Skip to main content

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. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Counterfiet goods and the fledgeling e-commerce market places

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...
Post a Comment
Read more

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...
Post a Comment
Read more

The right business model for your product

How would you decide what is the best business model for your product? Deciding on the right business model is very important for the product. It does not necessarily mean what is the price of your product. There could be no price for your product - though that is a myth. For example, we think google or Facebook is free. However, we are never the customers for Google or Facebook. It is the advertisers that are its customers. What we need to figure out when we decide on a business model are as follows: Who is my target audience? Who is my customer What is the price. How is the support model going to work Who are my partners While we do not absolutely need to price a product, we need to understand how we would make money. For example Open ERP does not price its product. However, its product is not the ERP software but really the hosting, service and training that it offers. While pricing is an important part, what is more important is in realising who is you...
Post a Comment
Read more