"What is the learning here, about fostering listening to what is difficult to hear?"
1. My reflection is based on a feeling that there were missed connections and missed opportunities on the second afternoon. Perhaps not everyone shares that feeling, but that was mine. This comes with a generally deflating sense that this listening-across-difference is maybe even harder than we thought. We were a group of people united by many things, engaging in the process with good will, who had just been primed with a day’s worth of thinking and practice around listening. Yet we appeared to miss each other in important ways on the second day. It’s a useful corrective to any idea that “we” are trying to get “the” out there to listen better across difference. It’s also a useful corrective to any assumption that un-listening is primarily about an unwillingness or inability to listen across cognitive disagreement. Here, it seemed more an inability to hear each other across difference in disposition towards the process.
2. There is a tension for me in reflecting on this: I personally struggled to proceed through a lack of clarity on the second afternoon. Once differences emerged over the appropriate process to follow, there seemed (to me) to be a real uncertainty as to who (if anyone) held ultimate decision-making power. Was it Emily, whose project it was, who had brought us together, and who (I assumed) had an interest in arriving at some sort of conclusion? Or was it one or more of the other ‘master listener’ participants who had contributed to and coached us through elements of process? Or was it all of us, as equal partners in a co-design process? The tension I experience is that I felt a need for certainty and clarity, even though I am theoretically drawn to participatory, bottom-up modes of communication that don't rely on there being a nominated authority structure.
3. But perhaps this uncertainty over process emerged as a way of avoiding a pre-existing content-based uncertainty. At the end of the morning session, there was a question raised that I took to be a desire to discuss what it was that we were aiming for (was our purpose over the two days the pursuit of ways of facilitating listening across difference so that we might increase public support for a more equal society and for specific equality-producing measures? If so, exactly what exactly do we mean by ‘a more equal society’? Did we in the room all agree on a desired outcome, or did we place emphasis on different aspects of a shared desired outcome, or were our starting points even more fundamentally different?) Talking with others, I found that other people had understood the question differently. It was an important question, and I think it deserved further exploration, yet we never returned to it after lunch, and so the five questions on the white-board sat there, uncertain as to whether they were the questions that all of us / most of us / many of us were actually interested in.
4. Again, I don’t think difficulties came from our fundamental differences, so much as a difficulty in understanding and communicating our own assumptions / starting points / desires.
5. Having said that, it may have been that the problem was simply one of over-ambition: hoping to achieve more than was achievable in the given time frame, and then getting a little panicky over an apparent absence of an outcome when it felt like time was running out. It is quite possible to gather and process new information in a short space of time, but the embodied habits and practices of communication and opening to the disposition and worldview (not just the propositions) of another will probably take much longer.
6. On a quite separate note (I think), the second day reinforced for me the general principle that location and space matters. The rooms we met in had a lot going for them: they were conveniently located, brightly lit, big enough to reconfigure in a variety of ways. But they also came with (for me) a set of associations from being in similar rooms many times before in an academic context. For me, they enabled a tendency to stay in my head: to concentrate hard, take notes and try to work things out in a linear, rational way. I fully understand the advantages offered by the rooms and the location, but it did set me wondering how the days might have gone if we had met somewhere different: a marae, perhaps, or a rambling beach house. On the same theme, it is obviously really convenient to have all the catering laid on, but it left me wondering what other sorts of interactions and conversations might have taken place if the setting had been different: what ideas and discussions might have emerged if there had been time for different combinations of people to meet each other while peeling potatoes, washing dishes, or simply walking or sitting outside on grass, or on a beach? (All of which is difficult to arrange, and harder still to replicate if we are looking for models of enabling listening across society.)