In a technical meeting, I can often see the answer arriving on someone’s face before the speaker has finished the question. I know the feeling because I do it too. Experience helps us recognise patterns quickly, but it can also make us respond to the pattern we expected rather than the sentence that was actually spoken.

Experience is useful and dangerous

When I work with billing, finance and technology teams, people usually bring deep knowledge and strong opinions. That is valuable. The difficulty begins when familiar words trigger a familiar answer. We hear invoice, migration, collection or dependency and mentally complete the rest.

The speaker may be naming a different risk, asking for a decision or trying to explain why the usual answer will not work this time. If I enter too early with my solution, I may sound decisive while missing the offer that could change the decision.

This is why I like exercises that make listening visible. Nobody needs to declare that they are a good or bad listener. The structure simply shows how hard it is to receive a complete thought before building the next one.

Listening improves when my next sentence proves that the previous one reached me.

What the sources ask us to practise

The Repetition exercise appears in Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton. One person says a sentence. The partner repeats that sentence before adding a response. The exercise is presented in the book’s listening material and again in its appendix on print page 197.

Practiced Spontaneity: Resources, Theory and Supplemental Information by Izzy Gesell adds a useful physical dimension. Gesell describes listening through presence, silence, comfort, connection and acknowledgement. I find that combination important because repeating words mechanically is not enough. The aim is to receive the person, not to pass a memory test.

I therefore use the exercise in two rounds. The first makes the listening rule explicit. The second removes the rule and asks participants to preserve the attention it created.

A workplace example

Imagine that a finance colleague says, ‘The refund is technically correct, but it is appearing in the wrong reporting period.’ A quick listener may hear technically correct and move on. Another may hear refund and begin discussing customer communication. Repetition makes the whole sentence stay in the room long enough for the reporting issue to become the shared point of focus.

The useful response might then be, ‘The refund is technically correct, but it is appearing in the wrong reporting period. So the immediate issue is not calculation. It is the accounting timing and where we correct it.’

This does not mean repeating colleagues in every real meeting. It means training the mind to receive the end of the sentence before selecting the part it already knows how to answer.

How I would facilitate it

I begin with a topic that matters but does not carry a personal conflict. A recurring handover problem, an inefficient meeting or a small process frustration works well. Participants need enough reality to listen seriously and enough distance to experiment.

I ask the listener to keep natural eye contact and a relaxed posture. Exact repetition matters in the first round because paraphrasing can hide interpretation. If someone cannot remember the sentence, the speaker simply says it again. There is no penalty and no apology.

After three minutes I remove the repetition rule. Pairs continue the same conversation while trying to keep the slower attention. This second round is where the practice begins to feel usable at work.

What I listen for in the debrief

The debrief is not about who remembered the most words. I ask where attention moved and what changed in the quality of the response.

  • At what point did you begin preparing your answer?
  • Which word or detail would you normally have missed?
  • Did repetition make you more curious or merely more careful?
  • What would a lighter version of this behaviour look like in your next meeting?

Sources used

  • Yes, And by Kelly Leonard and Tom Yorton. Repetition exercise and the chapter Listening Is a Muscle, with the exercise indexed at print page 197.
  • Practiced Spontaneity: Resources, Theory and Supplemental Information by Izzy Gesell. The sections on full body listening, presence, silence, connection and acknowledgement.
About the author

Max Grillo is an applied improvisation facilitator. He manages and hosts Rice Cookie Improv, is cofounder of Monday Flow Improv and is a member of the Applied Improvisation Network. He combines workshop practice with more than 25 years of experience in technology and transformation.

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