Part of a Series on the Philosophy of Radical Change
“Since the being of the situation is its inconsistency, a truth of this being will present itself as indifferent [quelconque] multiplicity, anonymous part, consistency reduced to presentation as such, without predicate.” Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy.
In leadership today, “listening” is praised as a strategic virtue. We hear about empathetic listening, deep listening, active listening, generative listening, customer-centric listening, anthropological listening. But what if listening, at least in its dominant forms, is not the solution, but the trap?
In modern organisations, listening is often just a stylised form of capture. You “listen” to attune, you “listen” to align, you “listen” to tailor. But this kind of listening is not discovery, it’s choreography. It pulls people into pre-written scripts and encodes their responses through existing identity frameworks, behavioural expectations, or brand roles. It’s not liberation. It’s absorption.
What if the goal of leadership wasn’t to listen better, but to stop listening altogether, at least in the ways we’ve been taught to?
The Trap of Listening-as-Style
In standard leadership development literature, listening is a tool for influence, rapport-building, and conflict resolution. But rarely is it treated as a mechanism of control.
When you attune to someone’s “style”, whether it’s the values of a colleague, the preferences of a customer, or the concerns of a stakeholder, what you’re really doing is fitting their uniqueness into a pre-existing genre. The dialogue becomes a stylistic dance: recognisable, repeatable, branded. It’s not a space for emergence. It’s a space for strategic alignment.
Typical of this problem is Fernando Flores’ famous and brilliant essay On Listening, which proposes four components of listening: attunement to style, articulation of distinctions, collaborative meaning-making, and the detection of anomalies. It sounds open, ethical, and generative. But on closer analysis, it simply optimises a process of integration, a form of mutual capture.
Flores gives the example of a real estate agent trying to sell a suburban house to a sophisticated urban couple. The agent listens not to understand who they truly are, but to assemble a stylised narrative they will respond to. She doesn’t sell them a house; she sells them a story. A future. A lifestyle.
The couple walk away thinking they’ve made a free choice. But their values were interpellated, stylised, and sold back to them. The agent isn’t just facilitating; she’s enrolling them into an identity. This isn’t an act of co-creation. It’s an act of containment.
And it’s what many of us do, reflexively, in leadership.
The Power of Communicability
To understand why this happens, we need to dig into communicability, the real infrastructure beneath all speech.
Communicability isn’t about what is said. It’s about what can be said, and what can be heard. It’s the background framework that enables speech to appear meaningful or rational within a particular context.
In Flores’ model, listening occurs within a “disclosive space”, a shared realm where speech makes sense. But communicability doesn’t just enable this shared space, it shapes it. Flores is clearly aware of this, but does his account of listening for anomalies go far enough? Does his essay show how communicability conditions which expressions, Flores calls them charged distinctions, are legible, desirable, or actionable.
To borrow from Kant: even if two people disagree on whether a statue is beautiful, they are still participating in the shared communicability of the category “beauty.” The term unites them even as they differ. Their disagreement confirms the shared frame.
In business, this is crucial. You may argue with a customer, a regulator, or a peer, but the communicability of the terms, value, risk, return, sustainability, governs the very possibility of that dialogue. Your language may feel nuanced, but the structure is generic. This is the bind the estate agent is in.
Communicability often operates like a gravitational field: you can’t speak outside of it, and you don’t notice it until you try.
This is where communicability becomes dangerous, and deeply political. Because what can be said isn’t neutral. It is always shaped by power. By precedent. By ideology. By market logic. By style.
You can’t talk about home ownership in a way that isn’t already interpellated by class, aspiration, or financial ideology. The same is true for “leadership,” “diversity,” or “transformation.” These aren’t neutral ideas. They are loaded communicable structures. And when we listen through them, we reinforce the existing power matrix.
So when we “listen for difference,” we don’t actually hear what’s radically other. We hear what the frame permits us to translate. Difference becomes style, and style becomes compliance.
Style Is a System of Capture
We often imagine style as expression, our way of being in the world. But style is rarely original. It’s a library of tropes, ready-made identities, aesthetic kits.
Think of the hipster couple in Flores’ example. Their aesthetic, farmers’ markets, raw wood kitchens, curated mess, isn’t self-generated. It’s culturally preloaded. They may reject suburban norms, but they do so through a new genre. A recognisable one.
And the agent is trained to speak that genre. She doesn’t deceive them. She reflects them. The manipulation is mutual.
This is what communicability does: it takes style, even dissenting style, and folds it into its grammar. That’s why subcultures become product lines. Why protest becomes branding. Why authentic signals become marketing channels. In this world, listening is not a gateway to deeper understanding. It’s a method for better sorting.
Why Listening Fails in Leadership
Leaders who pride themselves on being “good listeners” are often just better at coding others. They’re fluent in stakeholder genres. They can pick up on the tone of a room, the branding of a pitch, the positionality of a viewpoint. But they aren’t necessarily open to what doesn’t fit.
Listening, in this framework, becomes a soft form of social editing. You amplify what aligns. You reformulate what jars. You integrate what’s anomalous, if it can be stylised. And, as you stylise, you “know” you are missing what matters most.
But what about that which resists style entirely? What about encounters that don’t speak your language, don’t follow your logic, don’t lend themselves to transformation? Does Flores’s single mentions of “dry scenes” and “a hollow note” in the listening of the estate agent do more than hint at the ordinariness, the indifference, of infinite possibility and radical change?
This is where true leadership begins. Not in attunement, but in indifference.
The Case for Radical Collection
Instead of listening to tailor, translate, or transform, what if leaders simply collected?
Not “collected” in the sense of gathering data or insights. But collected as in accepting presence without needing meaning. Engaging with others without immediately folding them into a shared story.
Collection without style. Encounter without attunement. Co-presence without co-authorship.
This is what we call nonrelational space, a space where two beings share a moment without collapsing into roles or scripts. They are not aligned. They are not antagonistic. They simply coexist, without narrative.
It is in these nonrelational, contentless encounters that something truly new can emerge. Not a variation within the existing paradigm, but something paradigm-shattering.
The problem with listening is that it closes this possibility. It demands sense. It seeks bridges. It normalises through recognition.
Collecting does the opposite. It permits nonsense. It refuses metaphor. It keeps the silence intact. Instead of a bridge between atomised lives in the city or burbs, what about a new kind of spiritual, communal and charitable living that is not yet possible anywhere?
This is the shift required in high-level leadership. Not more empathy. Not more storytelling. But more capacity to be with what is unspoken, untranslatable, and unfinished.
Implications for Leadership Practice
Most organisations suffer not from too little communication, but from too much stylised communication. Too much narrative, alignment, polishing, and sense-making.
As a leader, ask yourself:
- Do I actually hear what doesn’t fit, or do I reframe it?
- Do I allow anomaly to remain strange, or do I repackage it as insight?
- Am I attuning to real difference or just mapping another identity into a known matrix?
In other words: am I listening for the impossible, or just managing the probable?
A Five-Part Practice for Listening to Indifference
Here’s how to begin a different practice, one that opens space for true emergence.
1. Interrupt the Tune
Notice the aesthetic, professional, or ideological “playlist” you’re running. Pause it. Don’t decode people too quickly.
2. Refuse to Resolve
When an idea feels out of place, don’t smooth it out. Attend to the flat indifferent moments in the conversation. Let the discomfort live. Refuse integration.
3. Ask What’s Not Being Said
Some truths remain unspeakable in your current communicable frame. Notice them. Sense the indifferent moments. Hold on to the anomalies you can’t absorb.
4. Stay with Ambiguity
Don’t force coherence or consensus. Transformation often begins in incoherence.
5. Collect Without Naming
Let the encounter change you without branding it. Don’t narrate it. Don’t extract from it. Let it remain incomplete.
Conclusion: Stop Attuning, Start Collecting
Leadership is not about making sense of the world; it’s about creating space for the world that doesn’t yet make sense. That world is not revealed through listening for style. It’s revealed when you stop listening altogether, and start collecting what lies beyond style, beyond roles, beyond communicability.
The future of leadership doesn’t speak your language.
Are you ready to listen for its silence?