CHAPTER 1

Practice Eccentric Listening

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

—KARL A. MENNINGER

“But you aren’t listening to me!” The words ricocheted out of the conference room and down the hall, seeping into every cubicle on the floor. And it tactlessly lassoed everyone in earshot into involuntary eavesdropping.

“What do you mean?” the other side of the confrontation responded in his own defense. “I have been listening to you throughout our whole meeting.” It was a design meeting between an engineer and a key customer. The decibel level of their contest suddenly went hushed and died after the next heart-splitting line.

“You might be listening to me talk, but you’re not getting what I say!”

Organizations in search of innovation with customers brag about their commitment to great customer listening. Some show off their industrial-strength survey research with its heavy-duty statistics. Others boast about how often their executives talk to a customer or sit behind one-way glass at a focus group. “We are focused heavily these days on big data,” one executive bragged to another. The retort she received from her colleague: “What about real data? The kind you get from listening?”

Curiosity in action comes in many forms, depending on the pursuit. Archaeologists gratify their curiosity with a pick, shovel, magnifying glass, and brush. Innovating with customers is the hunt for a novel product, service, or solution. The bridge between curiosity and discovery is collective insight. And we unleash insight through deep understanding acquired through listening, observing, and inquiring. This chapter focuses on a special level of listening—eccentric, as in unique, odd, unstructured, artistic, emotional, and fluid.

Meanwhile, back at that conference room, the lament of the customer was for recordings on the heart, not for sound waves on the ear. The customer did not feel understood and therefore did not feel esteemed. Today’s customers feel over-surveyed and undervalued. Too much effort goes into listening to customers talk rather than valuing what is said (or not said) and, more importantly, meant (or implied). Too often, the pursuit is for facts rather than feelings, conversation instead of candor.

Start with Empathy

Empathy starts with simply attentively listening while asking yourself: “What must my customer be feeling right now? How might I feel if our roles were reversed?” Empathy begins by caring enough to give undivided attention. Think about what “undivided” really means—not broken into parts. Empathy is enhanced through a reflective response. Receptivity to the customer’s feelings enables you to provide a tailor-made reflective response that says, “I’ve been there as well.” This gesture, another way of saying “I am similar to you,” promotes the kinship and closeness vital to customer trust.

Reflective responses can be a short personal story that lets your customer know you appreciate his or her feelings. Mildly self-deprecating anecdotes can work well, too. Above all, empathy is best served laced with humility and sensitivity. Think of it as the emotional countenance of a parent soothing a child awakened by a nightmare. And it is blended with authenticity. If you feel awkward, say you do. If you feel excited, say so. The sooner you speak your feelings, the faster your customer will match your vulnerability, propelling you on the path to trust.

Instead of listening to understand, focus on listening to interpret. Pretend you are an emotional translator, not just an eavesdropper. Paraphrasing is an interpersonal tool that involves listeners mirroring the meaning of what was heard as a sentence that ends in a period, not a question mark or an exclamation point. It is not parroting or repeating, which can sound wooden; it is your words reflecting the meaning you heard. But the greatest gain comes in the attentiveness required to paraphrase in the first place. With practice, it will stop feeling contrived and become as natural and as effective as master paraphrasers Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, or Ellen DeGeneres.

Co-creation partnerships are not about a love affair. Yet they possess some of the same features as being in love. Recall the early days with a person with whom you were in love. You hung on to their every word, did not miss a single nonverbal, and were attentive to their every whim. Your antenna of adoration was raised high, and you looked hard for tiny, subtle ways to emotionally connect. That is what empathy looks like in action. Its magic is in its capacity to cause its target to lower their emotional shield and model your openness.

EDiS Company is a highly successful building solutions firm headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. A number of years ago they unexpectedly lost an important client. It was a wakeup call. After doing some customer forensics work to unravel the root cause of his sudden departure, they learned there had been interpersonal signals they missed that could have warned them of his exit in time to turn the relationship around. CEO Brian DiSabatino had always insisted on a mid-project review with EDiS’s clients. Armed with this new insight, he wisely added questions aimed at the interpersonal relationship, not just the project, to their Compass review. “The byproduct of this addition,” said DiSabatino, “was it created a stronger partnership with our clients enabling them to offer creative ideas we still had time to implement and stay within the scope of the bid and project plan.”

Be the Customer

My business partner John Patterson and I were asked by a large wholesale auto auction company to help them understand the process exporters used to purchase a vehicle at the auction and then get it to dealers in their country. The hope was the insights would enable the auction company to create an innovative offering that would make the export process pain free. Before interviewing a group of exporters about their experiences, we decided we could ask sharper questions if we better understood the end-to-end export process. We called our project “Be the Car.”

We watched an exporter purchase a particular car at their auction in Lakeland, Florida. We followed the car from purchase to title check to inspection to transportation on a truck bound for Miami. Once in Miami, the car was placed in a large container, loaded onto a truck, and transported a short distance to customs at the Miami docks. It was inspected and then waited until the right ship arrived. It was then loaded with a large crane onto the ship that set sail for a port in the Black Sea near Zonguldak, Turkey. From there, the car would be loaded onto a train at the Turkish dock and shipped to its ultimate destination.

We talked about the potential for damage at all its many points of loading and unloading. We noticed the many wait times the car had to endure at various stops, especially before being containerized. We were amused that the car had to share a container with a speed boat and two motorcycles. We wondered about the ease of the car getting lost or the likelihood of it missing a connection. When we met with our client to debrief our learnings, he seemed to feel a strong kinship with the car now that we knew so much about its life on its journey by truck, ship, and rail. “What could we learn if we could ‘be an exporter’?” It was a sobering moment, as we all realized how deeply we empathized with a car—an inanimate object—yet knew so little about the exporter who owned it until it reached its destination.

How can you “be a customer”?

One of the most revealing questions you can ask a customer is “Tell me about your typical day.” Taking an empathy walk (or ridealong or sitalong) involves following a customer through an experience, constantly asking, “What are you experiencing; what are you feeling?” Being a customer is more of an “identification walk.” It involves requesting that the customer guide you through an experience he or she would typically have, narrating it along the way. It lets you feel what the customer feels; it is an experience, not a report. And it can be as revealing as phoning your own unit, disguising your voice, and asking for something out of the ordinary.

Seek Second to Understand

Stephen Covey drew from classic books on human relationships to phrase his success habit—“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”¹ And there is more to the habit than simply deferring to another person to go first. The concept is about the pursuit of insight through the demonstration of understanding laced with compassion. The goal of curiosity is to care deeply enough to discover meaning not found merely in the words used. Sometimes creating collective guideposts can help. Again, start first with empathy, then seek to understand.

One approach to this joint search for meaning is to start with a collaborative mindset—that is, a meeting of the minds. “Mindset” is the term for the tone-setting actions at the beginning of a discussion that ensure congruence on three simple but powerful questions. These three questions serve as bannisters to the quality of the conversation. The goal is for both parties to periodically interrupt a long conversation by revisiting the same three questions from my book Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnership in Business and Life.

1. Why are we here? Both parties need to be clear on the purpose of the conversation. A simple statement followed by confirmation is usually sufficient: “John, I see this session as an opportunity for the two of us to discuss a new approach for reducing and managing your wait time. Is that your goal as well?”

2. What will it mean to you/to me? The potential for both participants to benefit from the dialogue is important. Not only does it help focus the exchange, but it enhances motivation. Proper attention to the potential benefits can turn a lethargic “Here we go again, another meeting with Sandra” mindset into a “Wow, this meeting with Sandra is going to be helpful!” mindset.

3. How shall we talk? Mindset also includes telegraphing the tone and style needed. Even if the tone is implied, a brief reminder can be useful in serving notice that an open, candid, freewheeling conversation is needed and expected. It also helps clarify the rules of engagement, avoiding unpleasant surprises: “Edward, I’ll be as open and candid as I can in this discussion. My thought was that we devote about thirty minutes to exploring options …”²

Turn Meaning into Insight

Build-A-Bear Workshop is one example many people think of when considering the idea of customers directly involved in creating a product, service, or solution from which they will benefit. Maxine Clark founded the company in 1997 and was its CEO for sixteen years. There are over four hundred stores today. The concept of “the most fun you’ll ever make” has their customers (children) going through an interactive process in which the stuffed animal of their choice is assembled and tailored to their unique preferences during their store visit. It is literally a workshop.

But the backstory is told by Maxine in an interview for Fortune in 2012 and puts someone else at the center of her innovative idea. “One day, I was shopping with Katie Burkhardt, the daughter of one of my good friends, and her brother Jack, who collected Ty Beanie Babies. When we couldn’t find anything new, Katie picked up a Beanie Baby and said we could make one. She meant we could go home and make the small bears, but I heard something different. Her words gave me the idea to create a company that would allow people to create their own customized stuffed animals.” And the rest is history!

Build-A-Bear continues to follow a partnership model that recognizes that the imagination of their customers (like Katie) is their greatest resource. Maxine continues: “There were no formal focus groups, but from the beginning, Build-a-Bear Workshop has had a Cub Advisory Board, which is a group of children who offer their opinions about our products and services. Kids have insights and offer inspiration by looking at the world differently.”³

The search for meaning is simply the first stop on the path to insight. That is the instant understanding ratchets up to a eureka moment. How do you get to insight? There will be many techniques in the pages ahead, but here are a few quick starter ideas:

Use an analogy to apply to the customer challenge. If the customer issue were an animal, a sport, a vehicle, etc., what would be its characteristics?

Choose a role model company for a new lens. If this problem were managed by Starbucks, Amazon, Ritz-Carlton, etc., how would they address it?

Examine the customer need through one of the five senses. What does the need taste like, smell like, etc.?

Rimini Street is a global provider of enterprise software products and services and the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products. Their client base is quite diverse, but all need advanced technical support for their complex environments. Prior to working with them, I did a series of interviews with many of their support professionals. Jennifer Perry, VP of Global SAP Service Delivery, made a profound statement. “When partnering with our clients, they know we are there for them 24/7, provide solutions to their technical issues and are fully invested in their success. Our engineers work extremely hard to provide Rimini Street clients with the best solutions and customer service and seeing this in practice is magical. There are instances where our clients figure it out on their own, sometimes even discover different solutions while working with our engineers, but most every time they end up viewing us as the heroes that helped them win.”

Practice Eccentric Listening: The Partnering Crib Notes

Listen without an ulterior motive. Make certain you are listening only to learn, not waiting to make a point or seeking a way to convince, teach, correct, or “sound smart.” Listen with your whole body. If you are uncomfortable being silent, deal with it; “listen” and “silent” have the same letters. Look at your customer in a way that would be convincing you are only listening to her or him. Stop “cutting to the chase”; hear all of your customer’s story. No multitasking while listening. Don’t be a sentence grabber. Be absorbed in what your customer is saying; be inspired by what your customer is meaning. Your ultimate goal is not just collecting information or gaining understanding; your objective is to make your customer feel valued and important. “Listening,” wrote actor Alan Alda, “is being able to be changed by the other person.”

Conventional wisdom regarding customer relationships suggests, “start with the customer’s need.” But co-creation partnering is unconventional. It begins with the customer. The need is like a destination; the customer is like the pilot of the transportation. Get to know the pilot, and she or he will take you to where you need to go. Besides, only the pilot knows the shortcuts and the scenic routes.