It all started with a story that Ed has told many times in the last few years:

We find in this story one of the major problems of our time. We value telling each other things, showing off how much we know, and winning arguments, whether we’re using verified data or not. Winning, being right, convincing others—these victories are so important to many people that they feel free to spin, invent, or lie because what is true and what is not true has become a matter of debate. Opinionated distortions—what may be considered tactical necessities in politics, where winning is indeed the most important thing—have crept into too much of our discourse about empirically measured reality.

Because in an increasingly volatile and culturally diverse world, we cannot hope to understand and work with people from different occupational, professional, and national cultures if we do not know how to ask questions and build relationships that are based on (1) the assumption that other values may be different but are no worse and no better than our own, and (2) we may need to know what others know in order to solve our own problems.

There are many contexts in which productive relationships, completing work tasks—even helping others to save lives—absolutely depend on inquiring in the right way to figure out what is really going on. If you allow yourself to be really interested in what you don’t know about another person, to be open to your natural curiosity, what more could you learn? Would this make it easier and more comfortable to reveal things about yourself that you are pretty sure the other person might be interested in? Would this be a new way of building relationships at work? Inquiring and revealing in this way are the key processes of displaying the Humble Inquiry attitude.

When a team is trying to solve a tricky problem of what to do next and is stuck among several alternatives, Humble Inquiry means asking, “What else do we need to know?” or “How did we/you arrive at this point?” This is particularly true when others propose something that we oppose or don’t understand. It is asking the question, “How do we connect the dots to make sense of this predicament that we don’t fully understand yet?”

When you are asked for advice, do you jump in with a response, pitching your solution? An alternative Humble Inquiry approach might start with asking why advice is needed, why it is needed now, why it is you who is being asked for advice. The context may be much more important than the content of your response.

Why is the word humble so important in this form of questioning? The Humble Inquiry attitude does not require that humility be a major personality trait of a good inquirer. But even the most confident or arrogant among us will find ourselves humbled by the reality of being dependent on others, and by the sheer complexity of trying to figure out what is important and what is not. We can think of this as Here-and-now Humility, accepting our dependence on each for information sharing and task completion.

Displaying Here-and-now Humility is one key to building positive relationships with those upon whom we are dependent because it reveals our genuine interest and curiosity in others as critical partners. The ability to embrace Here-and-now Humility, and to face challenges with this attitude of Humble Inquiry, becomes especially important for leaders when they recognize their own dependence on the people they are leading.

Couldn’t we argue that nowadays it is equally important to value telling, that people be courageous and tell it like they see it, to speak up to power, to get out of a bystander mentality, to blow the whistle when necessary? The paradox is that the main inhibitor of useful telling is often our own failure to inquire in a way that makes it safe for others to tell us the truth, or at least to share all of what they know.

Our failure to ask humbly and with the right attitude has created work climates in which people do not feel psychologically safe to share what they know. Do we even see such work climates in which people withhold, spin, or even lie because they realize it is not really safe to speak the truth? Or are such “toxic” work climates so commonplace that we fail to even notice this underlying lack of psychological safety?

High-hazard industries, where safety is paramount, especially require reliable communication across hierarchical boundaries. However, we learn from analyses of aviation disasters, chemical/oil industry accidents, nuclear plant incidents, and some NASA missions, that lower-ranking employees had information that may have prevented or lessened negative consequences, but this vital information was either not passed up to higher levels, was ignored, or was over-ridden.

Senior managers often say they are open, that they want to hear from their subordinates, and that they take the information seriously. But when we talk to employees in those same organizations, they tell us they were not asked sincerely, did not feel safe bringing bad news to their bosses even if asked, or tried speaking up but never got any response or acknowledgment. And when we see what happens to whistleblowers, it is a strong signal that truth may be the last thing that some organizations actually want to hear.

We see similar issues in operating rooms, in hospitals, and in the health-care system as a whole. If nurses and technicians do not feel safe bringing contrary information to doctors, whether it’s suggesting alternatives or correcting an MD who is about to make a mistake, it is easy to see how patient outcomes can be negatively impacted. Doctors may proclaim that they do ask and that their professional environment embraces open flow of relevant information, but if PAs, nurses, and technicians do not feel safe in providing relevant contextual information, risks for the patient increase.

Is this the result of employees lacking courage, or is this really the result of leaders and managers not asking humbly? Unfortunately, all too often what is missing is leaderships’ recognition that unless they really want to know what is going on, and inquire in a way that convinces others of their open and trusting intent, they will get only responses that their employees think leadership wants to hear. If questions are not posed with Here-and-now Humility, silence, false telling, or spinning may be the more likely and exacerbating response.

We know from our responses to disasters and pandemics that we are all capable and willing to help each other when help is needed.² Yet building relationships between humans is an intricate adaptive process because it requires us to deal simultaneously with our biologically encoded impulses to both compete and cooperate in a cultural context that tends to favor one over the other. In our U.S. culture, it can be especially difficult to build enough trust to feel comfortable asking for help. In addition, when asked for information, others may conceal what they know in order to deceive the “rival” and hence gain power or status.

Because we tout teamwork and like to use lots of different athletic analogies to illustrate it, we use the relay race to illuminate Humble Inquiry and relationship building. To achieve a goal it is often necessary to demonstrate both superior individual accomplishment and effective teamwork. Winning the race requires not only fast competitive running but also reliable, collaborative baton passing. Reliable baton passing requires open communication and a high level of trust among the runners. We cannot favor one over other, we need both.

Teamwork can become so complicated that it is best compared to a professional U.S. (NFL) football team running an intricate play in which all 11 players have to coordinate their actions with each other as well as react to the opposing team as the play unfolds (or unravels). A surgical team performing a complex procedure needs to coordinate all of the members of the team in real time to even have a chance of coping with unexpected complications. In all of these teamwork cases, can open communication, trust, and coordination develop if members of the team have not built positive relationships with each other through Humble Inquiry?

Building relationships between humans is a biologically intrinsic iterative process, especially in adulthood. We all agree that trusting each other is important, but how do you know, if you need help, that the other person will help? If you need valid information, can you trust others to reveal what they know and not deceive you? Our existing relationships are a tenuous balance easily upset in conversation by withholding or lying. For this reason, Humble Inquiry works only if the attitude behind it includes the desire to really hear what the other person says, to develop an appropriate level of empathy, and to choose a response that shows interest and curiosity. When this process is complemented with situationally appropriate revelations about yourself to others, relationship building—openness and trust—takes off. Humbly inquiring communicates openness, and honestly revealing builds trust. In the pages that follow we hope to convince you why this matters.