Listening to others
Overview
Listening to other people - coleagues, complainants, professionals, nonprofessionals, ... - is a fundamental to effective professional practice.
This is particularly so in natural resource and environmental management issues like urban water management, because many disciplinary perspectives and many stakeholder perspectives need to be taken into account to manage them effectively. A wide variety of expertises (including those of nonprofessional resource users) and interests must be taken into account.
Developing your skills
Interpersonal listening skills
Habits to Differentiate Good From Poor Listening
Other resources
Strategic Questioning : An Experiment in Communication
"We all know of many people who are perfectly content to tell you what you should do. They are people who love to dispense "solutions". And we all know of experts who go from one country to another or from one community within a country to another, telling people what to do. I call it the "consultancy disease". Change that happens as a result of the "this is what I think you should do" school of consultancy are often too shallow and too fast to have long lasting effects. It is not empowering for the people who are trapped within the issues at stake. The people involved might look as if they have changed but, because the change strategy has not come from them, they don't own it, they have not invested themselves in the change."
see also Listening to ourselves
Engaging Stakeholders
Principled Negotation
