Active Listening
The Basic Idea
Have you ever zoned out while someone is talking? Found yourself communicating without really being aware of what the other person is saying? While it’s easy to find ourselves in these moments of distraction, an attentive approach to a speaker’s verbal and non-verbal forms of communication can make interactions more meaningful and effective.
Active listening is a communication technique that involves giving free and undivided attention to the speaker. Although on the surface this seems like a straightforward skill, it scarcely occurs during everyday discussions, as people tend to focus more on their opportunity to speak. Active listening, on the other hand, is a challenging task requiring intense concentration on what a speaker is conveying, or attempting to convey.
1
When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
- Ernest Hemingway
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
