Concept
Looping for Understanding
Looping for understanding is a listening technique described in Charles Duhigg's Supercommunicators: ask a question, repeat the answer back in your own words, then ask whether you got it right, and repeat until the other person confirms. It proves understanding, not agreement.
Duhigg's starting point is that listening is not enough: the other person has to believe we are listening, and most of us are poor at proving it. We say 'I understand' and then reply to a slightly different point, and the speaker repeats it more forcefully. Looping, which Duhigg draws from the practice of mediators, closes that gap in three steps. The paraphrase uses our own words, because repeating someone verbatim sounds mechanical, and it includes the part that matters most to them. The final check, 'Did I get that right?', gives the speaker the last word on what they meant. If the answer is 'not quite', we loop again. The technique overlaps with summarising in negotiation and reflective listening in therapy; its distinctive parts are the explicit check and the discipline of repeating the loop.
A real-life example
An HR manager at a hotel group in Antalya meets a receptionist who wants to resign over a new night-shift rule. Instead of defending it, she says the problem seems to be the rota changing at two days' notice, and asks if that is right. 'Partly,' he says, 'and nobody asked us.' She loops again with both points. He stays.
How to use it
- 1Ask one question about what the other person thinks or feels, and let them finish.
- 2Summarise in your own words, in fewer words than they used, including what seems to matter most to them.
- 3Ask 'Did I get that right?' and loop again until they say yes; only then give your view.