method essay / Listening tours
listen before you call it a problem.
People in different parts of an organization can be living inside very different versions of the same story. Listening across those positions helps us find a better place to begin.
a way into the work
make the pattern discussable.
A listening tour brings several accounts into view before a team commits to a fix. It can sharpen the question, reshape a study, or help people name something they have been working around.
start with the people who live with it.
A listening tour is a series of open-ended conversations across a system: practitioners, leaders, adjacent roles, people who have left, and the people affected by the work.
The discipline is in who gets heard and how their accounts are held together. I look for where stories meet, where they differ, and what each person’s position lets them see.
when care lands as exclusion.
An information design studio was experiencing friction that leadership had attributed to process, workload, or team chemistry. I held 45-minute conversations with each team member and three past clients.
A different pattern came into view. Senior designers were protecting junior colleagues from difficult client conversations. Senior staff understood this as mentorship; junior designers experienced it as a lack of trust and access.
Naming that gap changed the intervention being considered. The tour helped make an underlying belief discussable. The immediate value was a more useful question and a pattern the team could begin to discuss together.
listen before designing the research.
Before planning research into an airline’s accessibility services, I spoke with disability justice advocates about the broader context: what previous studies had missed, where the system had broken down, and what communities had already been asking for.
Those conversations informed the research design. They shaped recruitment, the questions worth asking, and what the study needed to learn. They were explicitly framed as scoping conversations rather than formal research findings.
keep the differences in the picture.
The first neat theme can arrive too early. These are the practices I use to stay curious long enough for the useful questions to emerge.
Listen across positions
Ask whose part of the system is missing from the account so far.
Delay the tidy summary
Hold several accounts together before deciding what they mean.
Get curious about disagreement
A difference between stories can reveal how a practice affects people differently.
Bring the pattern back
Use the synthesis to open a conversation and shape the next step.
understanding gives the next step direction.
A tour can support a more precise question or a better-designed intervention. It does not establish that one solution will work.
In the wider ZDL practice, listening helps locate something people can work with together. The next move might be a facilitated conversation, a team experiment, or further research. It depends on what we learn.
from my practice
the objection might contain information you need.
Treat it as an invitation to investigate. People often know something about the system from where they stand.
a place to begin
what keeps getting explained away?
Bring a recurring tension or a question you can’t quite name. We can start by listening.
let’s talk ↗