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."*

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. 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 partners. Maybe it wasn’t just my kids who wanted a cat. It’s common for doctors to interrupt their patients within 11 seconds, even though patients may need only 29 seconds to describe their symptoms. In Quebec, however, Marie-Hélène experienced something very different.

When Marie-Hélène explained that she was concerned about autism and the effects of administering multiple vaccines simultaneously, Arnaud didn’t bombard her with a barrage of scientific facts. He asked what her sources were. Like many parents, she said she had read about vaccines on the internet but didn’t remember where. He agreed that in a sea of conflicting claims, it’s difficult to gain a clear sense of whether immunization is safe.

Eventually, when he understood Marie-Hélène’s beliefs, Arnaud asked if he could share some information about vaccines based on his own expertise. “I started a dialogue,” he told me. “The aim was to build a trusting relationship. If you present information without permission, no one will listen to you.” Arnaud was able to address her fears and misconceptions by explaining that the measles vaccine is a weakened live virus, so the symptoms are typically minimal, and there’s no evidence that it increases autism or other syndromes. He wasn’t delivering a lecture; he was engaging in a discussion. Marie-Hélène’s questions guided the evidence he shared, and they reconstructed her knowledge together. Every step of the way, Arnaud avoided putting pressure on her. Even after talking through the science, he concluded the conversation by telling her he would let her think about it, affirming her freedom to make up her own mind.

In 2020, during the worst snowstorm of the winter, a married couple drove an hour and a half to visit Arnaud. They hadn’t vaccinated any of their children, but after forty-five minutes of discussion with him, they decided to vaccinate all four of them. The couple lived in Marie-Hélène’s village, and seeing other children vaccinated there made the mother curious enough to seek more information.

The power of listening doesn’t lie just in giving people the space to reflect on their views. It’s a display of respect and an expression of care. When Arnaud took the time to understand Marie-Hélène’s concerns instead of dismissing them, he was showing a sincere interest in her well-being and that of her son. When Betty Bigombe stayed with displaced Ugandans in their camps and asked them to air their grievances, she was proving that what they had to say mattered to her. Listening is a way of offering others our scarcest, most precious gift: our attention. Once we’ve demonstrated that we care about them and their goals, they’re more willing to listen to us.

If we can convince a mother to vaccinate her vulnerable children—or a warlord to consider peace talks—it’s easy to conclude that the ends justify whatever means are necessary. But it’s worth remembering that the means are a measure of our character. When we succeed in changing someone’s mind, we shouldn’t only ask whether we’re proud of what we’ve achieved. We should also ask whether we’re proud of how we’ve achieved it.

PART III

Collective Rethinking

Creating Communities of Lifelong Learners