A colleague begins to explain a problem. Within seconds, one person offers a solution, another questions the data and a third redirects the conversation. Everybody is contributing. Nobody has yet shown that they understood what the colleague was trying to say.
Listening needs an observable behaviour
Most teams already believe that listening is important. That belief is not the problem. The difficulty is that listening happens internally, while the speaker can only experience what the listener does next.
Did the response connect to something specific? Did it recognise the concern behind the words? Did the listener check an assumption before offering advice? These are small, visible behaviours—and they are much easier to practise than a vague instruction to ‘listen better’.
In both transformation meetings and improv rooms, I see the same pattern: people miss useful information because they are working hard on their own next move. An exercise helps because it slows the exchange down just enough for that habit to become visible.
A person feels heard when your next response shows what you received—not when you silently believe you were listening.
Listen on three levels
When I facilitate this topic, I ask participants to listen for three different kinds of information. The first is the content: what facts, events or constraints were actually named? The second is the concern or intention: what appears to matter to the speaker? The third is the opening: what question, possibility or next step is becoming available?
The listener does not need to psychoanalyse the speaker or guess at hidden emotions. The aim is simply to notice more of what is offered and then check whether the interpretation is accurate.
- Content: ‘The test environment will arrive two weeks later than planned.’
- Concern: ‘You may be warning us that the current test window is no longer credible.’
- Opening: ‘Which decision do we need to revisit first?’
Why advice has to wait
Advice is often well intended, especially in experienced teams. It can also close the conversation before the problem is properly framed. Asking the listener to reflect and check first creates a short but valuable separation between receiving information and solving it.
That separation does not make a meeting slower. It can prevent the group from spending ten minutes solving the wrong version of the problem. Once the speaker confirms or corrects what was heard, the discussion can move forward with a stronger shared starting point.
Two simple variations
Once the group understands the basic practice, the same listening muscle can be trained in different ways:
- Exact-detail response: every response must connect to one precise phrase or detail from the previous speaker before adding anything new.
- One-minute listening: one person speaks for sixty seconds while their partner may not interrupt, question or take over; the partner then names the three things they believe mattered most.
Keep the topic safe enough to learn
Do not begin with the team’s most emotionally charged conflict. Use a real but low-risk topic: a recurring meeting problem, an inefficient handover or a small decision that became harder than expected.
The exercise is not a test of who is a good listener. It is a shared experiment. I normally run it twice, because the contrast between the first and second attempt teaches more than a long explanation can.
Max Grillo is an applied improvisation facilitator. He manages and hosts Rice Cookie Improv, is co-founder of Monday Flow Improv and is a member of the Applied Improvisation Network. He combines workshop practice with more than 25 years of experience in technology and transformation.
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