Future Here Now: Listening is the key to future success

This piece is part of a subscriber-only series I produce called Future Here Now. This newsletter focuses on the early indicators of how the coming era will demand very different mindsets, values and skills — from us, from our organizations and from our communities. If you like this, you will get a lot out of that. Learn more here.

My husband is more assertive than I am. And that’s saying a loooot.

He is currently doing a certification to become a life coach, and I have been riding him a little about that. Dave is a Guy Who Solves Problems, and a coach isn’t supposed to solve or tell you how to solve, they’re supposed to ask you questions that help you figure it out for yourself.

You don’t interact with your longtime spouse the way you do with a client or a direct report or anyone else, I know. But based on my 30 + years with the man, I’ve been viewing this particular new direction with a bit of a disbelieving side eye. At least when it comes to me, this guy has an opinion or a solution for everything.

This morning he sent me an article that I think his program assigned him to read. And I almost jumped up and down at the breakfast rable: YES THIS!

Here’s the article: How To Become a More Empathetic Listener

Perfect.

If you do nothing else today, read this. Maybe four or eight times.

Why?

I promise it doesn’t have to do with my home life. It has to do with one of the skills that will be the most crucial in the Fusion Era.

Listening.

We know we’re supposed to listen to other people. We know we’re supposed to actively listen. We might have even read other articles or had a workplace training on how to be an active listener (I’m sure that was a blast).

But listening well isn’t just a thing to do to be nice or well-behaved or avoid being a jerk.

Listening is actually more important now than it’ ever been. And it will become more and more crucial.

Why? You’ve heard me say that the next social and economic and technological era, the follow-on to the Industrial Era, will require us to work in profoundly different ways. Two of the key differences that are unfolding are

• Humans’ capability to collectively, creatively problem-solve is more important than ever, both because we have tech to do the more laborious stuff that historically occupied peoples’ time, and because the problems we have to solve are more complex, ambiguous and uncertain than ever before.
• As people’s problem-solving becomes more and more important to economies and societies, people who bring different perspectives — who aren’t stuck in the same old mental boxes — become more important than ever. That means that people who have been historically left out — minorities, disabled people, persons who come from outside the majority experience — become more important to the problem-solving effort than ever before.

To leverage either or both of those capabilities means that we have to listen. To listen actively, collaboratively, empathetically — to a level that we didn’t have to before. To listen like an investigator, instead of as someone who’s waiting for their turn to speak.

This is one of the most crucial skills we will have in the future, and it’s one that our Industrial-era education has often failed to teach us.

If Dave can learn to do this, so can you. And I. :-)

This piece is part of a subscriber-only series I produce called Future Here Now. This newsletter focuses on the early indicators of how the coming era will demand very different mindsets, values and skills — from us, from our organizations and from our communities. If you like this, you will get a lot out of that. Learn more here.