Exploring a new way public services can listen

This post is written by Ruth Ball, Senior Associate at the Centre for Public Impact.

• **The problem: **The approaches that governments often use to listen to their communities tend to exclude many groups of people.

• Why it matters: This means that those in government and public services are not able to learn from their communities, which prevents them from working together to shape the future.

• The solution: Explore different ways of embedding deep listening into the work of public services.

Members of the public don’t feel listened to by government. While governments at both a local and national level use numerous approaches to listen to their communities, these tend to engage ‘the usual suspects’ and often exclude many groups of people.

When was the last time that those in public services were really allowed to listen to people? Without an assessment to do, a particular service to deliver, a grant application to make or a form to fill out? What things would we learn if we listened deeply? How would we see the world differently? As we continue to face unprecedented challenges resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, how do we ensure everyone can help shape the future that we forge together?

"Involving participants in the sensemaking helped us to avoid making unfounded assumptions and supported richer and more accurate interpretations."

How we started learning to listen

Working with the charity Changing Lives and funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, we at the Centre for Public Impact have been embarking on a journey to learn how to listen.

We supported Changing Lives staff to have more expansive conversations and be led by the stories that participants wished to tell, rather than by a set of predetermined assumptions. Staff held listening sessions with people they worked with, who were all experiencing multiple disadvantages, such as poverty, homelessness, domestic abuse, addiction, sexual exploitation, and involvement in the criminal justice system.

Staff then wrote up the notes from those conversations, capturing the language of participants. We then ran sensemaking sessions, which involved both staff and participants looking over the notes from these conversations and identifying the key themes and lessons. Involving participants in the sensemaking helped us to avoid making unfounded assumptions and supported richer and more accurate interpretations.

What did we learn?

This work was hugely enjoyed by listeners and participants alike. Participants felt that they were truly listened to without ulterior motives, and that they had the space to share their views and tell their stories both in the listening and sensemaking sessions. Many of the people who participated said that the best listening came from support workers or peer supporters where there was already a trusting and non-judgemental relationship. People also said that they tended not to feel listened to by those in local or national government.

Listeners also enjoyed the experience. They felt it had helped them learn more about what it meant to be a good listener. They also reported that it gave them a broader understanding of the people they supported, along with their perspectives on issues that they would not normally discuss as part of their work together. While this was seen as a benefit, staff also felt that the boundaries of their role limited how well they were able to act on what they’d heard, and it is worth considering how to run listening and sensemaking sessions across a broader partnership.

"People told us that they felt most listened to in the context of a trusted, empathetic relationship, and that the best listening came from peer supporters or support workers who understood what they were going through."

How to run listening conversations in your organisation

Based on our experience of running listening conversations, we’ve outlined some of our key reflections for how those delivering public services can build listening and sensemaking into their work:

1. Defining your purpose and questions

One of our key findings was that, while it is important to have conversations that give participants the freedom to talk about what matters to them, it is also important to set clear expectations about the purpose of listening to conversations. It is helpful to include a range of people in designing the purpose and questions, including the key decision-makers in your topic area, listeners and potential participants.

2. Identifying and briefing the listeners

It’s important to consider who you want to reach through the listening conversations, and therefore who your listeners should be. In our work, people told us that they felt most listened to in the context of a trusted, empathetic relationship, and that the best listening came from peer supporters or support workers who understood what they were going through. Consider who would have this sort of relationship with the people you are trying to listen to, and how different power dynamics might affect what people feel able to say to these listeners.

3. Setting up and running listening conversations

Listening conversations work better when listeners take ownership of how the conversations are set up and run, with only a small amount of guidance from the project team and a set of broad framing questions to ask in the conversations.

4. Capturing insights

It is crucially important to capture the insights for the conversations, in as close to the words used by the participants as possible. It is also important that the listeners let participants know how these conversations will be used as part of setting them up. For instance, how they will be reviewed in the sensemaking, will they be anonymised, will they be reviewed as full conversations in the sensemaking session or will they be mixed up in some way.

Listening - particularly to the seldom heard - offers the potential to bring huge benefits to both public services and people who use them. It is therefore crucial that those in government, public services and civil society improve how we listen, so that we can work together more effectively to recover from the pandemic and rebuild a more equal society that serves everybody.

Our Learning to Listen Again report and materials provide further information about the approaches we took, the tools we used and what we learned. If you’re interested in learning more or being involved in our future work, please get in touch with Ruth - ruth@centreforpublicimpact.org.

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