THE GENTLE ART OF ASKING INSTEAD OF TELLING

REFLECTIONS FROM THE BOOK HUMBLE INQUIRY THE GENTLE ART OF ASKING INSTEAD OF TELLING EDGAR H. SCHEIN

Humble Inquiry The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling EDGAR H. SCHEIN

IMPROVE COMMUNICATION

How can we do better? The answer is simple, but its implementation is not. We would have to do three things: 1) do less telling 2) learn to do more asking in the particular form of Humble Inquiry and 3) do a better job of listening and acknowledging. Talking and listening have received enormous attention via hundreds of books on communication. But the social art of asking a question has been strangely neglected.

HOW DOES ASKING BUILD RELATIONSHIPS?

Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it. On the other hand, asking temporarily empowers the other person in the conversation and temporarily makes me vulnerable.

ASKING QUESTIONS BUILDS TRUST

Trust builds on my end because I have made myself vulnerable, and the other person has not taken advantage of me nor ignored me. Trust builds on the other persons end because I have shown an interest in and paid attention to what I have been told. A conversation that builds a trusting relationship is, therefore, an interactive process in which each party invests and gets something of value in return.

ARE WE TOO TASK DRIVEN?

We also live in a structured society in which building relationships is not as important as task accomplishment, in which it is appropriate and expected that the subordinate does more asking than telling, while the boss does more telling that asking. Having to ask is a sign of weakness or ignorance, so we avoid it as much as possible.

Humble Inquiry is the skill and the art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.

ASK QUESTIONS THAT BUILD RELATIONSHIPS AND BREAKTHROUGHS

Asking for examples is not only one of the most powerful ways of showing curiosity, interest, and concern, but alsoand even more importantit clarifies general statements. A timely open question is sometimes all that is needed to start effective problem solving.

When the choice is between you or me, look for a way to explore us, the relationship itself. Ask an open question to get information that you need (a question that is not answerable with just a yes or no).

THE POWER OF ASKING RATHER THAN TELLING OR QUIZZING

Humble Inquiry is not a checklist to follow or a set of prewritten questionsit is behavior that comes out of respect, genuine curiosity, and the desire to improve the quality of the conversation by stimulating greater openness and the sharing of task-relevant information.

DIFFERENT FORMS OF ASKING

1) Humble Inquiry

I do not want to lead the other person or put him or her into a position of having to give a socially acceptable response. I want to inquire in the way that will best discover what is really on the other persons mind. I want others to feel that I accept them, am interested in them, and am genuinely curious. Humble Inquiry does not influence either the content of what the other person has to say, nor the form in which it is said.

2) Diagnostic inquiry

What differentiates this form of inquiry is that it influences the others mental process. How did (do) you feel about that? (Feelings) Why did that happen? (Motives). What have you tried so far? (Actions) As innocent and supportive as these questions might seem, they take control of the situation and force others to think about something that they may not have considered and may not want to consider.

3) Confrontational inquiry

The essence of confrontational inquiry is that you now insert your own ideas but in the form of a question. When we talk about rhetorical questions or leading questions, we are acknowledging that the question is really a form of telling. You are tacitly giving advice, and this often arouses resistance in others and makes it harder to build relationships with them because they have to explain or defend.

4) Process-oriented inquiry

An option that is always on the table is to shift the conversational focus onto the conversation itself. I can humbly ask some version of What is happening? ( Are we OK? Did I offend you?) to explore what might be wrong and how it might be fixed. The power of this kind of inquiry is that it focuses on the relationship.

CULTURAL VALUES VERSUS CULTURAL REALITY

The most common example of this in the United States is that we claim to value teamwork and talk about it all the time, but the artifactsour promotional systems and rewards systemsare entirely individualistic. We espouse equality of opportunity and freedom, but the artifactspoorer education, little opportunity, and various forms of discrimination for ghetto minoritiessuggest that there are other assumptions having to do with pragmatism and rugged individualism that operate all the time and really determine our behavior.

THE MAIN PROBLEMA CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

Many cultures are individualistic, competitive, optimistic, and pragmatic. We believe that the basic unit of society is the individual, whose rights have to be protected at all costs. We are entrepreneurial and admire individual accomplishment. We thrive on competition. Optimism and pragmatism show up in the way we are oriented toward the short term and in our dislike of long-range planning. We do not like to fix things and improve them while they are still working. We prefer to run things until they break because we believe we can then fix them or replace them.

Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, dont care and dont want to be bothered with it.

We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we dont for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay

SOMETHING TO LOOK OUT FOR DURING THE ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN

We still live in a culture of what Stephen Potter so eloquently described in the 1950s as gamesmanship and one-upmanship.To be an effective gamesman or lifeman, Potter notes, one must know how to win without actually cheating or practice the art of getting away with it without being an absolute plonk. In pre-election debates we only care who won and often base that decision not on who did the best analysis of the issues but who looked most presidential in front of the cameras and who turned the best phrase or made the most clever put-down.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.

THE IMPORTANCE OF TEAM BUILDING

We know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise.

OBSERVE. REACT. JUDGE. INTERVENE.

What comes out of our mouth and our overall demeanor in the conversation is deeply dependent on what is going on inside our head. We cannot be appropriately humble if we misread or misjudge the situation we are in and what is appropriate in that situation. We must become aware that our minds are capable of producing biases, perceptual distortions, and inappropriate impulses. To be effective in Humble Inquiry, we must make an effort to learn what these biases and distortions are. To begin this learning, we need a simplifying model of processes that are, in fact, extremely complex because our nervous system simultaneously gathers data, processes data, proactively manages what data to gather, and decides how to react. What we see and hear and how we react to things are partly driven by our needs and expectations. Though these processes occur at the same time, it is useful to distinguish them and treat them as a cycle. That is, we observe (O), we react emotionally to what we have observed (R), we analyze, process, and make judgments based on our observations and feelings (J), and we behave overtly in order to make something happenwe intervene (I). Humble Inquiry is one category of such an intervention.

The problem....

We see and hear more or less what we expect or anticipate based on prior experience, or, more importantly, on what we hope to achieve. Our wants and needs distort to an unknown degree what we perceive. We block out a great deal of information that is potentially available if it does not fit our needs, expectations, preconceptions, and prejudgments.

Perhaps the clearest examples of this are the defense mechanisms denial and projection. Denial is refusing to see certain categories of information as they apply to us, and projection is seeing in others what is actually operating in us.

REFLECT MORE AND ASK YOURSELF HUMBLE INQUIRY QUESTIONS

In our task-oriented impatient culture of Do and Tell, the most important thing to learn is how to reflect. We wont know when it is essential to be humble and when it is appropriate to tell unless we get better at assessing the nature of the situation we are in, what the present state of our relationships with others is, and, most important, what is going on in our own head and heart. One way to learn to reflect is to apply Humble Inquiry to ourselves. Before leaping into action, we can ask ourselves: What is going on here? What would be the appropriate thing to do? What am I thinking and feeling and wanting?

If the task is to be accomplished effectively and safely, it will be especially important to answer these questions: On whom am I dependent? Who is dependent on me? With whom do I need to build a relationship in order to improve communication?