Archive for May, 2012
Listening Ears
Listening Ears in Great Britain
Notebook – A selection of Independent views, by Richard Taylor-Jones;Wednesday, 23 May 2012 at 12:00 am
I’ve just had the most amazing few weeks filming some very personal films for this year’s Springwatch. The basic idea of them was to be Landscape films, each with a different theme to explore. Dungeness, the Southern most tip of Kent, was one of my favorite locations and its theme was energy.
Its an area of shingle that’s 40sq Km, the largest shingle foreland in Europe and its been formed by the energy of the sea. Waves washing and shifting shingle relentlessly. In itself, it’s a very natural and unique environment, but there are certainly some very Accidental Nature things going on too. The most visually striking of those is to be found at what are known locally as the Listening Ears. Three large concrete walls and domes standing a good 40 ft. high.
Now classed as Schedule One listed monuments, these bizarre structures were built just after the First World War in an attempt to find a way to hear enemy fighters approaching over the English Channel. The inventors hoping they would focus distant aircraft engine noise, magnifying to a point that allowed the defence staff to hear them well before their human ears would normally pick them up. Those few extra minutes would give valuable time to scramble air defence ahead of the enemies arrival.
In the end The Ears never came to use as Radar was invented, and they became defunct along with the land surrounding them. That land was an old quarrying pit from which cement was made, that Cement used to make the Listening Ears. The pits are now flooded and full of life. Reed beds play home to the likes of marsh frogs and reed warbles and high above them Marsh Harriers hunt. And it’s the Marsh Harriers that were relevant for my film. What better place to comment about the importance of sound energy and the Harriers acute listening skills when it comes to hunting, than at these marvelous Listening Ears.
The cement works and listening ears were certainly never created with the idea of a nature reserve being made off the back of them but, by accident, that’s certainly what happened. And, now the ears are schedule one monuments I’m pretty sure the area will always be protected and nature will benefit.
Whilst filming, not only did we get shots of the Marsh Harriers, we also captured some fantastic behavior as the male came in and made a food pass with his mate. An arial exchange of food energy, part of the Springtime bonding rituals. Along with nailing some cracking starlapses, brown hares and stunning landscapes it’s all in made for a great film, with those Listening Ears taking center stage.
The Ears are privately owned by Cemex who now value the areas importance to wildlife and they allow guided walks to go and see the Listening Ears. Learn more about them here. For details of the open days and guided walks, contact Owen Leyshon, Romney Marsh Countryside Project [email protected] Springwatch starts Monday 28 May, see the whole film then.
The Listening Skills Version of the Invisible Gorilla Effect
The invisible gorilla decade-old experiment was designed to show that we’re not aware of as much as we might think. In the experiment volunteers watched a video of a group tossing a ball and were told to count the number of times the ball was tossed. About half the viewers failed to notice a gorilla (in a fake suit) walk through the group they were watching.
Science News (12/3/11, p 10) reported on an experiment that took the gorilla-suit concept and applied it to listening. Psychologist Polly Dalton of the University of London created a recording of two men talking as they prepared food and two women as they wrapped a gift. Volunteers wore headphones and listened to the recordings that simulated the four characters moving about the room as they talked. During the recording, and for 19 seconds, “gorilla man” repeated, “I’m a gorilla.”
A very high percentage of the volunteers who were told to follow the women’s conversation and a third of those who followed the men, didn’t hear gorilla man at all. Gorilla man’s voice passed closer to the men in the scene, which Dalton claims, accounts for some of the reasons the men might have detected the gorilla more often.
Dr. Dalton’s experiment provides us with more research about how unconscious we are about what is happening around us. No one would ever say the ball tossers nor the headphones users were unfocused, they were hyper-focused. Still they missed something crucial that was in their midst.
Think about the people who are killed crossing a road while texting. They get so embroiled in their activity that they fail to listen to their surroundings. Our job is to know when we need to block out extraneous information and sounds, and when we need to scan the environment to take it all in.
Be aware; there are “gorilla men” everywhere.
ASTD Conference and Listening Skills
Yesterday I attended the Expo of the ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) conference held in Denver. My reason for attending the Expo was to talk to vendors and look for book titles on listening.
My good friend and superb breakthrough thinker, Ann Herrmann Nehdi, President of Herrmann International (home of HBDI), sent me an Expo invitation. The last time I was at the conference was in 2004 when my book, COACHING C.L.U.E.S. came out and I spoke at the conference as well as autographed copies of the book. That Expo had aisles and aisles of books that were scarfed up by eager learners. This year there were about half the books, fewer categories, and not so many buyers.
If I’m going to create a “book” on listening, what would it cover, how would it look, what medium would it be in, who will want it? Certainly, I don’t want to end up developing something that would end up in an ever-shrinking market, the traditional book.
And then there were the vendors on the huge Expo floor. There was row-after-row of booths filled with people motivated to explain their wares, give me some tsatske, and scan my badge to collect my identity. While I knew how hard their jobs were, I only made eye contact with a few.
The vendors I talked to said they have modules or programs on listening. Most were Active Listening and included within Communication. Not one person was familiar with the content and only one found materials on it in his literature. I don’t want to run up Ladder of Inference and jump to conclusions that listening isn’t on their radar screen. It might be the Expo just wasn’t the right venue to hold a conversation about the topic.
What I am certain of is that attendees were drawn to hi-tech, glitzy, expensive, entertaining booths. One of the big guys gave away a Kindle an hour. People stood four deep at that booth, got caught up in the hype, chatted away with professional sales people. While, nearby, a smaller, traditional booth with candies or vanity pens to give away, was empty. In both cases, the vendors were selling their same, over-worn content, but re-packaged into different formats and claiming it was new information.
I’m glad I went to the Expo because I think it saved me a lot of time and changed my expectations. Whatever I undertake to bring listening skills to a broad audience, needs to be different content, format, and even media.
I need your help. What ideas do you have to suggest about a “book?” I’m definitely in the problem/mess finding stage of the creative problem solving process. Please advise me.
Is the Internet changing the brains of youngsters?
Following is an excerpt from The Brain: A User’s Guide, The Daily Telegraph by Nigel Farndale posted 11:30 AM BST 24 Apr 2012. He interviews David Eagleman the brilliant neuroscientist I’ve written about before. Here’s Eagleman’s response to Farndale’s question:
Is the Internet changing the brains of youngsters?
“It certainly is,” he says, “especially in the way we seek information. When we were growing up it was all about ‘just in case’ information, the Battle of Hastings and so on. Now it is ‘just in time’ learning, where a kid looks something up online if he needs to know about it. This means kids today are becoming less good at memorising, but in other ways their method of learning is superior to ours because it targets neurotransmitters in the brain, ones that are related to curiosity, emotional salience and interactivity. So I think there might be some real advantages to where this is going. Kids are becoming faster at searching for information. When you or I read, our eyes scan down the page, but for a Generation-Y kid, their eyes will have a different set of movements, top, then side, then bottom and that is the layout of webpages.”
I recently had an experience with my eight-year-old granddaughter, Hannah that echoes Eagleman’s explanation. Hannah began reading early and prodigiously. She reads faster and more accurately than most adults, including me, so I’m curious about her reading process.
She came for a visit with her family during spring break, and I tried to watch her read to see if I could figure it out without being noticed. That part was easy because she’s not distractible when engrossed in a book. She was re-reading one of the Harry Potter’s as well as a different tome, with equally as many pages.
Just as Eagleman describes, Hannah’s eyes did not move across the page, line after line. Instead she seemed to look at the whole page then read in a “z” like pattern. What is interesting though is that she doesn’t spend much time at all on the Internet, even though she’s adept at using a computer.
I intend to continue observing her and her brother Izzy to see how the Internet is shaping their brains. One thing’s for sure; they’re not at all intimidated by technology.
The Classic Trap of Experience—Listening Case
Jonathan, the senior VP of Sales, and Francesca, the senior VP of Marketing, have had a contentious relationship for the year Jonathan has been in his job. At first their peers thought it was a matter of getting clear about roles, responsibilities and territory, and that it would smooth over, especially since working with Francesca was never a problem.
Yesterday at an Executive Committee meeting, Francesca presented three ideas for a new marketing campaign and asked the EC for feedback. Jonathan swiveled in his chair and said, “There’s nothing new here. We did almost the exact same things at my last company without success. Why didn’t you come to me beforehand? I could have saved you a lot of time and effort.”
Everyone in the room was stunned. The CEO pulled himself together and said, “Jonathan, let’s hear Francesca out, then we can discuss the ideas. Your response seems hasty.”
Unfortunately, interactions like those happen much too often in the workplace. Of course, there’s more than one explanation for what happened, but a big one is that Experience gets in the way of Listening. Because Jonathan sees himself as an expert, he reverts to what he knows and closes off new information that doesn’t match with anything in his past that has brought success.
Some considerations:
- New information is perceived to be a threat to what has been tried and made true
- Prior experience has been repeated enough to be trusted
- It takes time and effort to assimilate new information
- Success speaks for itself; there’s no need to start again from the beginning
- Reputation is built upon replicating winners
What advice do you have for the people in this case?