I've sat through enough soft-skills workshops to suspect that active listening is oversold as the cure for workplace conflict. Last quarter, our team tried 'reflect back what you heard' during a tense project review, and it just made people parrots—nobody actually changed their position. Maybe what we call a skill is really a willingness to be wrong, and you can't train that with role-play. Is structured listening genuinely learnable, or do we just get better at faking attention?