Mike D’Antoni’s seven seconds or less philosophy changed basketball forever. In data governance meetings, we seem to have adopted a similar principle — except we apply it to listening.
We lead our conversation with talking. We present the slides, discuss the framework, walk through requirements. But somewhere in all of that, the stakeholder’s voice gets crowded out. Not because anyone intended it. But because active listening was never built into the conversation.
Malcolm Forbes once said that the art of conversation lies in listening. It is a simple observation but one that most of us struggle to put into practice.
Plato explored this more deeply in The Republic through the dialogues between Socrates and his companions. What strikes most people about Socrates is his questioning. But look closer and you will find something more important. He was first and foremost a listener. He listened with intent, with patience, and with the specific purpose of understanding before he responded.
Plato identified four dimensions of listening: the aim of listening, the nature of listening, the role of the listener, and the relationship between listener and speaker. When all four are present in a conversation, something shifts. The person speaking stops feeling interrogated and starts feeling understood.
That is when real collaboration begins.
There is something that gets in the way of listening in almost every conversation. I call it the FM Radio. It is the internal mental chatter that runs constantly in the background, judging, analyzing, preparing the next response, defending existing beliefs before the speaker has even finished their thought.
Active listening means turning off the FM Radio. The Zen tradition calls this making a temporary truce with your mental chatter. Plato would call it creating the conditions for meaning to be understood before a response is formed.
It is a discipline to lead conversations, especially when it is about data governance.
A Harvard Business School study found that leaders consistently think they are listening while their teams feel completely unheard. Research published in Leader to Leader in 2024 goes further, noting that listening at work is flawed because people do not feel safe telling the truth, and listening is usually one sided, so it rarely produces the outcomes organizations are looking for.
And yet the opportunity is clear. Organizations that align listening strategies with business priorities are 76% more likely to connect feedback to business outcomes.
In data governance, that number should stop every practitioner in their tracks. Listening more is not a soft skill. It is a direct path to programs that work.
Most meetings produce minutes. I believe every data governance meeting should produce minutes of listening.
Not a record of who said what. But a simple capture of what was truly heard. The pain points people shared. The questions they were hesitant to ask. The expectations they carried into the room but never put on the table.
A listening plan belongs alongside every agenda. Without it, most meetings produce nothing more than the next meeting.
The ethics of a meeting lies in listening. When people give their time to a conversation, they deserve to be heard.
I worked on a large scale data centric program in New York responsible for delivering high quality data for regulatory reporting. Given the complexity of master, reference and market data, regulatory leaders were caught in a frenzy of manual adjustments. Because I listened to that pain rather than arriving with a predetermined solution, I was able to present them a simple data monitoring solution that gave them confidence in the quality of their consumed data.
At a large insurance company, our team attended Data Architecture meetings purely as listeners. What emerged from those sessions became the source for the business glossary. Data governance became a built in component of data architecture. Listening made that possible.
At 1lessclick, I bring a listening plan to every engagement alongside the agenda. The best data governance programs I have seen were built on what was heard, not what was assumed.
Plato wrote that listening is a gift one gives to the other party. In data governance, it is also the most practical thing a practitioner can do.
When did you last listen more than you presented in a data governance meeting?
