 Welcome everyone and thank you for coming to join me for the afternoon. My name is Ellen Grove, I am an Agile coach from Ottawa, Canada, and I'm thrilled to be back in Agile India after being away for a couple of years. What we're going to do during our time together today is this is a workshop to explore the art of humble inquiry, which in my mind and in my experience is actually one of the most important leadership skills. Just to the people who are coming in now, if there is room at a table, please join the table because this is a very interactive workshop. I am not going to talk at you very much. Most of the action is going to happen in conversation at the table. So if there's a spot at the table, great. For the people who end up in chairs, we will make sure that you have materials to work with each other. I'll just send some handouts back because you might want these over the course of the talk. So if I can just get these passed to the back of the room, that would be fantastic. We'll pass those around. So this is really a workshop about learning to ask great questions because one of the fundamental shifts in how we approach leadership as we move to working in an agile way is it's much less about telling people what to do because we're dealing with complex situations and things are changing all the time. And it's more learning how do we ask better questions of the people we work with, of the people who work for us so that we can achieve better outcomes together. In this workshop, we're going to explore how that helps you to achieve better outcomes. We're going to talk about what... we're going to practice some skills to explore what less telling and more asking really looks like. And we're going to talk about why this is so hard to do because this is very counterintuitive to the way that we have been conditioned to work successfully. So... But also, I'm not going to do a lot of the talking in this session. As I said, this is where most of the action is going to happen in conversation between you at the tables. And where I'd like to begin with that is I'd like you to find a partner in the room somebody sitting at your table or somebody sitting next to you if you're sitting at the chair or maybe sitting along the wall. And I'm going to give you about two minutes, you get 60 seconds each and I would like you to share with the person next to you what drew you to this workshop. Okay, I'm going to give you... I'll let these people come in and then I'll explain again what we're going to do and then I'll give you two minutes to do that. So, come on in and grab a space if you can find a space at a table even better for the people who are standing along the wall along that side maybe if I could just put some handouts here if I could ask you to pass them back to the people who are lined up along the wall. So now your task at the moment is to find a partner at your table and spend 60 seconds each explaining what attracted you to this workshop. Your two minutes for that starts now. Okay, that's been 60 seconds. If your partner hasn't had a chance to talk, switch roles. Okay, time is up. Just let's see how many people know this because with the number of people in the room we're going to... Yeah, I'm going to need... With the number of people in this room I'm going to need to use this signal and what this means is some people have already gathered is if I put my hand up, that's your signal to put your hand up and finish your sentence and stop talking because that way we can bring focus back quickly to the middle of the room. So now what I'd like you to do is think about this little exchange that you've had and you might want to grab a sticky or a piece of note paper if you have one and I want you to think for a moment about what your experience as a listener was like right there. What did you do as a listener? Were you looking for what connections you had with the person you were speaking with? Did they identify a problem and did you immediately start thinking about how can I solve their problem or how can I help them solve their problem? Take a moment and capture your reflections on a sticky or organize your thoughts in your head. Okay, and once you've made your notes or collected your thoughts take a moment to share with your partner what that experience of listening was like. What was it like for you to listen? I'll give you about a minute for that just so you know. So hopefully you've had a moment to reflect on what that experience of listening was like because listening is one of the key skills in Humble and Query. Part of it is about asking questions but the other half of asking questions of course is listening to the answers, right? And Humble and Query, what is Humble and Query? This comes from Edgar Schein's book, Humble and Query, which I cannot recommend enough. I was blown away by this book, it's very short, it's very quick to read and it very quickly and cleanly explains so many things about how do we shift our behavior from a culture of telling, of expecting that when we're in a leadership role one of our primary functions is telling people what to do to being in a leadership stance where we recognize that we are dependent on other people to work together to solve problems and one of the ways we can best support that is by relationship building and learning to ask better open questions and listening very carefully to the answers. So Humble and Query, as Schein defines it, is the fine art of drawing someone out of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer and of building a relationship that is based on curiosity and interest in the other person and this is a wildly different thing because we live in a very problem solving culture very task focused culture and we tend to value telling over asking because we tend to believe that our workplaces are often built around an assumption that task accomplishment is more important than relationship building and Schein is turning that idea on his head, he's saying that in order to be effective to work together well to solve complex problems we really need to focus on building relationships with the people who we work with so that we recognize our interdependence regardless of where we are in the organization and we learn to work together more effectively. So why? Why does this work? Because this stance of approaching other people with curiosity of asking questions, of really listening, it empowers the other person in the conversation first of all if somebody comes along and I tell you what to do you're not necessarily going to feel like you have much autonomy or much agency you're just taking orders and it's like yeah maybe I'll do what you want, maybe I won't but it's not necessarily conducive to a feeling of mutual respect, right? And conversations that are focused on building relationships rather than directing people or telling people through especially through questions that are really designed to tell rather than ask Conversation that builds relationship it's more equitable, it's more balanced it helps us treat each other with respect and recognizing that we are in fact dependent on each other to get things done we need to do and that builds trust and one of the things that in my experience as an agile coach that it really is fundamental if we want to have effective teams, if we want to have effective organizations we need to build trust amongst the people we work with in order to be effective at solving complex problems. So this is where learning to ask better questions and learning to listen is a critical leadership skill. So let's talk about listening for a moment. We did a little exercise at the beginning of this workshop where you listened to each other, maybe because a lot of the times when we're listening we're not really listening we're kind of listening to one ear to what people are saying but a lot of the time we're often thinking about well what am I going to say next? Just a quick show of hands. Hands up when you were reflecting on your experience as a listener if you were thinking more about well what am I going to say when it's my turn to talk anybody feel that way? Yeah. Or somebody identified a problem and you jumped right into wow I have ideas about how you might solve your problems Does that seem familiar? We've trained ourselves to listen that way and so the first step we need to take in order to be able to more consciously and intentionally assuming a stance of humble inquiry is to train ourselves to really listen and from the co-active coaching model there's a model of they talk about the three levels of listening three levels of listening and I want to share this with you because I found this a really powerful tool if any of you have heard Lisa Atkins talk she talks about this quite a lot and this is where I got this exercise from her so we're all going to do something faintly ridiculous together so the three levels of listening the first level is internal listening where yeah I'm kind of listening to you but really I've got the internal dialogue going on in my head I'm either thinking oh okay I heard them say that and this is what I'm going to say next when it's my turn to talk or I'm not even listening at all you're talking talking talking telling me about something that really matters to you and I'm thinking about wow I wonder if I'm going to be on time for that meeting or I need to pick up groceries on the way home or whatever this is internal listening which is all focused me me me me me I might be looking at you I might be pretending to listen I'm not really taking in what you're saying level two listening is focused listening where I am listening to you I am paying intent attention to what's going on and that's that's great that's a step up that's where I am attending to what you're saying but I might be so focused that actually I'm missing some of the things that are going on contextually in the conversation and that's where we move to level three listening level three listening according to this act of listening model is listening in such a way that I'm listening to you but I'm also paying attention to what's going on around us I'm not just taking in your words but I'm taking in your body language I'm taking in what the mood is in the room I'm paying attention to what's going on around us and that's giving me all the information I need to really be able to relate to you and that's what humble inquiry is about that's what active listening is about that's what humble inquiry is about really relating to other people building that relationship and I found a great... it doesn't come from the co-active model but I found a great definition of what this level three listening is from a book about communication by the actor Alan Alda of all people Guy who is in MASH and West Wing and stuff in addition to being an actor he's very interested in communicating about sciences and helping scientists learn to communicate more effectively I can't remember the title of the book but he talks about relating as it's being so aware of the other person that even if you have your back to them you're observing them it's letting everything about them affect you not just their words but their tone of voice their body language even subtle things like where they're standing in the room or how they occupy a chair relating is letting all of that seep into you and have an effect on how you respond to the other person that's level three listening it's taking all of that in and now this is the ridiculous part of this because I really want you to remember this model so we're going to do this silly little exercise that's going to help you remember the difference between level one, level two, level three I'm going to ask everybody in the room to stand up so if you'll remember from the model level one listening is me me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me so I want you to do this me, me, me, me, me yeah, okay awesome this is stupid and silly but the reason that I'm asking you to do this is because if you want things to stick in your memory it helps to engage your body because that creates different neural pathways to remember things and emotion helps you remember things as well so if everybody's feeling kind of funny this is goofy and it's a little embarrassing you'll remember this more than if I just sat and said this is level one, this is level two, this is level three moving on so moving on to level two you, you, you, you, you this is level two, you, you, you, you, you okay and level three this global listening is us it's all about us so open your arms wide to take in everything about us okay so let's just do that really quickly level one, me, me, me, me, me level two, you, you, you, you, you level three, us okay thank you you can sit down now so now that you've learned a little bit about listening and you've thought a little bit more carefully about what listening involves I want to redo the exercise we did at the beginning of this workshop where I want you to think about a problem that you're involved in and I want you to find a partner maybe the same partner you worked with before and I'm going to give you 60 seconds each to talk about the problem what I would like you to do when you're listening is just listen don't like, don't like strive to oh my god I have to listen to level three all the way through this listen as you naturally would but just kind of notice when am I listening at level one when am I listening at level two when am I listening at level three and what drops me in and out of that because the expectation isn't that I'm that hyper focused all the time that would take an incredible amount of energy and willpower but I just want you to pay attention to the level that you're listening at so think of a problem that you're willing to discuss with another person in the room and then I'm going to give you 60 seconds each to talk to that person and as you're listening just know what level are you listening at okay go okay that's been about a minute I'd ask you to switch roles now and let the other person speak okay come on in okay if I can awesome thank you thank you so how did it feel to really be listened to what was the difference that you noticed between the first round of listening and this round of listening sorry? it's quite effective yeah how did it feel to be listened to with intention like that you said it's effective how did you feel about it yeah absolutely and I just want to highlight this is perfectly natural the expectation I don't know maybe there are people who can do it who are like I am at level 3 listening all the time and I'm taking it all in but naturally you will drop between those things but as you recognize what the different levels are it increases your ability to think wow I just noticed I'm not really paying attention I need to tune into this conversation I really need to take in what's going on how did it what was your experience what other experience did you have as a listener this time around yeah and as you were being listened to that way how did it feel different excellent so you she was describing your problem you started to think about oh I have some similar problems I can understand that I can empathize with that and I realize I'm putting some words around what you said but this is it right we want to through listening we want to start building relationships that are focused on mutual trust mutual understanding and mutual respect regardless of what our relative roles are in the organization you know so would that be classified as a combination of level 2 and level 3 where you're trying to kind of empathize and map it with your side probably probably because you're dropping out maybe you can drop back into level 1 you're dipping back in and you're thinking oh what if I got going on in my head that's relevant here and this is where again it's perfectly natural to sort of dip between I am intensely listening and just taking it all in to going back into my own memory banks and retrieving stuff but it's just about being attentive to that and deploying doing that intentionally rather than sort of as a habit going yeah I can see your mouth moving but really all I'm thinking about is what's going on in my own head so this is listening I want you to think more about listening the other part there's two parts to humble inquiry there's inquiry which is about listening and asking questions and we'll get to questioning a bit but let's talk about humility for a moment because this is another really important aspect of humble inquiry we're going to talk about there are different kinds of humility and what I would like you to do at the moment at your tables and if you are along the back wall because this room is way more full than I thought it would be find a group of 3 or 4 people you can talk to and I want you to think about different kinds of relationships you have in your workplace as you think about these different kinds of relationships what I would like you to do and with a smaller group I get them to do it on stickies I'm just going to ask you to do this verbally today is as you identify different kinds of relationships what I'd like you to think about is is that a relationship of equals or is it a not equal relationship so I'm going to give you about 2 minutes to have that discussion in groups well that's Mike I'm going to ask what do you think an equal relationship is as opposed to an unequal relationship I have ideas about that but they may not be the same idea that you have but where do you think you have interactions with people where you treat people as equals or do you have relationships with people where you see some people as being above you on some basis or possibly below you on some basis but I'm not going to tell you what that basis is because that's really going to depend on your context okay 2 minutes what kinds of relationships do you have so oops that's not where we're at okay thank you we'll get there awesome I love doing this it's like magic I love the fact that everybody is talking the fact that it's it's wonderful don't get me wrong and I feel kind of bad interrupting you but in the interest of getting through this workshop I can have to so was every group able to at least come up with it was there any group where you're like we can't think of any unequal relationships everybody at my workplace is entirely equal anybody want to put okay awesome because like if that's the case I would like to work where you were um but I'm just curious where do you work if you don't mind sharing yeah great thank you thank you I was intrigued because so many of the organizations that we work with are by nature very hierarchical right whether it is rigidly defined in an organizational structure or whether it is defined in our heads according to some certain rules and we're going to dig into those rules most of the workplaces we work in there really is a pecking order there are some people who are more equal than we are and there are some people who we perceive as being less equal than we are and that often colors the way that we interact with them so there's three in the book humble inquiry shine talks about there's three kinds of humility maybe there's more but I think the three categorizations he offers are useful models there's basic humility which is humility based on um kind of status that you just have for example the respect you might have for elders for your parents or your grandparents because that's just the natural of things that is basic humility in a rigidly hierarchical organization there is an expectation that people up here are to be respected by the people who are here on the org chart and we don't question them and we don't treat them the same way that we treat the people who are here or the people who are here um so that's basic humility optional humility is that humbleness we feel in the presence of people who have accomplished something great that we're in awe of or that we really respect or admire so you know I have a thing about astronauts so it's like when I meet an astronaut oh my god there you went in space that's optional humility or people who have you know made great feats of intellectual ability or athletic ability or our favorite music stars or movie celebrities the kind of humility that we feel that we are not worthy to be in your presence optional humility um here and now humility though this is the kind that we really want to cultivate when we're thinking about humble inquiry recognizing that we are dependent on one another regardless of the roles that we have in the organization regardless of the positional influence that we may have based on our title, based on where our office is, based on our seniority in the organization it's recognizing that we depend on each other to get things done and you might have knowledge regardless of our respective roles in the organization you probably have knowledge that I don't have I probably have knowledge that you don't have and in order for us to be successful we need to pull that knowledge together so there's those three levels of humility basic humility optional humility and here and now humility um and you know what I think even though the room is kind of crowded I'm going to make you do the wacky option for this workshop what I'd like you to do at your table is divide into groups of three and what I'm going to do is give you sorry I'm just figuring out the logistics of this given that there are people lined up at the wall because actually what I at your table I'd like you to divide into three groups if you are not at a table find six or eight people and divide into three groups and what I would like you to do in your groups is we're going to do a little bit of body storming this is going to be cozy in this room but otherwise I'm going to make you draw and I'd rather do the body storming because I don't think everybody has a marker and a pen and by body storming what I'm asking you to do is I'm going to give you a minute to create a scene that represents one of the three kinds of humility so I'm going to get you to create with your bodies just a little tableau that this shows an example of basic humility and how would you position each other relative to each other to illustrate basic humility how would you create a scene that shows optional humility how would you create a scene that creates here and now humility everybody will be doing this so we will all be looking equally ridiculous together ok so find at your table break into groups of three if you're along the wall as I said find a group of six or eight people to work with in your group of three sorry in your larger group break into three groups each of you picks one kind of humility each of you creates the scene you're only going to show that scene to the other people in your group we're not going to go around the whole room smaller groups I do that this is too many people but I want you to think about what does each kind of humility look like in practice four minutes to do that at your table off you go you can have a group of three you might want to pair up with people at the back of the room or join with this table join with this table is the best thing so basic is something like a child to their grandparents or you know subjects to the emperor or something like that where it's just built birth by birth this is an unequal relationship or by some sort of status that is kind of unchangeable it's just who we are and so that is the natural aspect of our relationship optional optional and then here and now is when we depend on each other so I am expecting to see everybody standing up and moving around a little bit if you are sitting at your tables I know you are not doing the exercise doing body storming sometimes I do this with drawing but I am like now you got to get up and move around okay so there is a minute left I want to see some posing happening at your table okay there we go so did everybody at least get a chance to talk through what the different kinds of humility might look like you didn't actually act it out I was hoping for a little more drama but the room is kind of cozy so did everybody have a chance to think about what it looks like and sort of the different levels and stuff like awesome so what I would like you to do now again I think I warned you at the beginning I am going to make you do most of the work in this workshop my goal for a workshop is for me to do as little of the talking as possible for you to do as much of your talking and learning from each other is grab a pair somebody at your table maybe not the partner you worked with before so find a new friend to speak to and what I would like you to discuss is think about people in your life that you admire and respect think about some of the people who you really feel that kind of who you have those kinds of admiring and respectful trustful relationships with and the question that I would like you to discuss in your pair is what type of humility do you feel towards them of those three kinds and what do you do what do you do what do you feel what are the thoughts you have that expresses that kind of humility in this relationship what are the behaviors how do you interact that reflects that kind of humility so find a partner and I'll give you a couple minutes to talk about that idea okay thank you thank you if you can put your hand up and help fantastic it's okay I'm not going to keep you from talking for long but now that you've explored that idea when you think about the people who you admire and respect and how you behave towards them what I'd like you to do is have your pairs come together at the table and as a larger group the question that I'd like you to consider and discuss at your table is I want you to tie this back to the different kinds of listening that we thought about just a few minutes ago and I want you to think about the people who you admire and respect how do they pay attention to you and other people what levels of listening do they demonstrate how does that make you feel so think about that how does that listening tie to that relationship and what's the feeling that it creates I'll give you a moment to discuss that and a little larger groups at your table in fact I will give you about two minutes I think I'm good for time because we go to 5.15 right? yeah because 90 minutes perfect I'm right on schedule thank you can you copy this please? absolutely thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you excellent thank you any aha moments out there about how there's a connection between listening and respect any observations that you want to share so let's hear from you guys are pretty loud let's hear from somebody over there what was something you noticed it seems so obvious and yet we kind of forget that right and this is a critical thing and this is a critical thing it's hard to respect or to feel respected by somebody who doesn't listen to you so if as leaders we want to create a feeling of trust and respect maybe we need to focus on not quite so much talking and telling and a little bit more listening and paying attention any other observations that came up in your conversations at the back so leading questions like questions that drew you out not leading questions that we're trying to take you in a specific direction because that's where we're going at the moment but this is critical right in order to ask good questions that reflect true curiosity that are opening up the conversation we need to be listening well we need to be listening respectfully not listening to think about what is my agenda here and how am I going to drive the conversation in that direction that kind of conversation that help build that sense of trust and mutual respect when we think somebody is trying to drive us in a particular way that tends to create a completely different impression I'll say so I want to move into talking about questions a little bit because this is the other half of that skill that goes with inquiry listening but then expressing our curiosity through open questions that expand the conversation rather than shut down the conversation so what I want you to think about for a couple of seconds I'm not even going to have you talk about this group but I just want to give you a couple of seconds of silence to think about what are the kinds of questions you get asked in the work that you do and which kinds get you interested in conversation with the person who's asking them so I'm just going to give you 30 seconds to reflect silently about what your experience of being asked things in your workplaces okay so now that everybody's had a chance to sit in silence because it's been a pretty noisy room and for introverts like me it's like this is good I want to talk about questions for a couple of minutes then we're going to do an exercise so there's many different kinds of questions that you can ask and that we use all the time sometimes we use questions to express curiosity but often we use questions to direct the conversation or to show off how much we know or to tell people how to do something but we're trying to be polite about it so we ask a question that isn't really a question at all we do this a lot with our children please could you go and do something that's not really a question because you know please could you go clean your room concrete example that's not really a question because I'm not asking you if you could I am telling you to do it I'm just sticking a please on the front question mark on the end but it's not really a question it's a very directive kind of question and a lot of the times when we ask questions they are directing the conversation a certain way they're rhetorical questions where I'm asking a question but I'm not really expecting you to answer it there are questions that are very diagnostic questions where I'm asking actual questions but I am trying to direct a question down a particular path why are you doing what you're doing or have you thought about doing this thing there are questions questions are often very confrontational and we use questions as a way of pushing our own agendas and we need to get better here's me telling you I'm telling you rather than asking you fail we need to get better at asking targeted questions that reflect that sense of curiosity that you just described that help us open up the conversation and share ideas about what's going on rather than telling each other this is what I think this is what I want you to do and one technique that you can use there's this idea that also comes from the coaching world about powerful questions powerful questions are questions that open up the conversation they're not directive they don't have a yes or no answer they invite curiosity and this is Deb's powerful questions triangle which is a useful tool to think about what makes a question powerful questions that are which questions or yes or no questions do not tend to be powerful questions they shut down the conversation right away did you get this done will we deliver on time and on budget that's not inviting a conversation that's inviting an answer and probably the answer you think I want to hear questions that start with who, when and where are often a little more opening who is responsible for doing this now sometimes that's actually just a blaming question who am I going to go and yell at because things aren't going my way but they're opening up about what's going on here powerful questions questions that really invite conversations 10 more and I'm simplifying here a little bit but tend to start with how or what or why but why is a real double-edged sword and I want to point out that it depends a lot on context and it depends a lot on that relationship and that sense of trust and curiosity and humility that exists between the person who's asking and the person who is being asked because if we have a relationship that we feel that we are equally respectful that there is a sense of equality in our relationship if I ask hey why did something go wrong or how did that how did that issue manage to make it into production we can probably have a respectful, helpful, constructive conversation about that if I come along and go how did that get into production why did that happen that's not going to invite curiosity that's going to escalate defensiveness and shut down the conversation right away so while wording is important context, tone the nature of the relationship is also very important as well so a question that can be powerful in one context can totally shut down the conversation in another context to explore the idea of powerful questions there's an exercise that I'm going to ask you to do at your tables and I don't know where the people around the room are going to do this because you're going to need to find a flat surface you can work on the floor if there's enough floor space you could work on the counter and I have a couple of extra packs of the cards up front I also distributed two packs at most tables so maybe what I'm going to ask is if you're sitting at a table rather than using both packs if you can share a pack of the cards with a group that forms from the people who are standing around the room so that they can work in smaller groups because they probably have less space that would be a good thing the exercise is very simple you've got a list of I think there are 12 questions in here and what I would like you to do in your group is sort them based on what we've learned about powerful questions based on how the question makes you feel sort them from what is the most powerful question in the pile put that at the top of your list of the most powerful question in the pile put that at the bottom of your stack and then rank all the others in between so I've got a couple more sets of cards and I'm going to start a timer I'm going to give you about six minutes to do this okay does anybody else need there we go okay if there's another group around the wall that needs a pack ask one of the tables share one of their decks with you so if as a group you're satisfied with the order of the questions what I would invite you to do with the rest of your time is on one of the blank cards take one of the questions that you identified as really not powerful at all and think about how you might reword it to make it a more powerful question now some of them you might not be able to fix but maybe you can think of a better question that would invite the kind of discussion that you want okay excellent as I was saying if you've ordered them satisfactorily use the remaining time to see if you can improve on one of the questions at the bottom of the pile you can write it on you can write it on one of the blank cards is there a way that you could ask this question that would invite conversation rather than escalate defensiveness okay just if I can have your attention for a moment please thank you while you're ordering we're not done yet but I just want to let you know if at your table you've ordered your cards because some tables are still working on that what I would invite you to do is take one of the blank cards in the deck or take a piece of paper if you didn't get the blank card and try to improve one of the questions that you put at the bottom how might you ask that in a different way in terms of interpretation rather than raised defensiveness the intent would be to expose whatever information this is trying to get at yeah yeah that would be great because that probably that is not the same intent eventually we might discover but it might be let's use a bit of generous interpretation here and assume that this isn't necessarily designed to make somebody go I want to find out who's responsible but it's like I have a problem that we want to solve and in my mind the first step of solving it is going well how did it happen who's responsible for it but this is a much better question for getting at that because nobody's going to feel attacked asking that question this question is going to make people feel well not me nothing to see here it's over there go talk to them okay you guys are getting so good at this excellent so hopefully everybody's had enough time to complete the exercise I just I'm going to pick on you guys because you came and talked to me rather than asking the room to give you an example what did you put at the top of your pile as a powerful or the most powerful questions how can we make a schedule that meets the deadline that's a great question because that opens up possibilities what did you identify as the least person who is responsible for the build breaking that's a question that as soon as those words come out of somebody's mouth everybody's going to start feeling defensive just out of curiosity how many people put that at the bottom of the list that's a common now I want you to notice that not everybody in the room put up their hand right because different people interpret these questions different ways in different contexts and other groups may have picked different top you know most powerful or least powerful questions the reason that I wanted to use you as an example though is because I know from the conversation you guys found a much better way to ask the question related to who is going you know who is responsible for the build breaking that might open up the conversation and what was the question that you came up with instead can we discuss strategies to avoid build failures yeah if you couldn't hear it can we discuss strategies to avoid build failures because that giving it a generous interpretation that might be the intent of this question we're not blame storming it's just that hey we know there's a problem and we figure the first step in solving the problem is figuring out where does the problem reside so we can figure out who we need to work with the difficulty is if you start who is responsible for chances are pretty good that people are going to go not me we'll talk to those guys over there you know and we can't have a constructive conversation about it can we discuss strategies to avoid build failure it's pretty important we're experiencing a lot of build failures you're probably going to have a lot of people who are a little more receptive to wow that's something that's bugging me too I would really like to help solve that problem as opposed to whoa no not me go look the other way nothing to see here so powerful questions are a really important tool for encouraging curiosity encouraging responsible in constructive communication and building that sense of mutual trust and mutual learning in an organization so first of all I want to give a shout out to Deb Price who many of you saw on stage this morning Carlton Nettleton who are the people who designed this exercise this exercise is available from Deb's website and it's in the references it used to be a bigger game and I think she's changed the URL but you can go and download this exercise in a few different languages and use it with your teams if you find it helpful so please do and again thank you to Deb and Carlton the other thing that I want to mention about questions there's lots of resources out on the web about powerful questions and there's lists of them that you can download and practice using Roger Schwartz who's one of my favorite authors he wrote a skilled facilitator and wrote a book that's smart leaders smarter teams has a has a rule about asking questions that I want to share with you because this is a good way to generate to improve your ability to ask questions on the fly if you're going to ask a question and you're a little bit worried about how it's going to come across test it out in your head appending the words you idiot to the end of it if this sounds natural perhaps you need to pause and rethink the question before it actually comes out of your mouth so that is Roger Schwartz's rule and it has helped me out many times I share it with you in hopes that will help you out if a question sounds good with you idiot at the end of it it is probably not a good question or you need to at least think about your tone or your posture and all of those other things so what I would invite you to do for a couple of seconds is just think about what you've learned about powerful questions and I want you to take a moment and think about is there a context coming up later this week or next week if you're going to be at the conference all week where you in your day-to-day work life could make use of a more powerful question to have a better conversation take a couple of moments to reflect on this and maybe jot yourself a note to remind yourself of your intent so that when you open your notebook next week you can go ah okay in this meeting I'm going to come prepared with some powerful questions okay so as we move into the last bit of our time together today I want to explore a little bit why is this so hard because it seems really simple listening carefully and asking good questions is a really effective way to build trust and build relationships and you know positive positive relationships between the people we work with so why don't we do this this is a really difficult thing to do in practice if it weren't hard none of us would be here right now we'd be off having a beer or enjoying another con workshop it's really difficult because a lot of our organizations are structured I'm going to give you some of the reasons and I'm going to give you a couple minutes to talk about what's going on in your particular context but we have organizational we have cultural biases in our society and our organization towards task accomplishment over relationship building particularly in North American business culture we tend to view building relationships with our coworkers as completely secondary to getting stuff done together we think oh yeah it's important to do team building it's important to get to know our coworkers because that's what allows us to get stuff done not because wow relationships are really important and maybe that will enable us to get stuff done but relationships are really no no no we're going to get stuff done so yeah I've got to start being friends with my coworkers not a helpful attitude we tend to focus on individual achievement over teamwork that devalues relationships as well maybe my team members are useful to me only and so far as they help me achieve my goals and do well on my performance assessment and help me move forward right that's a different attitude than wow we're all in this together and we depend on each other for success and often there are organizational structures in place that reinforce that yeah we want you to be a really strong team but we are still going to assess your performance individually hmm and then we're surprised about how that works out um telling and demonstrating your expertise is often perceived as being much more valuable than asking we rise up the ranks in our organizations because of how capable we are how expert we are how much we know and to stand in front of a group of people and say I actually don't know an answer I think we need to figure it out together that's not perceived as be great leadership that's we how did that bozo get in that position if they don't know that you know um and that makes it really hard to have those kinds of conversation makes it hard for leaders in the organization people who are in positions of positional authority to demonstrate that kind of vulnerability to show curiosity because there's so many things going on in the environment that suggest that is not what we expect of leadership we expect leaders to know all the things um and there are lots of things built into you know cultural aspects how our society works where telling is expected rather than asking or not sharing information either up or down the chain is expected uh and it's hard to overcome those patterns so what I want to do for a couple of minutes as uh because we've only got about 15 minutes left is at your table uh uh yeah actually at your table I'm gonna stop talking at you for a moment I want you to think about in your work environment what are the norms that determine how you relate to people who are higher in status or lower in status or even possibly equal in status to you but that makes it hard to assume the stance of humble inquiry what are the things that are in place in terms of how your workplace works whether it's rules whether it's processes whether it's how people sit I could be any number of things what are the things that are in place that would make it difficult to adopt a stance of humbling query on a more regular basis and what are the strategies that you might use in order to help be make yourself be more comfortable asking questions and building relationships with other people okay so I'd like you to I'm gonna give you about five minutes to have that conversation at your table what gets in the way what gets in the way of being able to do this what organizational barriers exist what internal psychological barriers exist because a lot of this sometimes it's external processes sometimes it's about how we think about the rules we invent in our head right so what are the things that get in the way of assuming a stance of humble inquiry and come up with some ideas for strategies that you might use to get around some of those barriers okay I'm gonna give you four minutes at your table to have that conversation at your table or grab a few friends if you're standing along the wall and have the conversation with them people show up as red people see that they're still being judged they're still being monitored so even if you want to be humble but that's what senior management who might not have an agile mind might not have an agile mind they might feel that that's leadership because you're driving across through this thing how do you change that that's tough because you have to coach upwards so things that you might do in that context sorry let me turn off the mic for a second it's hard to coach upwards but the two strategies that you might take first of all is maybe help draw their attention to how these kinds of processes are shutting down the flow of information that they need to be really informed about what's going on in their organization if you can find ways to demonstrate that you want me to do this but it's resulting in these consequences that are not what we want how can we change the process I'll say my simpler kind of snarky answer is buy them a copy of humble inquiry and leave it on the desk this is a great book about leadership or find a good blog post or something but start the conversation about how we as leaders need to model if we really want to build trust if we want to build transparency in our organization then it's not about being agile it's about attaining better outcomes maybe we need to think about how we present ourselves to the organization to take a different approach is that helpful? you're welcome you're welcome awesome thank you very much for coming back to the focus very quickly I hope at your table you had a chance to identify some of the barriers that exist in your environment and to maybe share some strategies for how you can work around them to wrap up what I want to do is share a couple of things that you personally can do because maybe in that conversation you thought about organizational structures you thought about processes that need to change there's stuff rules that are beyond your control one of the first principles of change that I have certainly come to appreciate more and more in my career is if you want to affect change you need to start with what you do because that's what you can control and so some of the strategies that you might use to sort of increase the practice of humble inquiry in your day to day life and in your work life and maybe sort of spread it through your organization a bit is first of all increase your level of self-awareness pay more attention to how you're listening how you're asking questions and deliberately cultivate a stance of curiosity think about how can you show more curiosity and maybe strip out some of the assumptions and judgments that creep into the questions that you ask or the kinds of conversations that you have think about how do I build relationship with the people that I work with is every time I talk to people in my organization I'm coming to ask them how it's going and when are things going to be delivered and how come that problem happened maybe I actually need to spend more time on just getting to know the other people in my organization as people and not in an insincere way because that doesn't work out very well but just think about how do we get to know each other how do we start to share information about who we are as people in whatever way that is appropriate in your context but focus on that relationship building and doing that especially when things are tense and anxious and people emotions are running high slow down a little bit put that effort into especially when things are stressful take a step back take a deep breath and think about how do we help to build relationship here how can I focus on getting to know people and not just focusing on solving the problem because that doesn't tend to drive trust and mutual respect and mutual learning the most important thing though and I think this is for a lot of us we need to practice humble inquiry on ourselves sometimes the worst conversations we have the most task focused conversations are the ones in our own head with ourselves why didn't you do that that you idiot rule the little voice in the back of my head asks a lot of those you idiot questions and taking a step back and thinking about how do I practice humble inquiry on myself how do I develop a better relationship with myself and become more curious about why things are going on the way they're going on in terms of how I think the questions that I make that's a really good place to start and then you can think about how do I apply this to my relationships with other people so just to recap really quickly go back to that slide humble inquiry it's the fine art of drawing someone out of asking questions to which you do not already know an answer because in that case maybe a question isn't appropriate and building a relationship with curiosity and interest in the other person because relationships is how we build trust it's how we build mutual respect and mutual learning and it will allow us to become more effective together in dealing with complex situations to do this we need to think about our listening skills we need to think about what else is going on in our environment that is reinforcing inequalities how we interact we're not going to eradicate systemic things that sort of result in in equal status but in our day to day interactions with people in the workplace regardless of what our respective status is how do we treat each other more equally, respectfully listening well asking better questions so that we can build learning together asking better questions that's key so I would really encourage you to think about how can I come prepared print out a list of powerful questions and have them on your phone or tack them in the back of your notebook and practice them I would encourage you if there's one experiment that I would invite you to try as a result of this session think of a good question take one of these or do a little bit of research online and find a different powerful question that appeals to you to find three ways you can just drop that into conversation next week maybe in a meeting, maybe in hallway conversations but start to build that reflex of asking questions that show curiosity that invite vulnerability that really focus on building that relationship so I would encourage you to think about how can you use that next week just to wrap up I just want to share I will make these slides available on the conference site but if you want to learn more about this by the book I think there is a newer edition than the one that I show in the slide I think Edgar Shin is put out a new edition with his son but it is an excellent book it's a quick read, it's easy to read I think it's only five chapters long worth every minute if you'd like to run the powerful questions exercise with your team I'll update the URL actually because this is her old URL but you can download this kit and other information from Deb's site and very easily run this with your team whether it's with a team or with a leadership team to start people thinking about how do we ask more powerful questions there's also some great stuff at the Google from the Google rework site about how as leaders in the organization what are the behaviors that we can practice in order to increase psychological safety in our workplaces and that's very much all about humble inquiry how can we create trust how can we demonstrate vulnerability and grow curiosity in order to build trust and build relationships in our organization so I would like to thank you very much for coming out to play with me this afternoon I appreciate your enthusiasm and your participation and I hope you found this valuable I really appreciate you coming out with me, thank you