Humble Inquiry: The gentle art of asking instead of telling by Edgar H. Schein
Who should read this book?
The content of the book applies to anyone. Applying Humble Inquiry is especially impactful when a person higher in the hierarchy (such as a manager, parent or teacher) applies it.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
This book contains very little new information. Furthermore, it offers more abstract concepts than practical advice I can apply immediately. It’s a short book (110 small pages) and is rather easy (not necessarily exciting) to read. I recommend alternative books such as “Non-violent communication”, “Change your questions, change your life” or “Just Culture”.
Interesting extracts
“Humble Inquiry is the fine 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 another person. (…) When I talk to senior managers, they always assure me that they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. However, when I talk to the subordinates in those same organizations, they tell me either they do not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses or they’ve tried but never got any response or even acknowledgment, so they concluded that their input wasn’t welcome and gave up. Shockingly often, they settled for risky alternatives rather than upset their bosses with potentially bad news.”
“It is the higher-ranking leaders who must learn the art of Humble Inquiry as a first step in creating a climate of openness.”
“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.”
“Asking temporarily empowers the other person in the conversation and temporarily makes me vulnerable. It implies that the other person knows something that I need to or want to know. It draws the other person into the situation and into the driver’s seat; it enables the other person to help or hurt me and, thereby , opens the door to building a relationship.”
“Asking for examples is not only one of the most powerful ways of showing curiosity, interest and concern, but also – and even more important – it clarifies general statements.”
“Humble Inquiry is not a checklist to follow or a set of pre-written questions — it 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.”
“4 fundamentally different forms of inquiry
- Humble Inquiry: maximizes my curiosity and interest in the other person and minimizes bias and preconceptions about the other person.
- Diagnostic Inquiry: I am steering the conversation and influencing the other person’s mental process
- Confrontational Inquiry: You now insert your own ideas but in the form of a rhetorical or leading question.
- Process-Oriented Inquiry: Shift the conversational focus onto the conversation itself.”
“This can become problematic when the cultures involved have different rules. In my executive classes at MIT, the U.S. students sometimes sincerely asked Japanese colleagues to dinner with “Can you come to dinner next Saturday?” and received a yes answer only to find that no one showed up. We learned that the Japanese were scripted to answer yes, which meant “I have understood your invitation” but did not mean “Yes, I will come”. We further learned that it was necessary and OK to follow up with “Please come to our house. Will you be able to come at 6:30?”
“The tacit assumptions that make up a given culture may or may not be congruent with each other: Cultures can exist with inconsistencies and internal conflict.”
“When we deal with people in other cultures that consider relationships to be intrinsic to getting the job done by building trust first, we get impatient with spending time over relationship-building dinners before getting down to work.When we are sent off to outward-bound retreats to build teamwork, we view that as a necessary price of doing business and sometimes even enjoy and benefit but still think of it as just a means to the end of task accomplishment.”
“When the airlines first investigated some of their serious accidents, they found that some resulted from communication failures in the cockpit. In several dramatic cases the senior person just plain did not pay attention to the junior person who was giving out key information as the plane crashed. For a time, the airlines launched team-training programs and even assigned crews that had trained together to work with each other in the cockpit. But when this became too expensive and too unwieldy to manage, they went back to a rotational system where checklists and professionalism were expected to facilitate the necessary communication. It was even reported that some teams became overconfident and developed bad habits leading to safety shortcuts that justified dropping the team training.”
“The point is that a small change—whom one eats lunch with—has huge symbolic implications for relationship building in that the senior doctor is publicly humbling himself by sitting with his subordinate staff, thereby empowering them to be more open with him.”
“Trust in the context of a conversation is believing that the other person will acknowledge me, not take advantage of me, not embarrass or humiliate me, tell me the truth, and, in the broader context, not cheat me, work on my behalf, and support the goals we have agreed to.”
“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, and projection is seeing in others what is actually operating in us.”
“The key to coordination is shared goals, mutual understanding of each other’s work, and mutual respect.”