Chapter 5 - Essential Skills: Listening And Note-Taking
The chapter opens with a humorous observation about the phrasebooks that are published for tourists - which are functionally useless because they give people the ability to ask a question in a language they cannot speak ... how are they supposed to understand when someone answers?
Then follows an anecdote about a reporter who was so excited about interviewing a celebrity that he neglected to turn on his recorder and had no notes by which to write his story.
The point of both is this: there's little point in asking a question if you don't listen to the answer.
Listening
Many people who seek to improve their communication skills focus on the way in which they express their ideas to others, and entirely neglect their skill at paying attention when others express their ideas. Good communication is about sharing ideas, not merely expressing yours to someone else, and requires you to be just as proficient at listening as you are at speaking.
When it comes to interrogation, it's even more important to listen: you are asking questions in order to elicit answers, and the answers are more important than the questions. You can ask fewer and more effective questions if you follow what the other person has said in their responses.
One major reason interrogators fail at listening is because they are preoccupied with thinking about the next question they intend to ask, and often fail to realize that it they listened to what the other person was saying, their intended follow-up question would be entirely unnecessary.
(EN: Another major problem with listening, which the author does not seem to address, is the need to listen without prejudice to what the other person is actually saying. Very often, the interrogator listens only for words or phrases that match is preconception of what he assumes the other person will say and misses, misunderstand, or ignores what the other person actually said.)
He also suggests that modern lifestyle, with multitasking and information overload, has severely damaged our listening skills: the ability to pay attention to one thing at a time and give it our full attention has been sacrificed for the sake of being able to scan many signals at once, and pay attention only to what we assume to be important in the first place. It will require practice and focus to get out of this habit.
A good sign that you are very bad at listening is to assess the amount of talking each person does: if the interrogator is speaking more than the respondent, then he is doing a very bad job.
Exercise
The author suggests listening to an interview on the radio or television, with careful attention to the behavior of the interviewer.
- Does he spend more time talking than the respondent?
- Are his questions longer and more elaborate than the answers?
- Does he interrupt an answer to ask another question?
- Does he ask a question that is irrelevant?
- Does he ask a question that has already been answered?
In so doing, you will find that even experienced professional interviewers often make many mistakes in questioning because they are simply not listening.
(EN: It might be worthwhile to contrast different journalists - particularly celebrities who conduct interviews on chat shows, younger and more experienced journalists, bloggers and college journalists, all do very rotten jobs of interviewing because they do not listen. Or worse, they come with a list of questions and ask them regardless of the answers.)
Active Listening
Most people listen passively, hearing the other person without paying much attention to what they say. Active listening takes an approach that attempts to extract as much information as possible from what the other person says - to really hear what they are saying, pay attention to the manner in which they are saying it, and even to detect when there is something they are not saying.
Some random tips follow:
- Face-to-face conversation minimizes distractions and helps you focus on the other person. Speaking over the phone, particularly a mobile phone that places you in a busy and noisy environment, means that the conversation is one of many stimuli.
- Turn off your phone completely. There are few instances in which a phone call is more important than the conversation you are having face to face - and nothing sends a stronger signal of disinterest and disrespect that a person who seeks, or takes, any opportunity to interrupt the conversation.
- Pay attention to the pattern of the other person's speech: which words they repeat, when they pause, and where they seem to show discomfort. Nonverbal can communicate as much or more than the verbal message.
- Your own eye contact, posture, and gesture can also signal to the other person that you are not listening. The author provides a few tips (EN: but I choose to omit them, as this is a pet peeve of mine. Tips like these teach people to pretend to be listening, not to really listen. If you really listen, your nonverbal will take care of themselves.)
Listening is a critical part of the questioning process - as you can ascertain what a person is able to talk about from a perspective of knowledge and comfort. Asking a person a question to which they do not know the answer is pointless and annoying. Asking a series of questions that are outside of their comfort zone, with indifference to the apprehension they are already showing, will shut them down.
(EN: I'll add that there is a great deal more to active listening than this author has to say. There are entire texts on the topic of listening, alone.)
Note-Taking
The skill of note-taking is often underestimated. People think that their memory is good enough that they don't need to take notes (unless the interrogation is very short, they are wrong), or that because they took notes in school, they already know how to do it (which is interesting, because few students were ever trained to take notes, and have lots of experience doing it the wrong way).
Taking notes is more than jotting down random things. The notes you take should be in reference to the things that are pertinent to what you are trying to discover (omitting the extraneous details) and are organized in some way (the author uses is people/places/things/events schema)
He also mentions the value of a plan or agenda - if your conversation is organized by topic, your notes from the conversation will be organized as well. Or if the conversation goes off the rails, referring back to your agenda will help you make sure, before breaking off, that all the important topics were covered.
Good note-taking is critical to interrogation, but also comes in handy when you're merely listening to a presentation or a conversation in which you are not involved.
He also insists on taking notes by hand rather than using a laptop or other device. He cites some scientific evidence that the act of writing causes us to pay better attention and process information as it as received. Writing by hand, in cursive or shorthand, further sharpens the cognitive and intentional processes.
(EN: A bit of Metadiscourse - this habit of mine in taking reading notes follows in that logic, and has been very useful in being able to remember. Even if I never refer back to my notes [which I do often] just the act of taking notes makes me pay closer attention to a text and integrate new knowledge with existing.)
He goes on a bit of a tare from there - regarding how manual typewriters required people to compose their thoughts before writing because it was hard to "fix" what you said and you couldn't rely on spell-check, etc. (EN: it's a bit self-indulgent, but he does make an oblique point about how people are becoming careless with communication.)
The Role Of These Skills In Business
Listening and note-taking skills are often recommended to students, but one doesn't see much advice for professionals. Many "workplace failures" could be reduced if these skills were more widely practiced.
He is acutely peeved by poor listening skills in customer service people, who don't seem to pay much attention to what callers say, and ask many unnecessary questions. (EN: This is often because CSRs are given "tools" that restrict them - requiring them to ask specific questions in specific order, not allowing them to take an answer before it's given in the script - and firms that believe that CSRs are just monkeys who interface between the customer and the system provide little training in listening skills or customer service.)
The fact that many phone service reps are held to quotas or are demanded to handle a minimum number of calls per day also encourages them to be superficial - to predict what customers are going to say, ignore details they feel to be extraneous, interrupt the customer to suggest a solution, and otherwise attempt to rush the to the end of the call quickly. All of this contributes to rotten service and a customer who is frustrated with the experience.
Prediction as an Obstacle to Observation
He goes off the rails for a bit, to talk about the way in which the human brain attempts to create efficiencies by matching any new information to known information - and this is done in an assumptive manner that if a few key details are the same, the rest should be the same. Many errors are made as a result of this tendency.
(EN: The author implies this is laziness, but it is often intelligence - a mind that develops shortcuts to avoid tedious work is more efficient and seeks to fill in gaps in information to draw conclusions quickly. There are various studies that demonstrate that there is an inverse relationship between intelligence and accuracy in detail-oriented work - simply because the intelligent mind makes conclusions by considering only the relevant details, not all of the details. But by this same process, very smart people can make very stupid mistakes.)
(EN: In this sense, the author leaves the reader without a good solution. Telling an intelligent person to avoid predicting is like telling him to avoid breathing - it's just his nature to do so and it cannot be switched off. The way to get an intelligent person to pay better attention is to get them to pay attention to more things at once. Specifically when it comes to questioning, an intelligent person may be able to focus better on what is being said if he also pays attention to gestures, expressions, posture, tone of voice, and other factors. There is a point at which trying to pay attention to too many things at once becomes overwhelming, but there is also a point in which getting too little data causes a person to lose interest - and the "trick" is to find the right balance for a specific persons given their intelligence.)