Education is the process of learning about other people’s ideas, ideas that have been tested and shown to have value.
As we get older, leave education and start work, we tend to value our own ideas over the ideas of others. By doing so, we miss out on learning new and interesting things. This is a natural process and it takes effort to change it.
Equal Value Thinking aims to open our minds and view ideas equally, so we can learn and grow.
Every argument or disagreement you have ever had, every time you have not been listened to or you have not listened to someone else, is because of perception error, cognitive miser theory, and clashing thinking styles.
When teams solve problems, different ideas are expressed due to different thinking styles. Perception error occurs.
Rather than trying to understand other people’s ideas, cognitive miser theory kicks in. It’s more energy-efficient to ignore everyone else's ideas and just keep pushing our own.
We have stopped listening.
No single person in the meeting will be 100% right, and without all the participants listening, the loudest voice or most senior person will win. The problem has not been solved, but we think it has, and the project has just failed, but it will take time for anyone to realise.
If the people in the room understand why this happens, they can stop it happening.
For the majority of situations, you now have the information you need. Simply understanding the neuroscience behind why you aren’t listening is enough for you to be aware of when you don’t listen. You will also be aware when others don’t listen to you and why.
When you do notice it, stop, take a deep breath, and ask “I hadn’t thought of it like that, can you explain where your idea came from?”
It will make the other person feel valued as you are showing you want to listen and learn. When others feel like that, they also are much more likely to listen to you.
Don’t stop there; ask meaningful questions about the other person’s idea. It forces you to try to understand what they are saying, probably not fully, but asking meaningful questions demonstrates you are putting in the effort. The effect of people feeling listened to is transformative.
If you feel something negative entering your head, take a deep breath and turn it into a question. The other person may be wrong, but for the dialogue to be productive you need to help them realise it; you don’t tell them. If you tell them, they will feel under attack and the conversation can quickly descend into an argument.
Every time you feel you want to interrupt, knowing why can enable you to become consciously aware of it, so you can consciously stop yourself. If you do interrupt, you can stop quickly as you know why you are doing it and the biology that caused it to occur.
This is not magic and isn’t as easy as it sounds, as you are working against, probably, decades of learnt behaviour and your own biology. Continued use of EVT can change the pathways in your brain through neuroplasticity, but don’t expect it quickly. Research on habit formation found real-world timelines ranging from 18 to 254 days depending on how demanding the behaviour is.[16] Listening differently, after years of learnt habit, it is at the demanding end. It however is worth it for all the benefits you will gain.
EVT can help create the circumstances for psychological safety to exist. Psychological safety was demonstrated, by Google’s research project, Aristotle, to be the singular most important factor in creating high-performance teams. You can’t actually create psychological safety; it’s an emergent property of people feeling listened to. EVT at its core is designed to achieve that aim, the wonderful feeling of being listened to. Get it right and it can enable you and the people you lead to be more creative, have more agency, be more content, and improve productivity; the list is very long.
To get an understanding of the importance of this, innovation can only occur when people are engaged, and the Gallup State of the Global Workplace report for 2026 is grim reading. Only 20% of the world’s workforce were engaged, which resulted in $10 trillion in lost productivity!
[16] Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.
