GA 380 | The Concept of Humble Inquiry with Peter and Ed Schein

I can ask you and require you to give me an answer, but if I can sort of figure out a way to open up the dialogue to increase the information flow, then the questions that I don't even know to ask, you're gonna answer.

Today I'm very excited to welcome Ed and Peter Schein to the show. Now, as you may recognize the name Ed Schine and Peter Schein, they've written a books and very influential books, I would say, within the, the business world, management world. And then I really believe, as you'll hear me say during the episode, sort of some of these books are really mandatory reading, I would say, for those of us in the continuous improvement world. But the book that we're going to hone in on today is called Humble Inquiry. Now the first edition for this book came out, you know, I believe it was maybe 2013. I think it was anyhow, 2021. They, they released a second edition, a revised and expanded edition and it's a won wonderful update. They've added some case studies and just put some really nice additions to this book. And so I really do encourage you to pick this book up and give it a read because, you know, for those of us in the lean movement, you know, those of us that practice scientific thinking, we talk a lot about, you know, asking good questions and being curious and working to overcome or move past our threshold of knowledge by experimenting and learning. And that's really kind of at the heart of Humble Inquiry. It's about, you know, asking and listening, asking and listening. And so it's this wonderful, wonderful way to just reinforce all the things that we're trying to do within the continuous improvement world. So now I will tell you, this is a long episode. It's nearly an hour long, perhaps even a little bit over an hour. So maybe listen to in a few different drives into work or something like that. But it's really powerful and I really would encourage you to give it a listen to from the from the start to the finish. Now show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 380380. Now again, there's going to be lots of links in today's show notes. We're going to link to all of their books and I even want to link to. We didn't actually talk about it in the podcast, but there's a video series that my friend and the Shines friend Skip Stewart did recently where he interviewed Ed and Peter. And I want to put those links to those YouTube videos in the show notes as well, because they actually go a little bit deeper. Not a little bit, a lot deeper. There's much more content than what we were able to cover today, so I'm going to put those in the show notes, too. So again, GembaPodcast.com, look for episode 380. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Ed and Peter, welcome to the show. How are you guys?

Great.

Glad to be here.

Yeah. Well, I am super, super excited. You know, we were talking before we hit record. I saw Ed had logged on a little bit early. I was like, oh, I'm going to log on early. So we had a nice chat, you know, and then, Peter, you came on. So really, really excited for today's episode. I am a big, huge fan of your work. Today we're going to actually talk about one of your. One of your books, Humble Inquiry. I know there's many other ones, and maybe we can give a highlight of what those ones are. But. But today it's Humble Inquiry. And, yeah, just. It's a really powerful book. So I'm going to tell everybody listening right now, this lean audience of ours, if you have not read Humble Inquiry, okay, you got to do this. You pause. Right now, the podcast is. Hit pause. And then you open up Amazon or your favorite bookstore website and you go and you order the book. It is. This is. I don't say this often, but this is like, if you are in our lean movement and you've not read this book, you've got to read it. You really do. Now, it's not. They're not going to talk about lean or anything like that, but it's. It's all of the human behavioral side of lean that we're also passionate about. It's. It's what this book's all about. So I would say there is. There's your required reading for your next book is. Is Humble Inquiry. So. So please go out and order that. Okay. So go. Go ahead and hit pause if you need to. All right. So anyhow, Ed and Peter, as you guys know, we do like to begin all of our episodes with our guests sharing a quote. So do you guys have one?

So I'll start. This is Peter. You know, this is one that's really been sort of top of mind for me. It's like, I probably think about it first thing every day, and it's from a very obscure T.S. eliot play in 1934, but somehow the Turner phrase just really captured me. He's describing humans being sort of struggling Existentially just with, with the struggle to survive and to thrive. And he's describing the creation of systems. And he says that humans trying to escape the darkness by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. And to me, that really captures the essence of what we're talking about. Because if we can design, and especially in this world that we're entering, where automation is everywhere, AI is everywhere, augmented reality is everywhere, and we're always striving. And my background is in Silicon Valley, so I've seen a lot of this from the sort of the dawn of the Internet age of designing systems that are so perfect that the human beings that are motivated to be good to each other and to do good things together will no longer need to be, because the system is so perfect at drawing what it needs to out of us. It's that inversion that we never want to be in a situation where we've designed a system so perfect that no one will need to be good. We still need to be good. We need to be good to each other. We need to be good at listening, we need to be good at asking, we need to be good at managing and leading. Good has something different than perfect. And that's without even getting into all the implications about improvement. Anyway, let's be careful about dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.

Yeah, I love that one. I've never heard that. That's great. Ed, did you have one?

Absolutely. I made one up and I would love it to be perpetual. It builds in a way on what Peter said, but it's how I feel. Society and organizations are not made up of a bunch of individuals. Societies and organizations are made up of a bunch of relationships.

I love that one. Yeah. Very, very powerful. You know, in fact, in our Lean movement, we were often saying that there's a lot of tools, you know, in our toolbox, so to speak, that we have that we use to, you know, improve quality or productivity or whatever it might be. But in the end, what we're passionate about in our movement is that Lean is a people based system first and foremost. And it's people and relationships and harmony that make it work. And, and without those people and without those relationships, without the harmony, it won't work. You can make some progress with our tools, but very, very limited without the people and the relationship side of things. So, yeah, wonderful. I was wondering if you guys could just maybe, in case people aren't familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your backgrounds and how you've got into this line of work and maybe what you're up to these days.

Well, I'll pick up since I'm the older one. So I have more to say. Maybe. I started as my family was academic. My father was a professor of physics, so I was going to be a professor no matter what. I took that for granted, became a highly trained experimental social psychologist, but then was seduced into my first postdoctoral job after four years in the army, was seduced into going to the MIT business school rather than going to a psychology department. And that proved to be very important because I first of all learned that I had to apply my field. It's not enough just to publish research, you have to apply it. And I learned that the process of teaching and consulting and applying social psychology was a relational issue. I couldn't just stand up there and tell people what. What was what. I had age them. I learned this in the human relations workshops, the T groups. And I learned it most in the consulting where I would try to fix things and never work until I built enough of a relationship that I was being to help them fix things. And so from that point on, I went deeper and deeper into helping culture, group dynamics, but in a practitioner way rather than in an academic way. And that's been how my career has evolved. I feel I'm more of a practitioner than an academic in many ways.

Yeah. And so my career started at the dinner table with Ed. But then I went undergrad out here to Stanford and thought that I was going to follow in the psychology footsteps of my father. But I went through the same realization. And it probably was just good indoctrination on Ed's part that what's interesting is the groups and the relationships around the individual, not the individual, him or herself, generally. At the time that I was the Stanford Psychology department was of great note at that time that I was there because it was only a few years after the Stanford Prison experiment, which taught a lot of good things and a lot of bad things about human behavior. But I kind of quickly recognized that what to me was interesting was how groups and cultures form. So I majored in social anthropology. And I have found with great pleasure in the last few years. A lot of that stuff, a lot of that fodder, a lot of that sort of agar in the petri dish that I learned as an undergrad stuff just keeps nourishing me. I keep finding stuff that I vaguely remember reading in undergrad. And now all of a sudden it makes sense and. But anyway, after that I had a long Business career started in strategy consulting and then had my IT epiphanies and worked at Apple for a while and some startups in Silicon Valley, and then spent many years in corporate development at Sun Microsystems, where while we were very much an intellectual property and technology driven company, what interested me in way more as I was working on mergers and acquisitions was how we were going to get these teams of talented people to join Sun's culture, or how sun was going to evolve their culture around acquired or merged in teams. And so integration is sort of a part of the process of M and A. But at some level there's really no other process that matters more than that sort of mutual and shared assimilation of when you grow a company that way, when you grow inorganically, that mutual assimilation is so critical, yet oftentimes it's subjugated to lesser importance relative to the accretive economics of mergers and acquisitions. At any rate, I found something inside of me that after I left Sun I just sort of wanted to pursue further. And my dad, Ed, had moved out here in 2011 and a few years after that we were talking and decided that we would start our Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute together and use that as a way to sort of hang a shingle and write books together and do consulting projects together. So I, after many, many, many years, sort of rejoined the family business and we've been doing it for a while. We've written four books together and love talking to folks like you who are coming at it from a different angle. But I think we share so many values in how we think about work and improvement and.

Great, great. Well, I'm so glad that you did join forces because we're all better off for it. So let's jump in. So I'm going to start with some basic questions to sort of warm up and then we'll, we'll get into some, some more meat and potatoes, if you will. But I want to start again. We're going to talk today about the book Humble Inquiry. If you haven't bought that book yet, you need to do it. So. But what is Humble Inquiry? If we just want to mean humble, it's like inquiry asking, being humble. What does it mean, humble Inquiry?

Well, what it means is that if society is all about relationships, we need to understand how relationships form. And they form in one of two ways. They can be transactional. I go to a counter and I say, show me all the different watches and which one should I buy? And I have a transactional relationship with that person because I've asked A transactional question. Humble inquiry personalizes that relationship. Let's say that the guy shows me a bunch of Swiss watches, and I get intrigued that the only thing he's showing me is Swiss watches. I can then choose a personal question. I could say, it's interesting that you've got all these other watches, but why you, the particular clerk, why are you just showing me Swiss watches? Particularly because I was born in Switzerland. Did you somehow I now force him out of his role, and we now have a choice together. He can pick up on that and say, yeah, and loosen up and say, I really love Swiss watches. Then I can ask him, how come? And he tells me about his history, and before we know it, we have moved from a transactional level one relationship into a level two personalized beginning relationship. Now, if we don't both play the game, it might not work. I might get stiff and say, all right, enough of that. How much do they cost? And he might say, well, I always do it this way, and draw a curtain on himself. But if we each kind of discover something interesting in each other, and so that could be someone on an airplane sitting next to me or a stranger in a bus stop, whatever. If we discover from the initial personalized question, the other responds, then we are getting into what we call level two relationship, and how did we get there? We got there through one or both of us asking humble inquiry questions, questions to which we did not already know the answer. We really wanted to know something from the other person. Long winded. But I hope I've described the process, the way of defining it as the definition doesn't tell you. I say ask something personal. Most people go blank. They don't know what that means.

Ron, if I can just fill in a little bit, There's a little around this that I want to fill in. One is that we've written a number of books in what's referred to as the Humble Leadership series with Barrett Kohler. The reason I bring up humble is that we often get the question, does that mean I have to somehow adapt my personality to be humble? I'm not humble. I'm very confident. I'm very arrogant. I don't want to be humble. I'm not going to be successful being humble. And that's not what we're saying. We're saying humble means embracing the fact that in a world that's increasingly complex and dynamic, and we use the Vuca term, we like the Vuca term. You don't know enough. And humble means you embrace the fact that there's More information out there that's going to help you. It's going to help you make better decisions. It's going to help you ask better questions. That our job as humans is to keep learning and to keep gathering as much information as we can to come to the right decisions, the decisions that are best for our group, for our team, or maybe just for ourselves. But humility means embracing the fact that there's more out there that you need to know and that if you're so arrogant that. That you don't need to be humble in that regard, then this. Some blinquiry stuff might not really appeal.

Yeah.

The other bit of background I just wanted to share is we have this little mnemonic that we use to describe kind of the attitude. And the attitude first starts with M, with motivation. And that motivation is you actually do care. So you do care what the other person's thinking. And in some cases, like that transaction at the watch store, ED may not care. And so mumble inquiry may not be important if they're maintaining that transactional relationship. But if you do care and you're curious. Right. So curiosity obviously is very important. And that's. It partly goes to that. How do you actually get to the point where you. Where you ask a question that you don't already know the answer to? Well, it's because you're curious and we're all naturally curious. It's. The question is, do you allow that to enter the establishment of this relationship in a work context? Oftentimes we don't. We stay in our lanes. We stay in our roles. We're not curious because we feel that we're on our path and we're going to stay on that path. And curiosity is just distraction. We're talking about getting beyond that. That's the motivation. Then the next part is you recognize that you are engaging in an intervention. This is not a passive relationship. You are intervening in that relationship. So that's an I. And you're intervening by learning and training yourself how to ask the right kinds of questions. But similarly, you're deep listening. You're actively listening. And that's part of the intervention. And so that's the I and then the C. The last part, when the acronym here is mic, M, I, C is you're contributing, you're contributing to building that relationship. The key there is that you get to some point of what ED likes to refer to as here and now or situational empathy. You don't necessarily have to be truly empathic to that person's life history. And their life story. But in the moment you need to express that sort of situational empathy. And part of that, part of convincing the other person of that empathy is that you're going to reveal something about yourself so you're going to contribute. This is not one way, this is a two way relationship building process. And so all of again, even more long winded than my father. But I will just say that that our little acronym there, Mike, and the attitude is about sharing the mic. Yeah, it's a sharing process. It's, it's bidirectional.

So I've got this big long list of questions and I'm going to go off the questions because some things are just coming into my mind as you're talking. So I want to ask a follow up question. I don't care who responds. But I'm wondering, you know, something that I struggle with. Personally. I think about this podcast even when I'm interviewing someone and they're talking. And so part of my job is I gotta keep the podcast going and all the rest of it. But also I really do need to listen to understand what they're saying. But so often it's so easy to listen so I can respond right instead of listening to really understand, you know, and that's something that I personally struggle with. Like what advice do you have for listening? Well, because listening well is not easy.

Well, let me take a first cut at that. There are lots of listening books out there and they all talk about the struggle that you're talking about. We have a zillion ways of not not hearing. We're anxious to make our own point where we didn't want to be told anything. So the books about listening really say if you really care in the mic, when you grab the mic, you have to have that here and now. Humility, you have to actively say, hey, I really don't know why this clerk is showing me these Swiss watches. And I'm anxious to tell them about my origins in Switzerland. But I got to put that park that I really got to say to myself, I really wonder what is making this clerk do this behavior? In my earlier books, I call that I have to access my ignorance. I have to admit that I don't know why this clerk is doing it. And I have to let that be my primary source of listening. And then if I want to build a relationship, I have to respond in some way that tells the other person that I have heard. So I can't just say, that's very interesting. Let me tell you about how I was Born in Switzerland, then I would turn off the relation. But if I really heard the clerk, I would maybe pick up that he too was Swiss and had some kind of a bias towards Swiss products. Or he's intrigued with the complexity of the mechanisms. And should I say tell me more. Maybe I should say is or you seem to really love the mechanical side. Is that right? I have to respond in a way that shows the other person that I have heard and that's probably the hardest thing to learn, to access my ignorance and then to respond appropriately.

Got it. Okay, next question. So in the book, and I've listened to many of your videos and well, by the way, I meant to do this at the beginning of the show, shout out to our mutual friend Skip Steward for well first of all, thank you Skip for being awesome. But thank you for I believe he introduced us. So I wouldn't be talking to you guys without Skip. So thank you Skip for that. But you often talk about this so called seesaw of asking and revealing and you talked about it a little bit earlier, but I'm wondering if you could maybe elaborate a little bit more about what are we talking about with a seesaw of asking and revealing. And again, you've been sort of touching on it, but I think maybe there's a little bit deeper we can go.

Well the. Just to pick up on what I said, I was describing the first movement of the seesaw when the clerk puts out the watches. There's an opportunity for me to ignore it, to go in some different direction, but I chose to tip the seesaw my way. And what's with the Swiss watches? Or some form of a question that gives the clerk the next move. Now if he picks it up now, he's moving the seesaw down.

So there's this balance, there's this balance right of back and forth where we're.

Who is asking and who is telling. It's a process, neither one go silent. The most significant quote I've heard recently is resistance to change is not when a person disagrees with you but when they stop listening to you.

That sure happens a lot today. My goodness, turn on the news.

And so Ron, I want to sort of add on to that. We tell a story in the book that's sort of an old fable about a traveler up in the north woods. In our telling of the story, this happens in Maine, but we didn't want to explicitly pick on Maine and we love Maine, but so we left it vague in the book. But the idea is that somebody's trying to get from here to there, right up in Maine. And, you know, hence the. You can't get here from there. But anyway, the. The idea of the story is that somebody basically asked a question, is this route going to get me to the town I'm going to? And the local who's giving the direction says, yep.

And then.

The traveler says, well, is this route gonna get me there as well? And the local says, yep. And then the traveler says, well, does it matter which way I go? And the local says, well, not to me it don't.

Yeah.

And the point. The point of the story is that the traveler is not interested in engaging in the seesaw. Right. The traveler is asking questions that. That sort of are really just sort of reflecting a need confirmation bias. Right. They're not actually asking a question about. Because really the question they're asking is what's the best way to get there? But that's not the question they were asking. They were asking questions that they basically knew the answer to and in the process set off the local saying, here's this person who's basically telling me something, not asking me something. It's embracing that. How do I engage that other person to draw out the most information that's going to help me make the best decision? That way of implicitly telling in the way you ask is a way that you're not really embracing the seesaw. You're sitting at the bottom of the seesaw and you're asking a question that does not give the other person any incentive to swing back. They just sort of. They're closed off to you.

Traveler could have said, can you help me? I have a question. The traveler could have said, I'm not sure which way to go. Can you help me? I think there was no invitation in the blunt way the traveler asked it.

Is there a role or a place perhaps is a better way to ask it for vulnerability and humble inquiry, you know, being a little bit vulnerable with the person that you're talking to. Is there a place for that, a role in it?

I don't think it's a question of is there a place for it? I think. Do we recognize how we are always in every place? Very vulnerable? Yeah. Can you imagine that? We never know enough. We're always in need of guidance and help and information, but we choose to own that vulnerability. We choose to pretend we, as individual heroes can manage everything. And that's a US culture thing. I'm not sure that's a worldwide feeling, but I think it's particularly that frontier mentality of the way to be strong in the US is to know stuff, to tell stuff, to be on top of things, to solve problems, and never admit for a moment how vulnerable you really are.

Yeah.

You know, you think you're helping the other person help you by asking directive, explicit questions. When. If you could just sort of embrace the fact that you're in a. Let's call it situational vulnerability, there's some particular information that you know will help you. You need to be able to express the fact that the other person has to help you. And trying to help that other person help you ends up, you know, cutting things off. It's Peter.

Can I give the football example? Because that's so clear. I will, whether you permit me or not.

That's happened before.

Yeah. Without my giving the names. A quarterback after a game said to his left guard, joe, you gotta do better. I got sacked two or three times, and that's not acceptable. And what that story. And the story ends there. But what it triggered was our knowledge of what might have happened if the quarterback had. Instead of saying, you've got to do better, what if he had said, joe, we've got to do better. I got sacked too many times. And our fantasy is that had he said we, the left guard might have said, Joe. The other Joe there, let's call him Mark the quarterback. I know I have to do better, but there's something that you need to know. Mark, next week when we play Green Bay, the guy opposite me is an all star and he's going to every time. And you may not be aware that I'm very conscious of my inability to stop that particular guy. So can you work out some plays that keep you. And don't count on me. That vulnerability the quarterback didn't acknowledge by saying you. By saying we, it was revealed that the guard knew something that the quarterback needed to know. And Peter has a nice quote. He said, the power of humble inquiry is that you often get answers to questions that you never thought to ask. If you allow the other person to tell you, if you build that helping relationship, they may reveal stuff to you that you needed to know and you never thought to ask about it. Yeah.

Is it possible for, let's say, a less than ideal, perhaps we could even call them, not to label people, but a proud leader. I don't know how else to say it. Is it possible for that type of a person to fake humility or to fake humble inquiry? Or does a person's underlying lack of humility show and just make it doomed for failure as it relates to humble inquiry.

Well, I'll. I'll start by saying, I guess at some level, no, we don't think it is possible, but we also also think it happens all the time. In other words, humans are so good at sussing out insincerity. Right. We're really. That's one thing that, you know, when we're designing AIs, I don't know if AIs are ever going to be as good with, you know, bullshit radars as. As, you know, us humans are today. And that's not, you know, and that's not a us thing. That's just. That's just a human. Yeah. Thing. Yeah. And so I. I think that we're. It's so easy to see any attempts at sort of faux humility or, you know, it just. I just don't. I think it. It's, you know, it's why we have Dilbert cartoons is there's just. There's just, you know, and movies like Office Space. You know, we get it. We see this kind of pretense and insincerity all the time at work, and I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon. But a lot of it is. So when we talk about the idea of humble leadership, a lot of it is leaders getting to the point where they recognize that that sort of pretense of authority or control ends up cutting off information flow more than it. More than it increases it. You know what Ed was saying? You know, I can ask you and require you to ask you a question or require you to give me an answer, but if I can sort of figure out a way to open up the dialogue to increase the information flow, then the questions that I don't even know to ask, you're going to answer. I think we get into this discussion of how do you project power, how do you project authority? While you're always coming across as asking questions that you don't know the answer to. But maybe that's just it. You are asking questions that you don't know the answer to, and the people around you know you don't know the answer to that question. And that's okay. You're still the boss. You're still in a position of authority.

Yeah.

I think that maybe one of the myths that we have to bust is that displaying some sort of. Or as Ed said, you know, owning your ignorance is somehow going to undermine you in the workplace. I'm just. Do we know that? We know that often you'll hear about power plays because somebody was perceived as weak because they came across as weak. But those are temporary. Those are tempests and teapots. I believe. I think truly great leaders over time, and we tried to put a bunch of examples of these in the humble leadership book, have more sort of moments of truth and moments of great leadership when they embraced a little bit of that ignorance and vulnerability and got to a higher order level of information flow and a higher order level of decision than if they had had stuck in their command and control mode.

Yeah.

And I'm starting to use. I'm starting to get to the sort of the Lean and Gemba language because I think there's such an important distinction between, you know, this idea of command and control versus responsibility. Right. Where, you know, leaders are responsible. The people they're leading know that they're responsible. They happen to be responsible on, you know, on the org chart. But their message is down to the front line of the organization. Everybody is responsible to the customer or everybody's responsible to the quality of the product that we're trying to deliver. And part of, I think one of the shifts that we'd like to, to people to think about is that responsibility doesn't just mean to the production or to the workflow or to the quality or to the safety. It also means responsibility to the people that you work with. And that's why we feel like this idea of strengthening relationships, moving from transactional role to role relationships to level 2, person to person relationships, is one of the ways of galvanizing and reinforcing that responsibility to each other.

We've mentioned level one and level two relationships and I know from reading the book there's a couple other levels.

Well, the model starts with level minus one because level zero didn't make sense because it is a relationship, but it's a negative relationship. It's one that's driven by domination, by pure sort of power and lack of power. And you know, in the sort of worst case, it's the prisoner or it's the guard relative to the prisoner, or it's the shop floor boss. You know, in a sweatshop, the worker has no power. It's purely domination and exploitation. That's level minus one. And the thing that's interesting there is that you do see situations like maybe in boot camp in the military, or maybe even first year of med school, where it's kind of designed as a fairly dominating and exploitative system just in order to sort of break the will, get people, you know, on board, get people going. And I don't know that that system's going to change anytime soon. And then we have level one being transactional. We've described that. And level two being person to person. You heard Ed use the word personize at the very beginning. And the reason we use that term is that personalize, we realize is actually something different that's sort of more like customize. Personalize. We wanted to create the design distinction that it's a whole person to whole person relationship built on hopefully an increasing degree of openness and trust.

Got it.

So then level three is intimacy. And the issue there is that generally we don't think of intimacy as something that really belongs in the workplace. However, we have a lot of people who have said to us, no, no, no, we're very much intimate at work. We finish each other's sentences. We work, you know, 70 hours a week together. So we are intimate. So I think the part of level three that makes sense to people is the idea of professional intimacy. That you do end up having such a strong relationship because you're spending so much time with another person or with a team that you develop that. And we do have models for that. Professional sports teams talk about how they love each other all the time. Well, that's a level of professional intimacy that goes beyond level two relationships or high performance teams, or in the military, SEALs teams, Special Forces, special ops, where they are trained together so much that they develop a level of professional intimacy that is required in their case to keep each other alive. But in a high performance team in a workplace, maybe it's required to perform at the high level that's expected of them. Anyway. That's level minus one, level one level, level two, level three.

Yeah, got it, got it. I'm wondering if there's a senior leader listening right now. I'm wondering if there's any particular message or messages that you'd like to deliver to that, to that senior leader listening right now. Is there anything as it relates perhaps to humble inquiry?

Well, the, the part that I would throw in is a quip that leadership is becoming a group sport. That leader has to accept the fact that not because we say so, but because the tasks that she confronts. In today's complex socio technical world, and it's an open system with constant change, the tasks that that leader as an individual faces automatically puts that person in the position of I really don't know what to do. They won't admit that they have an idea of what one might do, but deep down they know that in today's world, you don't know enough to just unilaterally say let's go in this direction and let's say charge. Unless the task is simple, like emptying a burning building or something. But if the task is real, like how do we get, how do we get the supply chain fixed to get Covid to all these countries in Africa and I'm the guy at the head of the UN group, there is no way I can figure that out by myself. I have to start engaging in humble inquiry first of all with deciding who knows something that I need to know. I have to build a relationship with that person or which group is in control of this. So I better get somebody in that group working with me. The world today forces what we're arguing. We're describing the need for humble inquiry. We're not inventing this stuff. And the good leader, best example by this captain who Marquez, his name, who wrote the book turn the ship around, sits this chief petty officers and says, I'm the new guy here, I want you to tell me what you think needs to be fixed on this ship. And they look at him and say, this is not how bosses behave. Losses tell us what to do. So they wait him out. And he admits that it took many minutes and maybe even a couple meetings before they believed that he was willing to listen to them. But finally when they opened up, he discovered any number of things that could be fixed immediately that were difficult. His role became the coordinator of fixing. And I think every leader today is in that box unless they're in one of the old dying automated or machine like industries. That's my accept it as a group sport. Learn how to do humble inquiry, accept your vulnerability and accept help.

The odds that I alone can fix this are going down every day. Another way of looking at the complexity that we're all faced with and the pace of change increasing is that anybody who believes that I alone can fix this, the odds are going down every day. Then there's one other thing that I would add and that is that I think there's a certain degree to which we have to set aside some of the tools and some of the structures and systems that we've built to make the workday efficient and just allow some time for reflection and relationship building. So you know, you've got a meeting of eight or 10 people and you've got a full agenda and it's a perfect meeting if you got through all of the open items on that agenda. But what if you got through all the open items on that agenda and you had resolved everything but you realized there was a Bunch of stuff going on that wasn't even addressed. Bigger, more systemic issues that weren't, that didn't happen to be covered by that agenda. So that you got through the agenda perfectly, but you missed the forest for the trees. Do you need time to go around the room and ask everybody what's going on?

Yeah.

So that something big, something that's, that's, you know, three puck passes away, but you know it's coming and somehow it doesn't get, it doesn't get verbalized. That your team, you know, you're, you're one of your defensemen, knows where that puck is going. But because the agenda was so rigid, couldn't get there because he or she had to stay in their role and ask the questions that were being asked, not answering the questions that weren't being asked.

Yeah, there's a dichotomy, right? There's this balance that we've got to find.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm not saying spend the whole our socializing. I'm saying allow time for things that are on people's mind to come out because they might change the nature of the agenda.

I know we're out of time, but this image is so important. When my, my granddaughter was working with my great grandson, one year old, on a lawn, he saw a toy, started to crawl toward it. She picked him up and helped him sort of bad walk, you know, he can't walk yet. She helped him go toward the toy. I yelled at her and said, why are you helping him? Let him do it. And she ignored me. And weeks later I asked her about this. And here's the thing I want leaders of today to think about. When I said. When I said, you should let Logan crawl for him, didn't he need to learn how to do that for himself? What were you doing? He said, well, when I picked him up and helped him get across to his toy, I was teaching him to accept help. And I think there's a profound message in what this young woman was saying that maybe what's wrong with all our society is particularly males never get accept. Yeah.

That's awesome. What a great story. What a great story. Wow. So the last thing that I. This is a maybe it's a very random question, but I'm not sure anybody's ever asked you guys this. I could be wrong. I haven't listened to every interview you've done, but I'm wondering if one of you, or perhaps both of you would be interested in sharing a favorite story about the other one. So, Ed, about Peter and Peter About Ed, maybe some story of. Of, you know, it doesn't even have to be professional, really just something that people might not know about. About. About the two of you. What do you think?

Well, I can tell a story about Peter that we were both in a group that was trying to figure out how to bunch of executives from. From different organizations. And I had been training Peter on how not to get content seduced and pay attention to group process. And so at one of these meetings, I was really very interested and Peter was obviously paying attention, but he made a very blatant intervention at the content level. And I silently said to myself, you know, I'm going to have to talk to him about why. Why did he know this process stuff. And the reason, the point of the story is I never corrected Peter or said anything more about it because I discovered that the group had heard him and made huge progress and that maybe my preoccupation with process was inappropriate. And at that point, he had the better intuition as to how to help this group. I've learned to leave him alone and see what happens. And that, for me, is a good story. It makes my life easier.

Did you know that story, Peter?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Stories get told in different ways every time. So I've heard a different variant of that. But I appreciate it. And I mean, I guess the story that I would say this is sort of a historical fact is that both when I worked at Apple and when I worked at Sun Microsystems, Ed was doing executive consulting projects with the senior management teams. And of course, I couldn't see it at the time, but now, upon reflection, I want to believe that the experience that I had in years subsequent to those really, really minor interventions that Ed was making with the generally, it was sort of the heads of HR or heads of OD ended up having a sort of a positive echo for the experience that I had at those companies. So whether or not I could prove that, I want to say that I certainly believe that because he was preaching a lot of this stuff that I think did have a positive impact for at least for the OD folks. Maybe it didn't always get through to the CEOs, but to the people and places folks. He was having an impact. And that, I want to say, actually had a direct bearing on my experience as well.

Great. So we've talked all about Humble Inquiry today, and you mentioned a humble series. I'm wondering, and I know there's other books outside of the Humble series. Can you quickly just give us an overview of maybe how the Humble series, maybe ties together because I believe they do play off of one another. So could you talk a little, just a little bit about that as I wrap things up?

I want to do that quickly, mechanically, because there is a sort of a paper history. The original book that is not part of the Humble series, but that in a way captured most most of these points, was a book called Helping. There's a chapter called Humble Inquiry, which a publisher said this title, you got to write a book about that. The publisher actually picked on the word humble as being what's missing in the world. I didn't do anything for three years, but finally had an incident where someone was telling me too much stuff instead of asking me. So then I wrote the first edition of Humble Inquiry, then added the title Humble to my next book on consulting, which Peter did not co author. And then we got together and realized that the word humble was very applicable to leadership. And the leadership is a group sport. And that then created our joint authorship and our realization that the building of relationships is done by Humble Inquiry. And if you don't build relationships, you won't get the tasks done.

Wonderful.

And Ron, just one other thing. The other main collaboration in the last few years has been this culture book. The it's the third edition of the Corporate Culture Survival Guide, which we sort of hate the title and we prefer to refer to this book as Culture Change Leadership. And I really just want to bring that up because the through line in all of this ends up being a kind of an emphasis on context before content. Content is always critical in our jobs. It's still going to be 80 plus percent of what we do. But a lot of the point of the Corporate Culture Survival Guide is about, in a way that ethnographers or social anthropologists do, figuring out what's really going on, figuring out ways to sort of capture the context of the culture or the situation and not being, as Ed said, not being too seduced by the content. And I think that I leave you with that because I think that's so pertinent in the A3 and GEMBA processes that, that. Where is that little trap door? Where is that space to sort of let what's going on determine what you're finding rather than confirming what you thought. Yeah, it's. It's, you know, because confirming what you thought beforehand, we all know that leads to. To errors or that leads to accidents and safety issues. So that's the through line for us. If I could be that sort of obtuse.

Great. How can folks best connect with you both this is our website social media. What do you guys got?

Website ocli.org and then we're also on the Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute is also on LinkedIn.

Okay. And we'll go ahead and we'll link to everything including the books in the show notes for today. So folks, you just go to gembapodcast.com this is going to be episode 380. 380. So yeah, go check it out. And in case you haven't yet bought Humble Inquiry, you should have already paused the podcast and done that. But this is another opportunity to go ahead and pause it now because it really is a fantastic book.

Plenty of time to kind of cut off to Amazon while we were blathering away.

No, it's all good. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on. Thank you for all you do. I think you're making the world a better place with your work and I for one appreciate it.

We thank you. Opportunity to talk about.

Okay, all right, well, take care guys and maybe we'll have you back on. We can talk humble leadership, humble consulting or anything else.

That's great. All right, thanks so much.

Thank you. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our morning than 1500 lean and six sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.