My Journey in Inquiry and Advocacy - An experience report

It is recently that I have consciously started practicing Inquiry.

Let me explain. I am a consultant who constantly looks at the situation and comes up and implements the solution to progress from there.

While I do that, I constantly use Inquiry as a means to progress - one of the key facilitation technique specifically in multiple stakeholder situations.

When I came across Systems Thinking 7 years back, It was initially overwhelming and I was not mature enough to appreciate that. It took me a good 3 years for me to have situations that pushed me to look for tools that would help me when I am looking at the wall in terms of direction in specific instances.

I have travelled a long way from there. One area where I have not invested enough effort is that I have not consciously tried to practice what I learn or read. 

Recently I read up on Inquiry and Advocacy as a part of deconstructing mental models - The first discipline in the Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge. I realised that, while I knew what they were, I had hardly had consciously practice and hence I was not using them effectively. I found that practicing them more would help me internalise how to use them in several situations.

Let me illustrate the exact instance when this dawned on me.

I started my day with my team on a fine morning in a discussion. 

Very quickly, our topic of discussion brought out different points of view and each of us were stuck to what we thought was right from our own perspectives.

 I was so deaf that when the other person was literally telling me - This is my opinion because I think this is how the situation is. 

He was practically listing out his mental model to me.

I was so much in the moment that I lost that opportunity to use inquiry. It took me a few minutes to understand that I have not internalised the concept of Inquiry or Advocacy that well. 

How can I claim to be a Consultant when I believe this is the most basic skill?

I promised that I would practice Inquiry and Advocacy at least 10 times in the next 15 days. I am pretty close - 8 times in the last 5 days and I am already excited. 

While that is a threshold, I am not going to stop practicing it consciously till I am confident I have internalised the concept well enough.