Lean Out. Tune In. Startup.

Part 2 in an ongoing series about healthy growth, based on the book “Listening for Growth” (available February 7, 2023). Part 1 can be found here.

Given that I am of a certain age and that my first startup, Insound, was an online record store, it will surprise no one that I collect and listen to vinyl records. I love LPs. I love holding them, taking the records out, and putting them on the platter. I like the minor clicks and scratches that arrive through wear. I love their scale — that they are one hundred and forty-four square inches in surface area where the compact disc is just twenty-five and the Spotify stream is exactly zero. I love the weight of their paper. I love listening to forty or fifty minutes of a musical arc, with a brief intermission to flip sides. I love all of it.

But if I am being honest, I also struggle to just sit and listen to my records. I get distracted. I feel an urge to work while listening. Or to do busywork or Google some random reference I hear in the music. I’m almost positive that I used to be good at active listening. Now, I’m not so sure.

I suspect that you can relate. It seems like our capacity to sit and just absorb what we hear without distracting ourselves has been diminished over time. The ways we sensorily engage with the world are vastly different now than they were just a few years ago.

For entrepreneurs and digital executives, the change has been perhaps even more marked, on account of the inordinate impact of speed and technology on startups. In business today, listening is in short supply and high demand and is exponentially contested. So where does that leave us if my claim is that listening is the thing that most correlates to healthy growth?

To state the obvious, when I use the word “listening,” I am only partially referring to the dictionary definition of the word. When I say “listening” I am implying something closer to the open and active consideration of information without bias. It is an aptitude that requires observing and thinking as much as it does hearing.

Our ears are always open, even when our eyes or mouths are not. Our ears are the most constant, natural receptors we have. They don’t blink. They don’t scowl. They don’t pucker. They just stay open to receive. Listening is about learning from our ears, but it’s about more than hearing. As somebody who has suffered hearing loss, I recognize that you can listen without hearing in the traditional sense. You can avail yourself of information — data, facts, stories, pictures, feedback, whatever — and then openly, earnestly consider what that information is telling you with regards to a desired out- come, an experiment, a hypothesis, or a problem.

This conception of listening shares some correlation with curiosity, but the two are not the same. Curiosity is a social or physiological attribute while listening is an action or practice. Similarly, listening is not the same thing as empathy. I value empathy in people as much as any other trait, but unadorned empathy assumes a bias toward sensitive projection. To listen requires a degree of sobriety, patience, and occasionally, dispassion for certain preconceived notions or ideas. Once we lean out and actively listen, I believe that we can then tune in and act with confidence. Sometimes, the next, best action is to empathize. But that isn’t always the case.

In other words, listening is being actively curious while being open to new evidence and perspective. It is empathy-adjacent but not innately empathetic. And it is the single most important skill for an entrepreneur — or anyone interested in growth — to cultivate.

Today, businesses have more ways to listen than ever before. We have technology and software solutions for researching, testing, and analyzing the data involved in every decision. But does that mean we are actually listening better? Sadly, the opposite might be true. We are overwhelmed and paralyzed. We look for shortcuts. Instead of listening to evidence, we weaponize data to validate our biases. And in doing so, we’re routinely missing the messages that would lead to healthy growth — personally, professionally, and institutionally. Listening is an opening up to questions and obstacles while resisting biases and unfounded conclusions. It is also about discernment and tuning and retuning based on feedback and evidence. To make sound decisions, we have to take in and carefully consider the feedback around us — even the feedback we’re currently unaware of and the feedback we’d prefer to ignore. Especially that sort of feedback.

Put this way, the value of listening seems obvious. The question, then, is why, in spite of knowing the value of listening, we forgo it, shortchange it, or undervalue it. The answers are many and varied and, possibly, as important as listening itself. Due in part to algorithms, echo chambers and geographic sorting, we struggle mightily with constant confirmation bias — conscious and unconscious. Additionally, many of us, in either a rush to avoid discomfort or to expedite resolution, run towards cognitive closure. There is also a very human, very practical, but often insidious, temptation to use the same solutions time and time again — to assume that what got us here will get us there. We call that “mechanized thinking” and it is an enemy to growth. And finally (for the purposes of this article at least), there is the distraction of hyper-mediation — the constant bombardment of content desperate for our attention, across more media devices than ever before.

Honestly, it’s a wonder that anyone hears anything. To truly listen, we need to resist. We need to lean out before we tune in. We need to cultivate openness, and to fend off biases long enough to allow us to hear what is true and truly valuable. We want to take in the stimuli, but we have to also discern veracity and proportionality. When we go to a concert, for example, we set ourselves up to hear the performance we want to hear. To do that, we have to block out our own noise. We have to block out crowd noise. We have to allow ourselves to focus on the music in spite of all the distractions.

The same is true in business. We need to get from distracting noise to clear signals. We have to lean out to be open to the information, but then we need to tune in to the most salient matters. For healthy growth, those most salient matters originate from three moments of revelation:

1. The articulation of true Desires—which propel founders, startups and products.
2. The understanding of Problems most worth solving—which stand between Desires and Outcomes.
3. The validation of the best Hypotheses—wherein we discover whether/why/not we have solved those Problems most worth solving.

In last week’s article, I attempted to establish “The Why” of the problem (Growth is broken). This week, I introduced “The What” of the solution (Listening). Next we get into “The How” of things — the practice of Healthy Growth.