Overcome Opposition: Wind Ep 8 – The Five Steps: LISTEN FIRST

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...you jump from question to question based on what they're saying, not based on what you want to say.

~ John Davies
...you jump from question to question based on what they're saying, not based on what you want to say.
~ John Davies
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Not all listening is equal. What people tell you can swing dramatically based on the questions you ask. In this episode, John explains how to structure the questions and how to really listen to the responses from the community.

Takeaways and Teachable Moments


  • GET MORE PEOPLE LISTENING TO THE TRANSCRIPTS (OF THE CONVERSATIONS).

  • TREAT IT AS QUALITATIVE, NOT QUANTITATIVE, RESEARCH.

  • FIGURE OUT WHAT THE PEOPLE REALLY WANT TO TALK ABOUT AND LET THEM.

  • CRAFT OPEN-ENDED QUESTIONS.

  • BUILD TEAMS TO WRITE QUESTIONS.

  • AVOID OVERLY SPECIFIC QUESTIONS.

  • BE EXCITED BY OTHER PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS.

Answers to questions are a commodity. Knowing what the community feels or thinks about a wind project allows you to address the right issues and to proactively maximize your efforts. In this episode John redesigns the profession of listening, laying out best practices for building questions that lead to knowledge that actually helps your project rather than bog it down in mountains of useless data points.

John helps to adjust our views on the differences between thinking and feeling and how communities use each to make decisions. He covers the most common challenges to getting good responses including how to ask a question when we don't know what people are thinking. We learn that if we don't know the right question, we're not going to get the answers that are essential to success.


 

Start here with WIND

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