One of the reasons I enjoy being a freelancer is that I am not good with routine. If I think I am going to have to repeat the same thing too often I quickly find other distractions. I appreciate I am very fortunate to have this flexibility. I don’t think it is driven by a low boredom threshold, although it might have something to do with it! For me, it is more about curiosity, the drive to try something else, to find another way, to ask ‘what if?’
It doesn’t always pan out as I would like but that is part of the richness of learning. When I first created Small Change® I tested it out in different ways. I wasn’t sure where it was going to start with. I was delighted by the results and kept working to improve it. It had moved from a bit of an idea to something more concrete. I was then closely observing what was happening, how people were responding, and what was needed to develop it further. There were different ways I could have approached it and while it seemed unstructured to start with, I knew I was doing more than just trying it out.
If you have something you want to work on there are different types of inquiry you could use:
- Confirmation: This is probably the most familiar. You have a hypothesis or know the end result and the goal is to confirm the expected results. This can help a team practice its inquiry skills
- Structured: you agree an inquiry question and the methods for how you will undertake the inquiry. The result is not known at the start
- Guided: Your only starting point is a question, like ‘how will audiences respond to the new Covid safe programme?’ You collectively agree the methods you will use to investigate the question
- Free: this is the least structured of all. You start with a blank page and develop your own question, then agree how you will explore it and carry out the inquiry. This is how I started with Small Change® all I knew at the start was that people were feeling overwhelmed and weren’t sure how to make change happen
There are three main obstacles that might get in the way of genuinely developing an inquiry based approach, whether you’re freelance, in a group or an organisation:
- Having to know the answer: Some people are just not comfortable stepping into an unknown space. This is often a particular challenge if you manage others. It is hard to be in a team leadership role and say you don’t know. If ever there was a time for it to be OK it is now. Rather than having the answer up front work out collectively how you are going to find out. Sometimes you might need to be honest and ask yourself if your advice is really as good as you think it is
- Saving others: Rather than see colleagues or team members wrestle with uncertainty we can be inclined to step in and provide a solution, it comes from a good place but can be disempowering. While this may have benefits in the short-term it tends to shut down questioning and inquiry in others. They will learn that they have to come to you for an answer rather than try and work it through themselves
- Maintaining control: This is probably the trickiest obstacle because we have to be brutally honest with ourselves about why we need to have all the answers. If everything comes back to you, you control what is happening. You can define the direction
Why bother with making inquiry work?
- Helping generate collective ownership
- Encouraging learning
- Helping manage uncertainty
- Opening up idea generation
- Giving people new skills
- Building confidence
If any of your values are aligned to learning, inquiry, empowerment or generosity then organisational curiosity might be something to explore in more depth.