s a bloody good book.

We all need to work on our engineering and management skills, this is a given, but mainly, we need to work on our meta-skills. On page 10 of the book, Nichols says,

The essence of good listening is empathy, which can be achieved only by suspending our preoccupation with ourselves and entering into the experience of the other person. Part intuition and part effort, it’s the stuff of human connection.

The book continues like this for another 300 pages. It’s a call to arms. A battle cry. And it’s very good. A lot of my colleagues, let’s say, are 80% done with their hard skills but are only at 5 or 10% with their soft skills. Yet, it’s the soft side that will allow us all to succeed. A good unit tester won’t necessarily help a project along, but a charming developer who can negotiate two weeks for unit testing training will. (Because charming people work in every aspect, a tester is just a tester like a manger is just a manager... a charming manager, on the other hand...)

Listening means watching and observing in a none-judgmental manner. Most of our answers are there simply waiting for us to see them. Last night, for example, I was Skyping my older brother (actually, he was sharing a poker game with me, but that’s another story). My office faces the west. The sky was burning, first a dusky orange, the light contrasted against the dark clouds, then a light purple before finally becoming a deep, deadly looking purple. The sky is always there, it’s just that we forget to look, forget to suspend our preoccupation with ourselves.