Colloquy with Jim Macnamara: Listening, the missing essential in communication

Abstract

In this conversation with Jim Macnamara, relevant issues about the challenges of public communication are discussed. Macnamara is Distinguished Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and has conducted numerous studies with different organizations (governments, public and private companies) that have led him to the conclusion that there is need for two-way communication between organizations and their different stakeholders. His research has focused on the particular importance of listening in organizations as the missing essential in public communication: based on his research he has theorized the design of an architecture of listening and the seven canons of listening. Professor Macnamara argues that one of the reasons for the lack of trust in society has to do with the limited understanding of communication as unidirectional (one-way transmission of information); thus, people do not feel listened to by either governments or organizations.

Keywords:

• Organizational listening
• two-way communication
• trust
• stakeholders
• architecture of listening

Introduction

Jim Macnamara is Distinguished Professor of Public Communication at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and at the London College of Communication.

Macnamara is internationally recognized for his research into evaluation of public communication including advertising, public relations, and marketing, corporate, and government communication to identify effectiveness and inform strategy, and his research into organizational listening has been described as ‘of major international significance’. He also has conducted extensive research into health communication, both nationally, including for the Cancer Institute NSW, the NSW Department of Health, the NSW Multicultural Health Communication Service, and globally, where he led global evaluation research for the World Health Organization (WHO) during the COVID-19 pandemic and for World Health Days between 2020 and 2022. He is Convenor of the Health Communication Research Group at UTS.

His research has had substantial industry, professional, and social impact, including adoption of his evaluation framework for communication by the NSW Government and the World Health Organization (WHO) Department of Communications. He contributed to the integrated evaluation framework (IEF) of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) and the evaluation frameworks of the UK Government Communication Service (GCS) and the European Commission Directorate-General for Communication (DG COMM).

In 2017 he was presented with The Pathfinder Award, ‘the highest academic honor’ awarded by the Institute for Public Relations (IPR) in the USA for his scholarly research, and the Don Bartholomew Award for ‘outstanding service to the communications industry’ by the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC).

Jim is the author of almost 100 academic journal articles and book chapters, a number of influential research reports, and 16 books including, most recently, Beyond Post-Communication: Challenging Disinformation, Deception, and Manipulation (New York: Peter Lang, 2020); Evaluating Public Communication: New Models, Standards, and Best Practice (London: Routledge, 2018); and Organizational Listening: The Missing Link in Public Communication (New York: Peter Lang, 2016 with a new edition coming in late 2023).

Prior to joining the university in 2007, Jim Macnamara had a successful 30-year career in professional communication practice spanning journalism, public relations, advertising, and media research. Immediately prior to joining the academy, he was the founder and CEO of the Asia Pacific office of the global media research firm CARMA International, which he sold to Isentia (formerly Media Monitors) in 2006. As he shared with us, the path to listening started when he realised that evaluation of companies showed a lack of communication because of the lack of listening.

He is a Fellow of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) headquartered in London and Chair of the AMEC Academic Advisory Group. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute (FAMI) and a Certified Practicing Marketer (CPM).

This conversation with Professor Macnamara took place through various online meetings and culminated in a face-to-face conversation in Rome, taking advantage of his participation in the 13th Professional Seminar for Church Communications Offices organized by the School of Communications of the University of the Holy Cross with the theme ‘Relevance and listening: Communicating the Christian message in the plurality of contemporary voices’.

Communication as a two-way process

In this interview we are going to talk about communication, so let’s start with the definition of this word. As a professor of public communication, how would you define the communication that takes place in organizations?

There is a range of terminology used in the communication field. First, there is interpersonal communication. Interpersonal communication occurs and is important in organizations, but when we are talking about organizations and their role and work in society, we are also talking about what I refer to as public communication – communication with the public.

Organizational communication means the same thing in some countries, but in others the term organizational communication refers to communication inside the organization.

Public communication includes all the ways that organizations communicate publicly, such as media advertising, traditional media publicity, social media posting, websites, publications such as newsletters, public events, and so on.

The question ‘what is communication’ is a very good one, however, the term is used constantly but often it is not understood. ‘Communication’ is often confused with ‘information’. I have addressed this point in my new book on Organizational Listening (Macnamara 2023).

It is true, in this book you review the etymology of the word communication. Could you briefly summarize where the word comes from and how it is defined today?

The English word communication is derived from the Latin noun communicatio, which denotes ‘sharing’ as well as ‘imparting’ (Peters 2008, 689), and the Latin verb communicare meaning to ‘share or make common’ and ‘be in relation with’ (Cobley 2008, 660). Both originate from the Latin root communis meaning ‘common’ or ‘public’ (Peters 2008, 689).

A more contemporary reference is the Oxford dictionary, which defines communication as ‘the exchanging of information as well as imparting information through speaking, writing, or using some other medium’. This recognizes the need to impart information to others in some situations, such as in public health campaigns and in marketing to sell products, services, candidates for office, or ideas. But, in informing and persuasion – two valid objectives of communication that involve one-way communication – those addressed need to receive, process, accept, and often are expected to act on the information provided. Unless some such effects occur, communication has not been achieved. Communication is about meaning making and influencing awareness, attitudes, or behaviour, not simply sending information or messages (Fiske 2010, Chap. 3 in particular). Furthermore, another objective of communication – some say the most important objective – is exchanging information, views, and ideas in a two-way transactional process to achieve shared meaning making, such as people negotiating, collaborating, and cooperating to establish personal, business, or political relationships and maintain social mores, laws, and practices.

Among 25 definitions of communication identified in The International History of Communication Study (Simonson and Park 2015), key examples cited by eminent communication scholar Silvio Waisbord (2019, 24) include ‘communication is a process in which participants create and share information with one another in order to reach a mutual understanding’ (Rogers 1986), and ‘the process of sending a message from a source to a receiver over some channel, through the use of symbols to share meaning between two entities’ (Kromer, Ewoldsen, and Koerner 2016).

Many organizations consider that communicating means conveying information, marketing and advertising campaigns, and making investors aware of the organization’s good results… is that all communication? If so, it would seem that it is a unidirectional process…

The research literature, some of which I have mentioned above, shows us that there are two types or purposes of communication – one-way and two-way. Sometimes it is necessary to inform others, such as distributing health information during the Covid-19 pandemic. Providing information to others is legitimate and important in many circumstances. Also, sometimes it is legitimate and necessary to persuade others, such as in promoting vaccination or urging people to drive safely on the road. Information and persuasion are one-way communication.

However, in many other situations people expect two-way communication. For example, in democracies, the voice of the people (vox populi) is the basis of legitimacy in government. Also, people expect to be consulted and have a say on many matters that affect them. Members of organizations expect to be able to express their views to those who represent them and have their views and opinions taken into consideration.

The communication proposal you make in your publications is based on the premise that communication is bi-directional. Do you believe that the demand for this type of two-way communication has grown in recent years? Is participation a right that we are now more aware of?

Look, not all communication is two-way. There are cases where it’s perfectly legitimate to inform. For example, as we have said before, governments need to inform people of certain rules and regulations; communication can also be persuasive where organizations want to persuade people to behave in a certain way. But the reality is, as you said, a large part of communication is two-way because we live in democracies, most countries are democracies or social democracies, and also organizations and citizens want to have engagement. You can’t have engagement, you can’t have democracy, you can’t have relationships without two-way communication. I often say to senior executives: go home and spend the next month just talking and see what happens to your relationships – they will not go very well… and then go home and listen and let other people speak and your relationships will be much better. That happens in our personal life, and it also happens with organizations. People do not only want organizations to inform us, because a very key part is a two-way process of communication. I think through the era of modernism many organizations have forgotten that communication should be largely two-way and many organizations, whether corporations or governments, focused on one-way. I think they have spent their time informing and persuading but have not done enough two-way communication.

You ask whether awareness of listening is increasing…I think it’s slowly increasing because what we are seeing is a decline in trust in organizations, we’re seeing a decline in engagement and that is because people are saying they are not happy with how things are progressing. I think if we look at the figures on trust and we look at the figures on engagement, we realise that people are not happy simply being talked to, people want to have a say, people want to be listened to, and so I think there is a challenge for all types of organizations.

Listening, the missing essential in communication

You say that listening is the missing essential in communication, how did you get to that?

I realised from my research that companies spend millions of dollars doing campaigns, but they often don’t know about the results. For example, in Australia in 2022 the government wanted to reach refugee communities with Covid-19 messages, so they did an advertising campaign that cost around $22 million. We went to interview people in the refugee communities and found that few saw the campaign. Many don’t watch TV. Some of them don’t speak English. Where do they get information? We found many went to Sino Weibo or their home country newspapers. The government had no clue about those people, and they didn’t consult with community leaders. Many of these refugee communities don’t trust the government. They trust the local community and religious leaders. There was a chronic lack of listening.

A chronic lack of listening, that’s a good way to define what happens in many organizations. If you had to say what is the most important element of listening, which one would you choose and why?

There is no one element that ensures organizational listening. I have identified eight key elements that are required, which I refer to as an architecture of listening. In summary, this involves:

• A culture of listening – the organization has to want to listen and see value in listening;

• Policies for listening;

• Avoiding the politics of listening which leads to selective listening, privileging some voices and ignoring others;

• Systems for listening, such as interactive websites; call centres; complaints departments, etc.;

• Resources assigned to listening including staff;

• Technologies to aid listening, such as social media monitoring tools, textual analysis software, e-surveys, etc.;

• Skills for listening, such as in using systems and technologies;

• Articulation of what is learned to decision makers and policy makers.

Your last definition of organizational listening (2019) has evolved from your early work, including an amplification of audiences. How would you define organizational listening right now? Why is it relevant?

I defined organizational listening in the first edition of my book on Organizational Listening published in 2016 based on a major study that I led, The Organizational Listening Project. After further research, I published the 2019 definition that you refer to.

Also, a number of other researchers have contributed to this growing field of study. So, in my new book published in 2023, I have taken on board some suggestions from others and expanded my 2019 definition as follows.

Organizational listening comprises the creation and implementation of ethical scaled processes and systems that enable decision makers and policy makers in organizations to actively and effectively access; acknowledge; understand; consider including critical review of relevant organization policies, decisions, and practices; and appropriately respond to feedback and input from all those who wish to communicate with the organization or with whom the organization wishes to communicate interpersonally or through delegated, mediated means, thus contributing to organizational learning and organization-stakeholder relations. (Macnamara 2023, n.p.)

This is long, but is designed to incorporate what I refer to as the ‘seven canons of listening’; to recognize the unique challenges of organizational listening compared with interpersonal listening, such as the need for scale; as well as to state the purpose of listening.

What are the requirements for true listening?

There are many requirements for true listening. A key requirement is to understand the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing involves sound waves striking the eardrum in the case of humans. In organizations, the equivalent of hearing is the arrival of messages or information such as letters, e-mails, phone calls, reports, submissions, etc.

We know that people hear many things but ignore them. Similarly, organizations can, and do, ignore messages and information they receive.

Listening is about the processing of what we hear, and what an organization receives, and then responding in some way.

From a very wide review of psychology, ethics, interpersonal communication, and therapeutic literature, I identified seven key requirements for listening, which I call the ‘seven canons of listening’ that can be applied in organizations and interpersonally. These are:

1. Recognition of others as having a legitimate right to speak and be treated with respect. This requires openness to avoid selective listening in which the voices and views of some groups are given preference while others are ignored;

2. Acknowledgement of others’ views and expressions of voice. Unless some form of acknowledgement is given, people feel that they have not been listened to;

3. Paying attention to others;

4. Interpreting a what others say (receptively and fairly);

5. Trying as far as possible to achieve understanding of others’ views, perspectives, and feelings;

6. Giving consideration to what others say; and

7. Responding in an appropriate way.

To give recognition, acknowledgement, attention, and interpret what others say openly and receptively, we need to apply empathy and sometimes compassion. So, openness and empathy are underpinning attributes required.

But it is important to note that responding appropriately does not necessarily mean agreement or acceptance. Sometimes, we as individuals and also organizations cannot do what others ask for valid reasons. In such cases, an explanation should be given as part of dialogue.

Returning to number seven of the seven canons of listening, often what is really lacking in organizations is an appropriate response to what has been ‘listened to’, let’s say, feedback management. What advice would you give to make that response possible?

What I argue and what the research tells us is that listening isn’t necessarily agreement because many times organizations cannot agree with all of the feedback that they receive, but to really listen organizations need to – at least – pay attention to and consider what people are saying. Then they may decide they can agree or maybe they cannot agree and finally they need to respond to people. People don’t always expect agreement, but they do expect consideration and they do expect a response even if the response is to say ‘no, we can’t do that’, and this is where many organizations fall down.

They receive feedback and comments from either their employees or external citizens and they don’t respond, and therefore people assume that they have simply ignored them. Thus, it’s very important to separate hearing and listening and also agreement and listening because listening doesn’t demand agreement, but it does require paying attention, giving consideration and giving an appropriate response. That might be an explanation of why something cannot be done, or it may be to take on board the suggestions that have been made to the organization.

Earlier you said that ‘to give recognition, acknowledgement, attention, and interpret what others say openly and receptively, we need to apply empathy and sometimes compassion’. it would seem that these two qualities (empathy and compassion) apply only to people – how can an organization be empathetic and compassionate in the listening process?

That’s a good question and something that I point out in my research is that, ultimately, in an organization it is people who do the listening. Organizations are not machines. Organizations are made up of people. They delegate their listening to public relations, customer relations, social media monitoring and so forth.

An organization can be compassionate and can be empathetic because it’s the people in the organization who are collecting the feedback. If people in a call center, for example, are rude, uncaring, or if customer relations people are uncaring, that is a reflection of the organization. I'm not trying to anthropomorphize organizations, but the actions that people take can reflect compassion and empathy or they can reflect that they don’t care; and if they reflect that they don’t care, then it’s taken as the organization doesn’t care.

The reality of listening in organizations

Even though you work in the university you still do lots of projects with the industry

Yes, I do… Many universities now seek not only grants from government funding bodies and philanthropy, but also engage with government agencies, industry, and NGOs in contract research. This is partly to gain extra research funding, but also to have impact. Modern universities are not only about long-term basic research, but also engage in very applied research to have social impact.

This year I’m going to be in a kind of sabbatical year in which I am engaged in full-time research. I like teaching, especially master’s students because they are already working, and I really love to be with young professionals. They are very interested in what I teach because they can apply that, and they realise that I’m not only an academic but a person who has worked in the industry and can talk their language.

But in terms of research, I have worked with around 60 organizations, and I have spent many weeks in some companies seeing how they work, what they do with the data they receive, and I saw that sometimes they don’t do anything with what they receive. If you just do a survey of organization leaders, they are going to say that, of course, they listen to the people. So that’s why I’ve decided to spend time doing deep research inside organizations to observe first-hand.

From that experience working with the organizations, could you share some common things you have learned about the reality of listening in those organizations?

Of course. There have been many major findings from my research – unfortunately many of them negative. Key findings include:

• Most organizations devote substantial resources to distributing their messages, such as through advertising, public relations, websites, publications, presentations, and so on. In the name of communication, they create an ‘architecture of speaking’.

• However, extensive studies show that most organizations devote comparatively little resources or time to listening to their stakeholders. On average, 80% of the communication budgets and resources of organizations is devoted to speaking and sometimes as much as 95%.

• When organizations do listen, this is mostly instrumental – that is, listening is done to gain intelligence or insights to serve their own purposes such as targeting audiences to get them to vote, or buy products or services, donate, and so on.

• Listening in and by organizations is significantly different to interpersonal listening at a practical level. While the same principles apply, such as those expressed in the ‘seven canons of listening’, organizational listening often needs to be conducted at scale, as many organizations have thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of stakeholders, such as customers, members, employees, etc. To cope with scale, organizational listening is mostly delegated to departments and units and teams such as customer relations, call centres, HR, social media monitoring staff, and so on. Also, because stakeholders are often spread around countries and even globally, organizational listening is largely mediated – it has to occur through letters, e-mails, reports, submissions, media comments, etc. Only a small proportion of organizational listening can occur interpersonally face-to-face.

• To deal with scale, delegation and mediation of listening, organizations need to use a range of systems and technologies that aid listening such as media monitoring, including social media monitoring and analysis; online research tools such as e-surveys; text analysis software; and online public consultation platforms.

• But technologies alone cannot provide open effective organizational listening. My research has identified that organizational culture sits at the foundation of organizational attitudes and approaches to listening. Management and staff have to want to listen. Furthermore, my research has identified that effective organizational listening requires policies, avoiding the ‘politics of listening’ (listening to some and excluding others), resources, and skills, and finally articulation of what delegated parts of organizations learn to senior decision makers and policy makers.

I have summarized the essential elements of what is required to be a listening organization in what I call an ‘architecture of listening’, as I have mentioned before.

How many people work with you in those projects in companies or governments?

I have a small team. I usually have three or four researchers working with me on major projects and we outsource some data collection such as social media monitoring and analysis. In the case of the WHO, we integrate multiple data sets from different sources and look for patterns. When you see the whole picture, you can listen better.

Why is it so difficult to really listen to stakeholders?

Organizations need to have the capacity to listen at scale through various departments and units and teams to a wide range of expressions of voice. That means organizations need to allocate resources to listening and have systems and technologies that aid listening at scale.

The model you have explained applies to large organizations. Is it applicable in a small organization with few resources? How?

Listening is easier in small organizations than in large organizations. In small organizations, leaders have the opportunity to listen to many of their employees and even some customers, members, and others personally. As someone who led a small research company before becoming an academic, I know this.

Listening may have some ethical implications, for example there are listening systems about which one may wonder to what extent they are lawful, such as ‘digital surveillance’ or listening through algorithms. Do you have an opinion on this? Is any means valid to obtain information about my stakeholders?

One of the criteria I and other researchers in this area apply to organizational listening is that it is ethical. Ethics in relation to listening applies in two ways.

First, organizations that represent or serve members, customers, students, patients, other stakeholders, or society as a whole, have a responsibility to listen. It can be argued that not listening to stakeholders is unethical.

Second, the purpose of listening has to be legal and ethical. Ideally, organizational listening is conducted for mutual benefit of the organization and its stakeholders. At the very least, it should not be done to exploit others. So, some types of listening such as unwarranted surveillance, both physical and digital, are unethical.

You have just said that ‘not listening to the stakeholders is unethical’. could you elaborate more on this idea?

It depends on the stakeholders. The word stakeholders is a word that’s used a lot in strategic communication. Some people refer to an organization’s publics, sometimes its employees or customers, or its parishioners … stakeholders is a general term and it’s been defined as anyone who is affected by or who can affect the organization. That is, someone who has an interest in the organization, and depending on the type of stakeholder it can be quite unethical to ignore them. For example, in a democracy, as we have said before, democracies are founded on the principle of vox populi – the voice of the people. Governments derive their legitimacy from the voice of the people, so if a democratic government ignores the people, you can question whether that is ethical. An organization depends on its employees, and it makes promises to its employees. If it ignores them, you could argue that is not an ethical practice. And certainly in non-government organizations, non-profit organizations, and institutions such as churches you could certainly argue that there is a moral responsibility to listen to people and to hear what people need and what their interests are and what their concerns are. If we’re only interested in telling people what to do, then we don’t listen. My argument is that there are times to tell people things, but there are also times that we have to listen to people. We live in a free society, so we owe people that courtesy, and I think they have that right to be listened to.

But some people at the top of the organizations may see listening with some kind of fear

Some leaders in organizations do fear listening because they are worried about criticism. But every organization needs to be changing and evolving. If organizations listen, if they look for patterns in data, they can fix problems and improve. They can change the things that need to change. Most organizations that I know that are in trouble, if you go back 15 years or so, you can see consistent patterns that were telling you where the problems were. Lots of crises happen because of a lack of listening. By using really good analysis tools you can have very good information and identify patterns. And when you give solid data to a boss, they are open to change things. Is it not me telling them what they have to change or if something is not working, it is data that tells them that and data is appreciated by bosses.

Could you give some advice to people working in communications departments who feel the resistance of the CEOs to listening?

Listening starts with culture. So, if you work in an organization where there is no willingness to listen, it is difficult. Typically, such organizations have to go through a long process and often run into major crises before they wake up and change. To start, I propose doing pilot projects or trials. Do a test in one department or in a particular project for six months and then they will see the outcomes. For example, in one company we analysed all the complaints people made and we saw patterns. With that data, we proposed to change some things in the company to avoid that problem and also we did call-backs to the people who had complaints and said ‘thank you, we are going to change that’ and the effect on those people was amazing. They were so surprised, and they changed their perceptions about the company.

Listening in organizations is often used for marketing purposes, in order to sell more. Your proposal, however, is that it is necessary to build relationships with different audiences. Why do you think this approach is necessary? Are there clear boundaries between communication and marketing in this respect?

Marketing communication is one form of public communication. It is legitimate and important provided the products or services involved are legal and the marketing communication is done ethically. Marketing communication helps drive the economy and it makes people aware of products and services available. But it should not mislead or deceive people, and it should not manipulate or exploit people through practices such as collection and use of data that breaches privacy.

In terms of listening, successful marketing requires marketers to understand the needs and interests of consumers and potential consumers or their products and services.

Furthermore, contemporary marketing recognizes that building trusting relationships with customers is important because it is much easier and less costly to sell products and services to existing customers than it is to gain new customers.

Many parts of society, including marketing, recognize the importance of relationships. Relationships cannot be built by speaking. They require speaking and listening because relationships are about mutuality. They require understanding of the other and interest in the other – not simply as a ‘target’ to sell to, or convert to one’s own ideas and thinking, but as a contributor to discussion and meaning making.

How do you apply your theories about listening to internal audiences? Why could it be important?

Internal audiences in organizations – namely, their employees or members – are arguably the most important stakeholder group of organizations. Without employees and members, an organization ceases to exist other than as a legal entity. Therefore, all of the theories, concepts, and practical guidelines on organizational listening apply to internal stakeholders.

I try refrain from using the term ‘audiences’ because it denotes passive receivers of information or entertainment. Stakeholders and publics have a right to speak as well as listen, and they often have valuable insights and feedback to offer.

From what we are talking about, it is clear that all organizations have almost a moral obligation to listen to their stakeholders but do third sector (NGO) and public sector organizations have more obligation to listen to their audiences?

All organizations have an obligation to listen to what we commonly refer to as stakeholders. Public companies have a legal obligation to listen to their shareholders and business partners with which they have contracts. Governments in democracies have a fundamental obligation to listen to the voice of the people. If they don’t, they lose their legitimacy.

It is true, however, that third sector organizations – NGOs and non-profit organizations – have a particular moral responsibility based on their constitution or charter. They are typically created with a higher social purpose than commercial organizations.

Do you think that listening is something present in today’s governments? Do you have any positive examples of listening in this area?

I think around the world most political scientists agree that democracy is not performing all that well. We’ve seen this in the UK after Brexit. The incoming Prime Minister at the time, Theresa May, admitted that the government had not been listening to the people. To have a Prime Minister admit that the government is not listening to people is very concerning.

If you listen to political scientists, they are warning that democracy is at a low ebb at the moment. If we look at trust figures in Pew research data or the Edelman Trust Barometer data, trust in government is less than 50 per cent in many countries. In other words, more people distrust the government than trust the government. That’s not a healthy situation for a stable democratic society and my argument is that governments do need to do a lot better. When I've studied examples such as public consultation in which the government says it wants to consult and it collects a whole lot of submissions, when I go in behind the scenes to find out what happened to those submissions, I often find out that they’ve not even been read. That is a government going through the motions and pretending to listen and not listening. I think the evidence for a need to improve listening is in the trust figures that we have at the moment, particularly the levels of engagement and trust among young people who are particularly dissatisfied with the leadership of many of our governments.

We’ve talked a lot about listening. Listening is the condition for establishing a dialogue. Do you think that it is possible for an organization to dialogue with its stakeholders? Is it relevant? Why? What are the conditions to achieve this dialogue?

I don’t think the word ‘dialogue’ is a verb. As a noun, it is derived from the Greek terms dia (διά), which means ‘through’ – not ‘two’ as many believe – and logos (λόγος), which means ‘speech’ or ‘words’. Literally, and in practice, dialogue can be no more than two parties speaking. So, the first thing we need to recognize about dialogue is that listening is not automatic. As Martin Buber eloquently said, in society we have monologue and ‘monologue disguised as dialogue’ (Buber 2002, 22), as well as true dialogue.

Most contemporary writers advocating dialogue conceptualize it as including listening as well as speaking – although in my writing I point out that this is too often implicit or an assumption – and I argue that listening needs to be made explicit.

It is important that organizations engage in dialogue, particularly with their key stakeholders such as their employees, customers, members, and so on. Listening is essential to be a learning organization. An organization that does not learn, does not evolve and adapt to change, and in a world of constant change, the organization that does not evolve and adapt is likely to go out of existence.

While listening is sometimes legitimately confined to experts, such as in highly technical and complex matters, organizational listening must recognize that the lived experience and local knowledge of a range of stakeholders can be very valuable.

What role does the communication carried out by an organization play in its culture? And vice versa, is there any relationship between culture and the communication that exists in an organization? What could be the role of listening (as belonging to communication activity) within the configuration of an organization’s culture?

James Carey, an eminent sociologist and recognized founder of American cultural studies, titled his landmark book Communication as Culture (Carey (1989) 2009, 12). This reflected his argument that culture is both created and maintained through communication. While humans exist as beings and organizations exist as legal entities, to a large extent we ‘talk ourselves into existence’ as individuals and as organizations.

Throughout this conversation, we have focused particularly on listening to stakeholders but to what extent is listening to the context (cultural, environmental, etc.) important for an organization to be successful in the way it communicates?

Listening to the voices of people often involves listening to other organizations, particularly representative organizations. Such organizations represent people and reflect the views of large groups of people, and when you look at representative organizations we see enormous concerns about the environment, about climate change, we see movements like the #MeToo movement, and concerns about women’s rights. Here we are in 2023 and we still have many countries where women do not have rights, women are subjected to violence. Those are all voices of people, those are voices of the community, and so when we talk about organizational listening, all types of organizations need to be listening. The voices of people range from individual customer complaints all the way up to social movements in which people are rising up and saying they would like to improve either our planet or our society, and successful democracy and social stability depends on our institutions and our organizations listening to those voices and doing something about it to improve society.

Have you considered how to listen to that context in order to be relevant to where the organization operates? Because sometimes an organization can be very focused on its goals and maybe it’s not concerned about what is happening in the society. Do you think relevance has something to do with listening to the context?

Well relevance is a key factor and listening is the key that makes an organization relevant. If an organization is only pursuing its own goals and its own objectives – which many organizations do – they may be relevant to their stakeholders, but they may not be, because they’re only following their own goals. Listening is the key, listening to key stakeholders, listening to people, listening to communities, listening to their employees. Organizations become relevant when they understand what is happening in society, they understand social movements, they understand public expectations, and they can therefore adapt. Organizations that are not listening in very simple terms soon find themselves out of touch and can become irrelevant. An organization that is listening will by nature be relevant because it will be taking on board the feedback, the views, the concerns, the interests of the people that it engages with and that it represents.

Listening in the Church

As an expert in organizational listening, what advice would you give to the Catholic Church as a worldwide institution?

Churches and their various practices involve a lot of speaking through published doctrines and sermons. However, at every level from local churches, parishes, dioceses, all the way up to the Vatican, the Catholic Church should be open to listening to its clergy and members of the Church, as well as informing them and persuading them to follow the teachings and doctrines of the Church. Listening, as well as speaking, keeps a Church in touch with its constituents and in touch with local cultures and the events that impact humanity, which is necessary to maintain relevance to people’s lives. Listening also creates an organization that is aware of and sensitive to the concerns and interests of its stakeholders and creates a membership that feels valued and respected. In many ways, listening can be seen to apply Christian values.

The Catholic Church is experiencing a synod on synodality in which a listening process has been launched through the dioceses whose results have reached Rome and here they will be studied and unified before the face-to-face synod takes place in Rome in October 2023. What do you think of this effort to listen? What does the attitude of synodality that pope francis is trying to propose in the Church evoke for you?

Initiatives such as Synod 2023 in which members from local churches and dioceses around the world are invited to contribute, culminating in the Assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2023, is an example of a major listening exercise by an organization or an institution.

Inviting people to contribute is the first step in listening, as it reflects recognition in my ‘seven canons of listening’. Collecting their views openly and inclusively is the second step, reflecting an avoidance of the politics of listening and acknowledgement.

But the real ‘work of listening’ comes in analysing the input received to interpret and gain understanding of what people are saying, giving it consideration; and responding in an appropriate way.

Analysing input can be a major task when listening is large scale and when people have diverse views. In listening to people, we are not talking about numbers that can be quickly analysed using statistical tools. People speak in words, so organizational listening typically involves systematic textual analysis of potentially large volumes of text or audio files.

The Synod is a major commitment to listening and, as such, it is a noteworthy initiative. Its effectiveness will be determined by what it results in both for the Church and its members.

The importance of trust in the post-communication era

In a recent book, you start from the statement that we live in the post-communication era; what do you mean by this term and why do you consider that we have reached this situation?

I refer to post-communication as a breakdown in genuine communication in a 2020 book of that title, but the term post-communication was actually used by a writer almost 50 years ago, and it’s not used in the sense of ‘post’ simply meaning after – it’s referring to a collapse of communication which we touched on at the beginning of this discussion where we talked about communication being misinterpreted as just talking or just telling people what to do. We can go all the way back to the Latin root of the term communication, and it talks about sharing, it talks about exchange, it talks about relationships and community. If we are truly using communication then we are exchanging, we are sharing, we are working together, and when I talk about post-communication, I'm referring to the top-down one-way information transmission that many organizations use to promote themselves to tell people what they should do. We see this in many governments, we see it in many corporations, and, to me, that’s a collapse of communication, that is not actually communication because we’ve stripped away all of the engagement, all of the sharing, all of the exchange of views. We’re just having individual views of certain organizations being promoted in society. So, if we want an inclusive society and a society where various voices are represented, we need to come back to the true meaning of communication. I was critiquing the collapse of the real meaning of communication which is fundamental for a society to operate where we’re turning it into informing and persuading and leaving out the two-way nature of communication.

How can trust be measured?

Some companies ask their stakeholders about trust and seek high levels of trust. I have written recently that there is a controversy about trust. If people have absolute trust in you, that’s problematic. Total trust is bad, especially in democracies, because with total trust, people disengage. They ‘switch off’. There is no critical thinking. On the other hand, total distrust is very dangerous. That also leads to disengagement. The best situation is in the middle, healthy skepticism, where you have confidence, but you have critical opinions.

In that book you talk about the widespread lack of trust, calling it ‘the collapse of public trust’ – can communication help in any way to restore trust?

I think there’s no easy answer to the problem of trust in modern societies and it’s probably not fair to say that lack of listening has contributed totally to the collapse of trust. We have got more educated communities than we’ve had in the past, we have people who are much more educated, much more critical of their institutions, people no longer blindly follow leaders or churches or organizations but – in the middle of all that – we also have, as I've proven and shown in research, a lack of listening.

My research shows – and I've studied more than 60 organizations globally – that looking at all the communication activities they do, between 80 and 90 percent of their resources and their activity in communication is about distributing their messages. Listening is receiving less than 10 per cent of the time and resources committed to so-called communication in many organizations. We know that if people are not listened to – either individual humans or groups of people – after a while they will cease to engage and they will not trust. Listening is not the only answer to the lack of trust, but it is a very key component because you cannot have trust if someone is not listening to you. That doesn’t mean to say they’re always agreeing with you. We sometimes are happy to agree to disagree, but the respect comes from at least people listening to us and that’s the issue we have to rediscover in contemporary societies: understanding that listening doesn’t always mean caving in or giving in or agreeing, but it’s a respect to at least give people consideration and hear them out and take on board what they say, and when that happens people do trust and people do engage because they know they are receiving that consideration. If they’re not receiving that consideration, they disengage and they distrust and then we have breakdowns in society.

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Notes on contributors

Gema Bellido

Gema Bellido holds a Ph.D. in Audiovisual Communication from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She worked in various media in Spain and also as a lecturer at Villanueva University. Currently, she works as an assistant professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Rome) and as a consultant for international communication projects. During the year 2022, she spent three months in Taiwan on a research grant awarded by the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her main research interests are the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction in audiovisual products and the relationship between communication and trust.

Mónica Herrero

Mónica Herrero is an Associate Professor of Media Management and Media Markets at the School of Communication (University of Navarra, Spain). She holds a MSc in Media Management (2000) from the University of Stirling (Scotland) and a General Management Program (PDG) from IESE Business School (2015). She also holds the honorific title of European PhD. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford (2017/2018); the University of Glasgow (2005, 2007) and the University of Lugano (Lugano, 2010). She has been the Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Navarra from June 2008 to June 2017. Her research focuses on television economics, business models in the communication industry and communication as a managerial and strategic dimension, also for media companies.