Erik Michielsen: How do listening and research help you understand and solve problems?

Hammans Stallings: Well, you know, listening is, I'd say, a form of research more than anything else. So, meaning you know, good at doing research I think is a matter of listening whether people are communicating to you in the form of, say, voice or conversation or listening for the cues, the subtleties, in someone -- in how someone's writing, or how they’re communicating something through video. So those -- I'd say it's that appreciation for the unarticulated, what's not been stated. That's a -- that's a listening skill, maybe the most important listening skill. Listening for the implicit assumptions in someone. Again, kind of those unstated things. And all the while building up kind of a meta understanding of an overall thing, through that conversation or through research or reading, I think those are all the -- those are all ultimately very tightly related.