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Agile methods stress the value of communication, especially communication in the form of direct human-to-human conversation. They rely on such conversations for all manner of concrete output: User Stories or requirements, automated acceptance tests, and the code itself. Open "war-room" work areas are intended to ensure that these conversations can take place easily and informally whenever needed.

Extreme Programming stresses subjective team characteristics like mutual trust, respect, courage, and team cohesion. These are measures of the health of our relationships and community -- the extent to which we are truly achieving the Whole Team practice. Certainly direct conversation plays a vital role in building and maintaining Whole Team.

So as agile programmers, customers, managers and other stakeholders we need to be talking with each other in person, day after day. Fair enough.

Conversations can go well or poorly, and agile methods don't give us a lot of guidance about the mechanics of conversation itself. How does conversation operate in our relationships and community? What are the differences between a good conversation and a poor one? What should our main goals be in conversation? What are useful patterns and antipatterns? We ought to at least have rudimentary answers to these questions.

So where to start? My contention is that there is a single lens through which we can most quickly see and learn about healthy conversation: Empathetic Listening.

Communication is about conveying objective and subjective meaning, some of it plain and pedestrian, some of it subtle and profound. Interpersonal communication experts (like Haim Ginott, Jack Gibb, and Thomas Gordon) corroborate common sense when they contend that much of the meaning we convey to one another is non-verbal. Non-verbal meaning travels via body language, tone of voice, and other elements of so-called "paralanguage." It travels by subtle evocation and implication. If we are not sensitive to these other components of conversation, then as listeners we miss the rest of the meaning. Worse, we may accidentally convey meaning that we do not intend! The more deeply we listen, the more of these components we learn to pick up and decipher. In this way, the depth of the listening constrains the "bandwidth" of the conversation.

But here is an interesting and odd thing: when we fail to listen deeply enough, it is often not us as listener, but the speaker who loses the most value. It turns out that listening often conveys more value to the speaker than the speaker conveys to the listener.

In software development, many or most of our conversations are about solving problems collectively. Conversations and meetings have agendas. To help solve the problems at hand, speakers convey concrete meaning, and therefore value, to their listeners.

But this presumes we are willing to collaborate in good faith in the first place. It presumes we are comfortable enough and care enough to do it. It presumes a level of health and maturity on the part of the team as a community and its component relationships, as reflected in ambient and specific levels of trust, respect, and approval. Why in the world would we strive to do our best for people who we do not like, trust, or respect, and who do not like, trust, or respect us? Below certain personal and collective thresholds of these qualities, we see our conversations, relationships and communities fall apart. The concrete meaning that is supposedly the point of our conversations is then easily missed or lost.

This is where listening is important both as gauge and as strategy. You can get an intuitive sense of the health of community by listening deeply and empathetically. And you can help improve that health with that same mechanism. Our need to "be heard" is primary and hard-wired. Being listened to deeply and empathetically can convey approval, trust, and respect to us convincingly. If someone says to you "I respect and value your ideas," but then interrupts you distractedly as you attempt to express those ideas, which of those communications will you trust more? How much listening are you likely to reciprocate to such a speaker? Will your levels of trust, respect, and approval for that speaker go up or down?

When we say we are "paying attention," the idiom is apt; the attention of listening conveys fundamental social value. Often the listener is providing more value to the speaker than the speaker does to the listener.

OK. So we need to be having conversations with each other, and we need to be listening to each other in those conversations as empathetically as we can. So what, in fact, is empathetic listening?

The deepest possible listening is like the rapt attention a child gives to an enchanting storyteller. In fact, by watching children listen to a good storyteller, we get a glimpse of healthy listening in its natural state.

Empathetic listening involves listening with the entire body, "attending" the speaker with the following mechanisms:

· Appropriate distance from the speaker: neither in their personal space, nor in outer space. The fewer people involved in the conversation, the more important these distances and boundaries are.

· Eye contact; observing without staring, whether or not that eye contact is returned. Enormous amounts of meaning and value can be exchanged between our eyes. If you are not yet conscious of your ability to sustain eye contact with others in conversation, try paying focused attention to it for a day. How easy or difficult is it for you? How does it vary from person to person, or in different contexts?

· Appropriate interjections and responses. For more detail, see the section on "Reflecting the Speaker" in Part 3.

· An "involved posture" and appropriate body movement. Overall, posture and body movement should convey that you care, that you are relaxed, and that you are alert. Gentle, occasional nodding and smiling convey care and attention to the speaker, whereas no movement at all can convey disapproval or distraction, and too much movement can also convey distraction.

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