Step 2 – Listen

The second part of the Culture Hack Method is to know how to listen to the narrative space. We do this by developing a listening model.

Listening to the narrative space means taking a broad look at the shape of the narrative you chose to engage with using your Point of View as a guide.

Imagine you have a big ear that can listen to many people’s conversations about a specific topic. What are you most interested in listening to? Your listening model codifies the different activities you will have to engage in in order to answer this question.

We differentiate between two types of listening, big and small listening. Big listening uses big data sets to find answers. This is normally collected by social listening tools. Small listening is the manual collection of data, this could include interviews, questionnaires and surveys.

The key outcome here is for you to determine what types of listening you need to do given your point of view. A listening model can be as complex or as simple as you need it to be. 

Our aim once the data is collected, is to identify the key narrative communities. A narrative community is a group of people talking to each other about a specific topic. They do not necessarily need to know each other to be in the same narrative community.

When we define our listening model, it is important to be as specific as we can (for example, define your date range, geography, themes, etc). You can find guidelines on how to build your listening model in the notes of this module. And a really good example in our The Future is Indigenous Report.

Developing insights

Once you’ve collected your data based on your listening model, you want to develop general insights.

You can use these questions to compile a list of insights:

What are the overall trends and patterns? Who/What are the most influential voices? What are they saying? Do they interact? What are we not seeing in the data?

This will set you up for the Understand phase in the next module where you identify the key narrative communities. 

Now, collect your data!