One Ear Up, One Ear Down

Listening, Judgment, and the Cost of Reactive Leadership

We live in the most informed era in history. But we are listening less than ever.

This isn’t a complaint about technology, nor a rejection of short-form media, or a nostalgic argument for some imagined past where everyone read long essays and thought deeply all the time. The issue is quieter, and more consequential. We have confused access to information with understanding. Information is everywhere, but context is not. And the gap between the two is where judgment can erode and strategy quietly breaks down.

The World We’re All Swimming In

Most leaders don’t suffer from a lack of inputs. They suffer from too many of them; arriving faster than anyone can reasonably process.

News cycles reset by the hour. Political narratives harden overnight. Economic indicators fluctuate while consumer sentiment whipsaws. Social platforms compress complex issues into clips, headlines, and outrage-ready fragments. Algorithms reward repetition and reinforcement, not range. Many people now experience the world through a single dominant feed; one outlet, one platform, one ideological lens. Not because they intend to be narrow, but because the systems around them make it easy to stop looking elsewhere. TikTok becomes the news. One network becomes the truth. One dashboard becomes reality.

None of this is inherently malicious, but I’d say it’s incomplete. Seeing the world clearly now requires more than staying informed. It requires intentionally listening across multiple, often conflicting sources of signal. Business data, cultural shifts, political undercurrents, consumer mood, and organizational behavior are all moving at once, - and quite often out of sync. This is the environment leaders are making decisions inside. And if you don’t actively widen your aperture, the picture you’re reacting to is almost always partial.

The Difference Between Hearing and Listening

Exposure is not the same as listening. Most leaders today are hearing more than ever. Feeds are full. Dashboards refresh in real time. Alerts arrive constantly, and commentary just never stops. But listening requires something different. Listening requires synthesis; the ability to hold competing ideas at once, to notice patterns before they fully form, and to sit with ambiguity long enough for meaning to emerge. It is slower than scrolling. Less comfortable than reacting, and much less rewarded by modern systems. Algorithms reward speed, familiarity, and agreement. But strategy depends on patience, context, and judgment. That tension is at the heart of why so many decisions today feel reactive rather than considered, even when they are backed by data.

Where Marketing Leadership Enters the Picture

Whether they ask for it or not, marketing leaders are often the first to feel shifts happening beneath the surface. They sit where customer behavior, internal priorities, competitive pressure, and cultural narrative intersect. They can see what resonates, and what quietly fails. They hear optimism and anxiety before either shows up clearly in performance reports, and that position carries responsibility. Marketing leadership isn’t just about execution or amplification. It’s about anticipation; sensing change early enough to respond with intention rather than urgency. And that level of judgment can’t come from one platform, one feed, or one worldview. It requires listening beyond the walls of the function itself.

The Burden of Listening Broadly

Listening at that level IS NOT efficient, and it’s certainly isn’t comfortable. What I’ve observed is most leaders aren’t avoiding context because they don’t care. They’re avoiding it because there is already too much coming at them; competing priorities, conflicting inputs, and constant urgency. Decisions that feel overdue the moment they surface. But listening broadly means choosing not to simplify too quickly. It means sitting in noise longer than feels productive, and holding contradictory signals without resolving them immediately. Being early - which almost always means being exposed, and that’s a challenging place to live.

That kind of listening doesn’t offer the quick relief of certainty. It doesn’t collapse neatly into a dashboard or a summary slide. It requires judgment when there’s no clear answer yet, and patience when pressure is pushing for motion. But over time, it builds something metrics alone cannot: pattern recognition. When someone asks, “How did you know?” the answer is rarely some kind of prediction. It’s synthesis; paying attention across business, culture, behavior, and lived experience - then connecting signals before they become obvious enough to feel safe. That mental muscle does still exist, but in many organizations, it’s been deprioritized. It’s not because it lacks value, but because it demands more from leaders than constant reaction does.

Why So Much Decision-Making Has Become Reactive

This really isn’t a failure of intelligence, discipline, or effort. Most leaders are operating under more pressure than ever before; more inputs, more expectations, more urgency, and less room to pause. Decisions are made in full calendars, between meetings, amid constant updates and competing demands. There is always something else to respond to. And organizations reinforce this pace, often unintentionally. Systems reward activity over reflection, optimization over judgment, and alignment over early conviction. The metrics move faster than meaning, and dashboards update constantly in real time. The work never really stops long enough to think. In that environment, reacting becomes a form of survival, and leaders adapt. Reflection doesn’t fit neatly into that systema, and judgment is harder to defend than optimization.

Chasing the latest tactic feels safer than making a call that hasn’t yet been validated. Moving in step with peers provides cover - at least we weren’t wrong alone. Over time, leaders become highly skilled at responding, adjusting, and course-correcting, but less comfortable pausing to decide. Listening narrows not because leaders don’t care, but because widening the lens starts to feel risky. Broad listening introduces ambiguity when certainty is already in short supply. It can slow momentum in cultures that prize speed, and it forces judgment where process once held a place. Attention begins to contract, and then the signals get filtered. We are human, and so context is trimmed down to what feels manageable. But over time reaction replaces that innate anticipation. Not because leaders don’t care, but because the system quietly teaches them not to pause and think. The habit of anticipation is replaced by the reflex of reaction.

A Practical Illustration: Who Actually Influences Outcomes

This shows up clearly in how organizations think about influence. In B2B conversations, there’s often debate about who matters most: the CEO, the VP, the manager. The instinct is usually to go higher - more authority, more impact.

But in many organizations, the most effective influence sits one level below senior leadership: Directors. They operate with one ear up and one ear down. They understand strategic intent, but they live inside operational reality. They know what leadership wants, and what teams can actually execute. They translate ambition into action. And that insight doesn’t come from theory. It comes from having lived in those roles; from listening inside organizations rather than observing them from the outside. Strategy often works the same way. The most useful signal frequently comes from the middle; close enough to reality to understand constraints, but senior enough to see direction.

Why Life Experience Still Matters

Markets don’t move purely on logic, and customers don’t respond only to messaging frameworks. Culture does not shift because a campaign launches on time. They move on far less tidy forces - trust, fatigue, aspiration, fear, belief. And it’s often before those forces can be named, measured, or neatly categorized. This is where life experience becomes strategic input. Leaders who have spent time listening outside their function: outside their industry echo chambers, dashboards, and professional feeds, tend to recognize these shifts sooner. It’s not necessarily because they’re smarter, but because they have seen enough cycles to sense when something feels different, even if the data hasn’t caught up yet.

When listening narrows to professional inputs alone, strategy often becomes technically sound but emotionally misaligned. Messaging works on paper, but not in practice, and can feel a bit brittle. Sure, the organization moves quickly, but just not always in the right direction. Life experience doesn’t replace expertise. It contextualizes it. It gives leaders a broader reference set for interpreting what they’re seeing, and what they’re not.

The Cost of Not Listening

The cost of not listening broadly rarely shows up as immediate failure. It shows up as missed inflection points. As late reactions framed as innovation. As over-investment in what’s new and under-investment in what’s durable. Teams execute well against strategies that no longer fit the moment. Leaders double down on optimization while the underlying assumptions quietly erode. By the time misalignment becomes visible, it’s often already expensive. What is sometimes missed in this environment is opportunity cost - compounding quietly, quarter by quarter. And it’s one of the hardest costs to explain after the fact, because nothing “went wrong” in a traditional sense. The execution was solid, metrics were monitored, and the decisions were justified. But what was missing was context.

Listening as a Leadership Discipline

Listening at this level isn’t passive, and it isn’t soft. It’s a true discipline. It requires leaders to slow down just enough to see patterns forming; before consensus, before certainty, before proof arrives neatly packaged in a deck. It demands judgment when data is incomplete and confidence when signals are still emerging.

When done well, listening doesn’t delay decisions. It sharpens them. It reduces organizational whiplash by grounding action in understanding rather than reaction. It allows leaders to make fewer moves, and make them with greater conviction. The strongest leaders don’t wait to be told what’s happening. They listen for where things are heading. And that confidence doesn’t come from having all the answers. It comes from having enough context to make a call, and frankly, the resolve to stand by it as conditions evolve.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need to consume everything. But you do need to widen your aperture! Listen beyond your function. Pay attention beyond your feed. Treat lived experience - yours and others’ - as signal, not noise. Build hypotheses. Test them. Revise them. And resist the temptation to confuse speed with clarity. In a world optimized for reaction, the ability to listen deeply has become a differentiator. Not because it feels thoughtful, but because it leads to better judgment, stronger decisions, and leadership that moves ahead of the moment instead of chasing it.

Listening isn’t passive. It’s the work.

Perspective by Clint Allen | President & Founder, CLINTONSCOTT

Feel free to share this with your social networks!