Listening is Not the ‘Soft’ Option

Last week, Kate Labeille (Root Capital) and I published an article in Stanford Social Innovation Review titled Listening Is Not the ‘Soft’ Option.

Listening is at the heart of what we do at 60 Decibels.  But Kate and I aren’t arguing that listening should replace rigorous program evaluation. Rather, we believe the best implementers and funders understand that these two approaches are deeply complementary.

One of the ways I like to explain this is to distinguish between proving and improving impact.

So much of measurement sets out to answer the question “does this intervention work?” This is an essential question to answer. But this alone—proof—is not the beginning, middle and end of the story.

Instead, we need efforts that both improve and prove impact to coexist. Neither is inherently better, and neither needs to come at the expense of the other.

Rather, we argue, we can create the greatest impact if we have an orientation towards improvement, and that orientation must be grounded in listening.

This orientation puts the customer or beneficiary at the center, prioritizes action and responsiveness, and feeds into a cycle of continuous improvement.

Because this sort of listening is, by design, done repeatedly—listen, interpret, act, then listen again—it lends itself to research approaches that can be lighter-touch, faster, and easier to apply across a broad swath of interventions.

While this might seem intuitive, over the last few years a quiet hierarchy has formed in our sector, one in which “value” and “rigor” are positively correlated.

In this view of the world, RCTs and quasi-experimental designs (the most rigorous) are at the top of the hierarchy, and customer listening is near the bottom. On a good day listening gets called “soft;” on a bad day it gets called impact washing.

Kate and I think that ranking mixes up sophistication with seriousness: a sophisticated study that nobody acts on isn’t serious, and a simple, well-executed one that changes a decision is.

(An important caveat: listening can be misused when findings about customer experience, the strength of impact claims or relative performance are presented as “proof” of impact.)

Root Capital’s digital advisory service improved coffee farmers’ knowledge and practices in Rwanda. When Root expanded it to macadamia farmers in Kenya, surveys found respondents valued it and would recommend it. But an RCT and a separate analysis found no significant improvement in what they learned. Root discontinued the program in Kenya.

That’s proving and improving in practice: listening, evaluating, and acting on the results. I also admire Root for sharing the findings publicly.

Thanks to Kate for being such a thoughtful co-author, and to Willy Foote and the Root team for their partnership and leadership.

If you’ve had satisfaction and outcomes data point in opposite directions, I’d love to hear what you did next.