Listen or Intervene?

The story: They agreed to really listen to each other this time. He took it seriously — he didn't want to interrupt. She went in the wrong direction for fifteen minutes. Why didn't you stop me? she said. I didn't want to interrupt — weren't we meant to just listen? Active listening to her included course-correcting. To him it meant silence and patience.

What it means for organisations: Listening is not a passive act, and different people hold fundamentally different models of what good listening looks like. Some see it as full attention without interruption. Others see it as engaged challenge and redirection. When a team agrees to listen better without discussing what that means in practice, they don't just risk miscommunication — they risk one person's listening being experienced as another person's indifference.