Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling QUOTES

21 " 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 the other person. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

22 " About this book In this book I will first define and explain what I mean by Humble Inquiry in Chapter 1. To fully understand humility, it is helpful to differentiate three kinds of humility: 1) the humility that we feel around elders and dignitaries; 2) the humility that we feel in the presence of those who awe us with their achievements; and 3) Here-and-now Humility, which results from our being dependent from time to time on someone else in order to accomplish a task that we are committed to. This will strike some readers as academic hairsplitting, but it is the recognition of this third type of humility that is the key to Humble Inquiry and to the building of positive relationships. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

23 " Finally, in Chapter 7, I provide some suggestions for how we can increase our ability and desire to engage in more Humble Inquiry. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

24 " How Does Asking Build Relationships? "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

25 " When we don’t get acknowledgment or feel that we are giving more than we are getting out of conversations or feel talked down to, we become anxious, disrespected, and humiliated. Humble "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

26 " The culture of Do and Tell does not teach us how to change pace, decelerate, take stock of what we are doing, observe ourselves and others, try new behaviors, build new relationships. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

27 " Doctors engage patients in one-way conversations in which they ask only enough questions to make a diagnosis and sometimes make misdiagnoses because they don’t ask enough questions before they begin to tell patients what they should do. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

28 " The answer runs counter to some important aspects of U.S. culture— we must become better at asking and do less telling in a culture that overvalues telling. It has always bothered me how even ordinary conversations tend to be defined by what we tell rather than by what we ask. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

29 " we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it. We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption). We "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

30 " But especially if you are dependent on others—if you are the boss or senior person trying to increase the likelihood that your subordinates will help you and be open with you—then Humble Inquiry will not only be desirable but essential. Why is this so difficult? We need next to look at the cultural forces that favor telling. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

31 " 4 The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

32 " Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult? THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

33 " What are you working on?” Because Ken was genuinely interested, the pair would end up in a long conversation that would be satisfying both technically and personally. Even when the company had over 100,000 "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

34 " How does one produce a climate in which people will speak up, bring up information that is safety related, and even correct superiors or those of higher status when they are about to make a mistake? "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

35 " Why does this not occur routinely? Don’t we all know how to ask questions? Of course we think we know how to ask, but we fail to notice how often even our questions are just another form of telling—rhetorical or just testing whether what we think is right. We are biased toward telling instead of asking because we live in a pragmatic, problem-solving culture in which knowing things and telling others what we know is valued. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

36 " 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. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

37 " (1) Learn to see, feel, and curb the impulses to lash out; (2) Learn to make a habit of listening and figuring out what is going on before taking action; and (3) Try harder to hear, to understand, and acknowledge what others are trying to express to you. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

38 " 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. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

39 " The U.S. culture is 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. We are arrogant and deep down believe we can fix anything—“The impossible just takes a little longer.” We are impatient and, with information technology’s ability to do things faster, we are even more impatient. Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it. "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling

40 " We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption). "

― Edgar H. Schein , Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling