Being a Good Listener

​About twenty years ago I wrote some guidance for community people who were conducting life narrative interviews. Looking back, I realise that much of it still holds true, but I would say some things slightly differently today. Below I revisit and revise my advice. Please share your advice about being a good listener in the comments. Kindest, Fiona Cram, Co-Chair, EvalIndigenous

Titiro ki ō taringa; whakarongo ki ō whatu — Look with your ears; listen with your eyes

This whakataukī (Maori proverb) reminds us that listening involves more than hearing words. It asks us to pay attention to what is being said, how it is being said, and to the silences, emotions, and relationships that surround the story.

One of the most important skills an evaluator can have is the ability to listen.
This might sound simple. But listening—real listening—is not always easy. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to set aside our own assumptions about what matters, what success looks like, and what questions should be asked. As Alice Kawakami and colleagues (2007, p. 332) write, "insights...can be found through humble and quiet observation and listening."
For many Indigenous evaluators and communities, listening is not just a professional skill. It is a relational practice.
Across Indigenous contexts, evaluation is grounded in relationships—relationships with people, with communities, with ancestors, with the Land, and with future generations. Evaluation therefore begins not with methods or indicators, but with listening to the people whose lives and knowledge shape the work. After protocols have been observed, and a project has been explained and people invited to participate, I often just ask people where they would like to start their story.

Too often, evaluation processes start somewhere else. A programme is funded, indicators are defined, reporting templates are created, and only then do evaluators engage with communities. By that stage, many of the most important decisions have already been made.
Indigenous evaluation challenges this order of things.
​Instead of beginning with tools and frameworks, Indigenous evaluation begins with relationships and listening. It asks evaluators to slow down and to take time to understand community priorities, histories, and aspirations. Listening becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
Listening also helps to build trust. Many Indigenous communities carry long memories of research and evaluation being done to them rather than with them. Reports were written, data was extracted, and findings rarely returned to the community in meaningful ways. In some cases, evaluation processes reinforced outsiders' deficit narratives rather than recognising community strengths and resilience.
​Listening helps shift this dynamic.

When evaluators listen carefully—to community leaders, to elders, to youth, to frontline workers, and to those whose voices are often least heard—we begin to see programmes and outcomes through different lenses. We hear stories that statistics alone cannot capture. We learn about relationships, cultural responsibilities, and community priorities that may never appear in a standard evaluation framework.

Listening also reminds us that communities are not passive participants in evaluation. They are knowledge holders and decision-makers.
Indigenous evaluation approaches increasingly recognise this by supporting communities to shape evaluation questions, define indicators of success, interpret findings, and decide how knowledge will be used. In these contexts, evaluators are not simply technical experts—they are partners in a process of collective learning.

Being a good listener also means recognising that not everything can be rushed.
​Relationships take time to build. Trust develops through repeated engagement and through showing up in ways that demonstrate respect and accountability. Listening requires evaluators to be present, to be attentive, and sometimes to sit with uncertainty rather than immediately seeking answers.

Let silence do its work. 
Silence can feel uncomfortable, and a pause of only a few seconds can seem much longer when you're worried about keeping a conversation going. But silence often means someone is thinking, remembering or deciding how to tell their story. Interrupting can disrupt this process of reflection. Often the best response is to simply wait rather than fill the silence.

​Sometimes people appear to go “off topic'. It can be hard to know whether to intervene.
Occasionally what seems like a tangent will eventually circle back to something deeply relevant. At other times, the conversation may drift further and further away from the topic.
Part of interviewing is learning to sense the difference, and when you may need to offer a gentle prompt or reflection about what's been shared to reconnect the conversation back to the topic.

Listening to difficult stories
Sometimes people will tell stories that are upsetting or hard to hear. Even if your inquiry is not about a potentially 'sensitive' topic, sometimes the time is right for someone to share about a heavy experience or memory.
I received advice from an elder that has stayed with me. They said that when people share difficult experiences, they need the opportunity to retell their story, not relive it.
That distinction matters. When someone is retelling a hard experience, my role is not to step into the story with them or to try to connect through my own emotions. Often the most honest response I can offer is simply to acknowledge the weight of what they have shared, perhaps saying, "I can't imagine what that was like for you."
​Stories like these can also stay with us. For that reason, it's important that we have opportunities to talk and debrief when needed, with an Elder and/or with a trusted colleague. Listening well requires openness and care for others—but it also requires care for ourselves.

For those of us working in Indigenous evaluation, listening is therefore both a responsibility and a discipline. It asks us to remain open to learning from communities. It challenges us to reflect on our own assumptions and to recognise the limits of our own knowledge. And it reminds us that evaluation is not only about measuring outcomes—it is about strengthening relationships and supporting community wellbeing. As the Indigenous peoples of Australia remind us about their cultural practice of storytelling (Productivity Commission, 2020, p. 27),

Mapuche women conversing

"Yarning positions the evaluator as a listener and learner in the data collection process and respects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the authority of their knowledges. It involves reciprocal relationships and is a two‑way process of learning and knowledge exchange."

At EvalIndigenous, we see listening as central to the Indigenisation of evaluation.
As Indigenous evaluators and allies continue to develop culturally grounded evaluation practices, listening will remain one of the most powerful tools we have. It is through listening that we learn what matters to communities, how change is happening, and how evaluation can better support Indigenous aspirations.

​If you have the privilege to learn from Indigenous knowledge keepers about traditional listening practices, what you really hear may help you sharpen your own listening skills.
In the end, good evaluation begins the same way good relationships do.
By listening first.

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Bibliography
​Kawakami, A. J., Aton, K., Cram, F., Lai, M. K., & Porima, L. (2007). Improving the practice of evaluation through Indigenous values and methods: Decolonizing evaluation practice—Returning the gaze from Hawai‘i and Aotearoa. Hülili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, 4(1), 319-248. Find it here.
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Productivity Commission. (2020). A guide to evaluation under the Indigenous Evaluation Strategy. Australian Government Productivity Commission. Find it here