Think Again

THE ART OF INFLUENTIAL LISTENING
Betty Bigombe had already hiked eight miles through the jungle, and there
was still no sign of life. She was no stranger to a long walk: growing up in
northern Uganda, she walked four miles each way to school. She subsisted
on one meal a day in a communal homestead where her uncle had eight
wives. Now she had made it all the way to the Ugandan Parliament, and she
was undertaking a challenge that none of her colleagues would brave: trying
to make peace with a warlord.
Joseph Kony was the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He and his
rebel group would eventually be held responsible for murdering over a
hundred thousand people, abducting over thirty thousand children, and
displacing over two million Ugandans. In the early 1990s, Betty convinced
the Ugandan president to send her in to see if she could stop the violence.
When Betty finally made contact with the rebels after months of effort,
they were insulted at the prospect of negotiating with a woman. Yet Betty
negotiated her way into getting permission to meet Kony himself. Soon he
was referring to her as Mummy, and he even agreed to leave the jungle to
start peace talks. Although the peace effort didn’t succeed, opening Kony’s
mind to conversation was a remarkable accomplishment in itself.
*
For her
efforts to end the violence, Betty was named Uganda’s Woman of the Year.
When I spoke to her recently, I asked how she had succeeded in getting
through to Kony and his people. The key, she explained, was not persuading
or even coaxing, but listening.
Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in
asking and responding. It starts with showing more interest in other
people’s interests rather than trying to judge their status or prove our own.
We can all get better at asking “truly curious questions that don’t have the
hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing or correcting,”
journalist Kate Murphy writes, and helping to “facilitate the clear
expression of another person’s thoughts.”
*

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When we’re trying to get people to change, that can be a difficult task.
Even if we have the best intentions, we can easily slip into the mode of a
preacher perched on a pulpit, a prosecutor making a closing argument, or a
politician giving a stump speech. We’re all vulnerable to the “righting
reflex,” as Miller and Rollnick describe it—the desire to fix problems and
offer answers. A skilled motivational interviewer resists the righting reflex
—although people want a doctor to fix their broken bones, when it comes to
the problems in their heads, they often want sympathy rather than solutions.
That’s what Betty Bigombe set out to provide in Uganda. She started
traveling through rural areas to visit camps for internally displaced people.
She figured some might have relatives in Joseph Kony’s army and might
know something of his whereabouts. Although she hadn’t been trained in
motivational interviewing, she intuitively understood the philosophy. At
each camp, she announced to people that she wasn’t there to lecture them,
but to listen to them.
Her curiosity and confident humility caught the Ugandans by surprise.
Other peacemakers had come in ordering them to stop fighting. They had
preached about their own plans for conflict resolution and prosecuted the
past efforts that failed. Now Betty, a politician by profession, wasn’t telling
them what to do. She just sat patiently for hours in front of a bonfire, taking
notes and chiming in from time to time to ask questions. “If you want to
call me names, feel free to do so,” she said. “If you want me to leave, I
will.”
To demonstrate her commitment to peace, Betty stayed in the camps
even though they lacked sufficient food and proper sanitation. She invited
people to air their grievances and suggest remedial measures to be taken.
They told her that it was rare and refreshing for an outsider to give them the
opportunity to share their views. She empowered them to generate their
own solutions, which gave them a sense of ownership. They ended up
calling her Megu, which translates literally to “mother” and is also a term of
endearment for elders. Bestowing this honorific was particularly striking
since Betty was representing the government—which was seen as the
oppressor in many of the camps. It wasn’t long before people were offering
to introduce her to coordinators and commanders in Joseph Kony’s guerrilla
army. As Betty muses, “Even the devil appreciates being listened to.”
In a series of experiments, interacting with an empathetic,
nonjudgmental, attentive listener made people less anxious and defensive.

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They felt less pressure to avoid contradictions in their thinking, which
encouraged them to explore their opinions more deeply, recognize more
nuances in them, and share them more openly. These benefits of listening
aren’t limited to one-on-one interactions—they can also emerge in groups.
In experiments across government organizations, tech companies, and
schools, people’s attitudes became more complex and less extreme after
they sat in a listening circle, where one person at a time held a talking stick
and everyone else listened attentively. Psychologists recommend practicing
this skill by sitting down with people whom we sometimes have a hard time
understanding. The idea is to tell them that we’re working on being better
listeners, we’d like to hear their thoughts, and we’ll listen for a few minutes
before responding.
Many communicators try to make themselves look smart. Great
listeners are more interested in making their audiences feel smart. They
help people approach their own views with more humility, doubt, and
curiosity. When people have a chance to express themselves out loud, they
often discover new thoughts. As the writer E. M. Forster put it, “How can I
tell what I think till I see what I say?” That understanding made Forster an
unusually dedicated listener. In the words of one biographer, “To speak with
him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to
with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best
self.”
Inverse charisma. What a wonderful turn of phrase to capture the
magnetic quality of a great listener. Think about how rare that kind of
listening is. Among managers rated as the worst listeners by their
employees, 94 percent of them evaluated themselves as good or very good
listeners. Dunning and Kruger might have something to say about that. In
one poll, a third of women said their pets were better listeners than their