In a recent workshop, a team had gathered to spend a few hours talking about change. I was there to help them explore the range of structural shifts happening in their organisation. These kinds of changes have become so common in many companies that they almost feel routine, yet they still affect people in very real ways. When we started, people were still finishing bits of work, closing laptops, and easing themselves out of the pace of their day. Nothing unusual. It was that in-between moment where people are still half in their workday and only slowly beginning to arrive in the room.
When I opened with a few questions about what change meant to them, the first answers were broad: they talked about resilience, the opportunities that come with change, mindsets. Perfectly reasonable responses, but familiar ones. The kinds of things any of us might say when we have not yet settled in enough to think more carefully.
As I often do in coaching and communication workshops, I stayed with the questions a little longer. Not to challenge them, but to give the group time to hear themselves. And then something happened that always catches my attention… silence. Not the awkward kind. More the pause that appears when people realise they don’t have a neat answer ready. In business settings, especially in international teams, that kind of pause can feel unusual. Most professionals are used to responding quickly. But here, the team had to stop. And that pause turned out to be useful.
That pause made me curious about what kind of listening was happening. It wasn’t just quiet. Something in their attention had shifted. To make sense of moments like this, I often come back to Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. His work explores how groups move from reacting out of habit to paying attention to what is unfolding right now. One part of his model looks at the different qualities of listening we bring into conversations, especially when we are dealing with uncertainty. He describes four levels of listening.
Level 1: Downloading.
Reconfirming what we already know. This is the kind of listening that keeps us anchored in our own assumptions. We nod along, agree automatically, and wait for our turn to speak, hearing only what fits with what we already believe.
Level 2: Factual listening.
Catching something new, a detail or piece of information that we genuinely did not expect. It is the moment when something small interrupts our usual way of seeing things and makes us pause long enough to consider a different angle.
Level 3: Empathic listening.
Stepping into another person’s world long enough to see an issue from their perspective. Most of us know this kind of listening already; it is the everyday effort to understand what something feels like for someone else, even if their experience is different from our own.
These three are common. The fourth asks something different of us.
Level 4: Generative listening.
Allowing something genuinely new to appear between people, a shared thought or insight nobody walked in with.
You can see this in different areas of life. I often notice it in coaching conversations, when a client follows a thought they did not plan to express and a new realisation begins to take shape. In the arts, something similar happens when a conductor steps back from directing every detail and lets the music find its own coherence. Or in theatre, when an actor makes a small, unexpected shift in tone or gesture and the others respond, deepening the scene in a way no one scripted.
Looking back, that moment of silence in the workshop felt like the beginning of this deeper kind of attention. Not generative listening itself, but the uncertain stretch that comes before it, when familiar answers fall away and nothing new has arrived yet. The team was not there. They were sitting between what they knew and what they had not yet discovered. But that space mattered. It opened a small doorway for something more honest to surface.
When the team did start speaking again, what emerged sounded different. It did not come from past experience or from what had worked before. It belonged to that moment and to the people in the room. A starting point, not a conclusion.
This kind of shift reflects what Scharmer calls letting go to let come. It is the point where we set aside our usual habits, the quick responses, the tidy explanations, the pull toward certainty, and create just enough room for a different kind of awareness.
In the workshop, it showed up quietly. People slowed down. They left more space for each other. The conversation moved at a gentler pace without anyone trying to steer it. By loosening their grip on the familiar, the group allowed something more meaningful to develop.
As the group continued, a different question began to guide the conversation. Instead of “How do we handle change,” it became “What deserves our attention right now.” That shift brought clarity. They could name what mattered, set aside what did not, and focus on the pieces they could actually influence together.
Change still felt big, but it was no longer vague. It became something the team could approach with intention and with enough space for new understanding to take shape.
