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The HIMS Matrix: A Tool for Assessing Listening

By Michael C. Gilbert, December 2006
 

Note: This article is based on a toolkit for applying the HIMS Matrix, entitled "Are You Listening?" and available online, along with our other publications. The toolkit includes an elaboration of how to apply each portion of the matrix as well as worksheets on inventorying stakeholder intelligence, the listening loop, and building new loops.
 

The Internet has gone a long way toward democratizing certain kinds of speech. If you are literate and on the connected side of the digital divide, you have access to the worlds most powerful printing press. Civil society organizations have used this to dramatically increase the number of people to whom they speak. I call this Scaling Up Talking. But the true power of the Internet is tapped when there is dialogue, when the conversation doesn't just go one way. Organizations now have to learn to Scale Up Listening.

There is a growing body of methods and tools for assessing the effectiveness of an organization's Talking. Some of this is derived from the metrics established by decades of telemarketing and direct mail fundraising. Some is the result of the increasing maturity of the field of online fundraising. Almost all of these help organizations focus on whether a stakeholder is listening to them and how to talk more often, more loudly, and more effectively.

But listening is often much more effective than talking. Witness the difference in the impact on a consumer of a thousand ads for a certain product as compared to a single act of listening by the company selling the product. We all know that the latter is more powerful. The same is even more true in civil society, where trust is such an essential currency. Nonprofit organizations need to start creating tools and methods for assessing how well they are listening.

The HIMS Matrix is such a tool and its corresponding method, which I propose as a starting point for further exploration of listening as an organizational practice. The matrix is designed to reflect the stakeholder's point of view in regard to communication initiated by the organization. Therefore, its use constitutes an effort to see things from their point of view, which is itself an act of Listening.
 

Summary of the HIMS Matrix

The HIMS Matrix itself is a classic two-by-two grid. The vertical dimension is about how well you know the stakeholder and is based on this stakeholder question: "Do I feel like they know me?" The horizontal dimension is about how you got that knowledge and is based on the somewhat subtler question: "Did they ask?"

Heard: The upper-left quadrant, as is customary, is where you want your stakeholder to be. Two conditions are necessary for that: the feeling of being known and, in the process, having been asked.

Ignored: The lower-right quadrant reflects a common situation. The stakeholder doesn't feel particularly known by you. Nor have you ever really asked them much in the process of your engagement. This is the typical broadcast situation.

Misunderstood: The lower-left quadrant is a frustrating one for both you and your stakeholder. You've asked them various things over the course of the relationship, but they still don't particularly feel known. This is very common in situations where you gather information about stakeholders that you don't put to visible use.

Spied Upon: The upper-right quadrant is the most uncomfortable one for stakeholders and reaches its extreme with spam and genuine invasions of privacy. In this quadrant, they recognize that you know things about them, but you never asked.
 

Questions and Implications

There are two questions I would ask about this matrix, which I invite you to explore with me:

1. Since this is from the stakeholder's point of view, how can we best go about knowing, short of rich interpersonal interaction, whether and how someone feels heard?
2. How can we, as forward thinking customer service organizations have sometimes done, actively construct experiences that result in our stakeholders feeling heard?

Obviously one way we might consider determining how well we are listening is to ask our stakeholders. This has the usual limits associated with self-reporting, but since we are asking people about their attitudes (rather than their behaviors) surveys and other such instruments might produce fairly accurate answers. But I would be most concerned that the people who have the weakest feelings would be least likely to reply. This may skew the results in unpredictable ways.

There might also be ways to build into our relationship management workflow, smaller interactions that can serve as indicators of whether someone feels that we've been listening. I'm not suggesting those little post-transaction surveys that you often see, although those might work too. Rather, I'm suggesting fairly integrated things like the use of "none of the above" options on multiple choice questions, simple and ubiquitous comment forms, and not refusing email messages that might come as a reply to outbound email.

There may also be some common-sense metrics, such as whether or not (and how soon) we respond to stakeholder messages, or whether we ask people for information that we don't put to transparent use. Of course, these are not actually indicators, but really move us into the second topic -- the "organizational listening" practices that help people feel heard.

I'm tempted to just say that we should listen, because most of us understand what that means on an interpersonal level. But of course, we can't always translate that understanding into policies and procedures for our organizations, especially when we are fighting the weight of tradition and common practice from the field of fundraising.

Clearly, every interaction with a stakeholder should be examined for the direct and implied uses that might be made of information and communication received from the stakeholder. An inventory like that can serve as something of a listening checklist for the organization. Any question that you ask of a stakeholder, the use of which you would be uncomfortable revealing to a stakeholder, should be suspect. So should questions that you ask out of habit, but which may not have any current use.

Email itself is an implied invitation to reply. When an organization fails to respond to such replies it results in Misunderstanding, which can easily become feeling Ignored once the initial email from the organization is forgotten and all that matters is the lack of subsequent followup.
 

One of the reasons I developed the HIMS Matrix is because of our own somewhat mixed record of good practice in listening to stakeholders. I know that I've been better about responding to hate mail than to fan mail from time to time, for example. But early on we did develop some useful responses to the major categories of queries that we get and most people seem happy with them. We also stripped our subscription process of any extraneous questions and put them in a followup email in which we ask to get to know people better. We have figured a few things out, and I'm sure we still have some things to learn. The HIMS Matrix is helping us with this.

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