Oftentimes, concentration (distractions or lack thereof) is a key environmental factor that influences meaningful listening. With research demonstrating that the average professional only hears half of a short task they are told (and this percent goes down with age), this classic Harvard Business Review article from 1957 highlights ways formal educators can develop methods to teach students to actively listen. Beyond the fact that listening is a timelessly useful skill, focus is a big barrier to learning for students and Plot Twisters should be mindful of this in everything we build.
There are many avenues through which management can send messages downward through a business organization, but there are few avenues for movement of information in the upward direction. Perhaps the most obvious of the upward avenues is the human chain of people talking to people: the man working at the bench talks to his foreman, the foreman to his superintendent, the superintendent to his boss; and, relayed from person to person, the information eventually reaches the top. This communication chain has potential, but it seldom works well because it is full of bad listeners. There can be failure for at least three reasons:
Without good listeners, people do not talk freely and the flow of communication is seldom set in motion.
If the flow should start, only one bad listener is needed to stop its movement toward the top.
Even if the flow should continue to the top, the messages are likely to be badly distorted along the way.
A version of this was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1957.