4 The Culture of Do and Tell

The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.⁵ But artifacts are not easy to decipher, so when we enter a new culture we find that we have to talk to people and ask them questions about what things mean. When we do that, we elicit the level of culture that I call espoused values such as freedom, equality of opportunity, individual rights, and other values that are often referred to as “our constitutional rights.”

When we compare some of the artifacts and behaviors that we observe with some of the values that we are told about, we find inconsistencies, which tell us that there is a deeper level to culture, one that includes what we can think of as tacit assumptions. Such assumptions may have been values at one time, but, by consensus, they have come to be taken for granted and dropped out of conscious debate. It is these assumptions that really drive the manifest behavioral elements and are, therefore, the essence of a culture.

The most common example of this in the United States is that we claim to value teamwork and talk about it all the time, but the artifacts—our promotional systems and rewards systems—are entirely individualistic. We espouse equality of opportunity and freedom, but the artifacts— poorer education, little opportunity, and various forms of discrimination for ghetto minorities—suggest that there are other assumptions having to do with pragmatism and “rugged individualism” that operate all the time and really determine our behavior.

The tacit assumptions that make up a given culture may or may not be congruent with each other. Cultures can exist with inconsistencies and internal conflict. With respect to a particular set of behaviors, such as humility, it is important to identify the relevant cultural assumptions and assess their impact. We especially need to understand the tacit assumptions around authority, relationships, and trust.

All cultures have rules about status and respect based on deep assumptions about what merits status. In many societies basic humility toward persons whose positions are based on birthright is taken for granted and automatically felt. In societies that are Western, more egalitarian, and individualistic, we tend to respect only high achievers, based on the Horatio Alger myth of working one’s way up from the bottom. We tend to experience optional humility in the presence of those who have achieved more, but the Here-and-now Humility, based on awareness of dependency, is often missing.

The degree to which superiors and subordinates can be humble differs by the basic assumptions of the culture they grew up in. The more authoritarian the culture, the greater the sociological distance between the upper and lower levels of status or achievement, and, therefore, the harder it is for the superior to be humble and learn the art of Humble Inquiry. Beyond these general points about culture, why do specific aspects of the U.S. culture make Humble Inquiry more difficult?

THE MAIN PROBLEM–A CULTURE THAT VALUES TASK ACCOMPLISHMENT MORE THAN RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

The U.S. culture is individualistic, competitive, optimistic, and pragmatic. We believe that the basic unit of society is the individual, whose rights have to be protected at all costs. We are entrepreneurial and admire individual accomplishment. We thrive on competition. Optimism and pragmatism show up in the way we are oriented toward the short term and in our dislike of long-range planning. We do not like to fix things and improve them while they are still working. We prefer to run things until they break because we believe we can then fix them or replace them. We are arrogant and deep down believe we can fix anything—“The impossible just takes a little longer.” We are impatient and, with information technology’s ability to do things faster, we are even more impatient. Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.

We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption).

We would never consider for a moment paying the team members equally. In the Olympics we usually have some of the world’s fastest runners yet have lost some of the relay races because we could not pass the baton without dropping it! We take it for granted that accountability must be individual; there must be someone to praise for victory and someone to blame for defeat, the individual where “the buck stops.”

In fact, instead of admiring relationships, we value and admire individual competitiveness, winning out over each other, outdoing each other conversationally, pulling the clever con game, and selling stuff that the customer does not need. We believe in caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), and we justify exploitation with “There’s a sucker born every minute.” We breed mistrust of strangers, but we don’t have any formulas for how to test or build trust. We value our freedom without realizing that this breeds caution and mistrust of each other. When we are taken in by a Ponzi scheme and lose all our money, we don’t blame our culture or our own greed—we blame the regulators who should have caught it and kick ourselves for not getting in on it earlier.

In politics we build relationships with some people to further our goals and in order to gain advantage over other people. We build coalitions in order to gain power and, in that process, make it more necessary to be careful in deciding whom we can trust. We assume that we can automatically trust family only to discover betrayal among family members. Basically, in our money-conscious society of today, we don’t really know whom to trust and, worse, we don’t know how to create a trusting relationship. We value loyalty in the abstract, but in our pluralistic society, it is not at all clear to whom one should be loyal beyond oneself.

When we deal with people in other cultures that consider relationships to be intrinsic to getting the job done by building trust first, we get impatient with spending time over relationship-building dinners before getting down to work. When we are sent off to outward-bound retreats to build teamwork, we view that as a necessary price of doing business and sometimes even enjoy and benefit but still think of it as just a means to the end of task accomplishment.

When the airlines first investigated some of their serious accidents, they found that some resulted from communication failures in the cockpit. In several dramatic cases the senior person just plain did not pay attention to the junior person who was giving out key information as the plane crashed. For a time, the airlines launched team-training programs and even assigned crews that had trained together to work with each other in the cockpit. But when this became too expensive and too unwieldy to manage, they went back to a rotational system where checklists and professionalism were expected to facilitate the necessary communication. It was even reported that some teams became overconfident and developed bad habits leading to safety shortcuts that justified dropping the team training.

In the United States, status and prestige are gained by task accomplishment, and once you are above someone else, you are licensed to tell them what to do. The best engineer and the best salesperson are promoted to be supervisors where they can now tell others what to do. Social distance across rank levels is considered OK. In fact, personal relationships across ranks are considered dangerous because they could lead to bias in assigning work and rewards. In the military, if the officer had a personal relationship with a subordinate, it would make it more difficult to decide whom to send on a potentially lethal mission. Officers shouldn’t fraternize with the troops.

In medicine today, we vocally deplore the fact that the system limits the amount of time that doctors can spend with patients because of our espoused value that building a relationship with patients is good medicine, but we accept short visits as an inevitable pragmatic necessity because of the tacit assumption that economic criteria rather than social ones should drive the system. We accept what we regard as economic necessities even though there is growing evidence that communication problems between doctors and patients cause treatment failures and are sometimes responsible for patients taking the wrong doses of a medicine. Valuing task accomplishment over relationship building shows up in how often doctors are disrespectful of nurses and technicians and even of patients. They often depersonalize and ignore the patient in their discussion with the interns who have been brought along to view the “case.” All of this is driven by the need to accomplish tasks in a cost-effective manner, which translates into cramming as many tasks as possible into each unit of time and not bothering with relationship building because that might take too long.

This may seem like a harsh view of our culture, and there are certainly trends in other directions, but when we deal with culture at the tacit assumption level we have to think clearly about what our assumptions actually are, quite apart from our espoused values. The result of a pragmatic, individualistic, competitive, task-oriented culture is that humility is low on the value scale.

A SECOND PROBLEM–THE CULTURE OF TELL

We take it for granted that telling is more valued than asking. Asking the right questions is valued, but asking in general is not. To ask is to reveal ignorance and weakness. Knowing things is highly valued, and telling people what we know is almost automatic because we have made it habitual in most situations. We are especially prone to telling when we have been empowered by someone else’s question or when we have been formally promoted into a position of power. I once asked a group of management students what it meant to them to be promoted to “manager.” They said without hesitation, “It means I can now tell others what to do.” Of course, the dangerous and hidden assumption in that dictum is that once people are promoted that they will then know what to do. The idea that the manager might come to a subordinate and ask, “What should we do?” would be considered abdication, failure to fulfill your role. If you are a manager or a leader, you are supposed to know what to do, or at least appear to know.

Knowing things is highly valued in most cultures. With age we supposedly get wiser, which usually means knowing more. So we go to older people to get answers and expect to get them. When the supplicant climbs the mountain to reach the wise guru, and his question is answered with another question, we put this into a cartoon and laugh about it. Telling is not only expected and respected, but it feels so good when we think we have solved someone else’s problem. What is more satisfying than giving advice?

We still live in a culture of what Stephen Potter so eloquently described in the 1950s as gamesmanship and one-upmanship.⁶ These were the two titles that best characterized what Potter saw to be the main characteristic of relationships in the Western world. It was British humor at its best, but it was a much deeper commentary on how Western culture values competition, even in conversation. Potter notes that there are several ways to gain points in competitive conversation: making a smart remark, putting down someone who has claimed too much, and turning a clever phrase even if it embarrasses someone else in the conversation. We compete on who can tell the most—the most interesting story, the most outrageous adventure, the best joke, or the best movie they saw.

Of course, outdoing someone else is only good if it is done within the cultural rules of etiquette. Embarrassing or humiliating someone in the conversation is not good and, if one consistently does this, one gets socially ostracized, or, if it is extreme, one gets put into a mental hospital. To be an effective gamesman or lifeman, Potter notes, one must know “how to win without actually cheating” or practice “the art of getting away with it without being an absolute plonk.” In presidential pre-election debates we only care who won and often base that decision not on who did the best analysis of the issues but who looked most presidential in front of the cameras and who turned the best phrase or made the most clever put-down.

One possible implication in all of this is that deep down many of us believe that if you are not winning, you are losing. If you don’t tell first, someone else will tell and get the brownie points. The tacit assumption based on our biological roots is that life is fundamentally and always a competition. Someone has to be the alpha male. The idea of reciprocal cooperation where both parties win is not on our radar screen except where pragmatically necessary or in special events such as improvisation theater where each person’s job is to set up his partner to deliver the good line that gets the laughs. That requires the building of a relationship in which one-upmanship is not desirable.

We also know how important telling is from our desire in most conversations to get to the point. When we are listening to someone and don’t see where it is going, we say, “So what is your point?” We expect conversations to reach some kind of conclusion, which is reached by telling something, not by asking questions. When we are in the telling mode, we hope to educate, to impress, to score points, to entertain; when we are in the listening mode, we want to be educated, impressed, and entertained.

When we listen, we want to feel that it was worthwhile to listen. It is frustrating to have someone tell us something that we cannot use or that is boring. My worst occasions of this sort are when someone tells stories about people whom I don’t know in situations that I have never experienced. In other words, we don’t want to be told any old things. What we want to be told and what we choose to tell have to be useful—they need to be in context and they need to be relevant.

Finally, nothing is more frustrating to listeners than to be told things or given advice that they already know and/ or have already thought of and dismissed as impractical. It makes you feel demeaned when you realize that the teller thinks you have not already thought of this yourself. But, paradoxically, telling is so ingrained that we don’t think about this issue when we are about to tell someone something. Before we give advice, do we really consider whether or not the person to whom we are telling this might have already thought of it? I suspect that we all do much more telling than we should.

Why Is This Important Now?
The Changing Demands of Future Tasks

There is, of course, much more to U.S. culture than what I have described. And things are changing. The assumptions I described may be less relevant to the next couple of generations. The recognition of interdependency is growing with the growth of information technology. So why focus on these particular biases in our culture? Consider again the operating room of today in which the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, key nursing staff, and surgical technicians have to work in perfect harmony with each other in undertaking a complex operation. Consider that they not only have different professions and ranks, but they are likely to be of different generations and possibly different national cultures, which may have their own values and norms around relationships, authority, and trust. So let me restate the problem:

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.

Increasingly, tasks resemble kids on a seesaw or a relay team. Coaches of American football often point out that every position has to do its job or the play fails. A chorus has to practice together so that every member will be able to deal with all the musical variations that different conductors may want from it. A surgical team requires perfect coordination from every member. Producing a successful web-cast requires perfect coordination among the senders and receivers. Flying an airliner safely requires perfect coordination from the entire crew, as do all kinds of processes in the chemical and nuclear industries. All of these group situations require the members of the group to build relationships with each other that go beyond just “professionals working with each other.” Checklists and other formal processes of coordination are not enough because they cannot deal with unanticipated situations. Through Humble Inquiry teams can build the initial relationships that enable them to learn together. As they build higher levels of trust through joint learning, they become more open in their communication, which, in turn, enables them to deal with the inevitable surprises that arise in complex interdependent situations.⁷

The irony is that when we see good task accomplishment that results from relationships and higher levels of trust, we admire it and almost treat it as a surprising anomaly, thereby admitting tacitly that it is culturally not normal. In the world of professional football, when a team acquires a player who knows either some of the present players or the coach from having been on another team together, the team as a whole may improve because there is already a clearly built relationship that enables them to play better with each other.

In other words, we know intuitively and from experience that we work better in a complex interdependent task with someone we know and trust, but we are not prepared to spend the effort, time, and money to ensure that such relationships are built. We value such relationships when they are built as part of the work itself, as in military operations where soldiers form intense personal relationships with their buddies. We admire the loyalty to each other and the heroism that is displayed on behalf of someone with whom one has a relationship, but when we see such deep relationships in a business organization, we consider it unusual. And programs for team building are often the first things cut in the budget when cost issues arise.

The Special Challenge to Leaders

Culturally it is more appropriate for the person of higher status to do more telling and for the subordinate to do more inquiring and listening. This works when 1) both parties have the same superordinate goal, 2) the superior knows the answers, and 3) the subordinate understands what is being told. Superiors need to find out whether those three conditions are met in a particular situation. To return to our relay race analogy, the leader has to find out whether all four members want to win, whether the baton passers (bosses or subordinates) know how to communicate to the receivers how the baton will be passed, and whether instructions such as “pick up speed when I enter the zone” are, in fact, clear enough to be understood.

If bosses don’t build relationships with their subordinates through initial Humble Inquiry, they will not be able to tell whether or not communication is good, because in many situations the subordinates will not admit that they don’t understand or they may withhold critical safety information because they do not share the superordinate goal. Or the boss may announce the superordinate goal of safety but be unwittingly sending signals that cost and speed are just as important. If surgeons have not built relationships with their teams, team members may withhold information and jeopardize patient safety because they do not feel psychologically safe to speak up to the higher-status person.

The more complex the task, the greater the degree of interdependence and the more the boss has to acknowledge a Here-and-now Humility and engage in Humble Inquiry. Yet remember that it is primarily an attitude, that there is no formula for exactly how to do it. Sensing and feeling inevitably come into play in deciding what is the current state of the relationship and what is the situation. However, the demeanor of the higher-status person should always be to build status, to give face. Only by making the subordinate feel psychologically safe can the superior hope to get the information and help needed. If they share the same super-ordinate goals, such as winning the relay race, keeping patients safe, and keeping the nuclear plant from having an accident, that will help but never be enough. Subordinates are always in a vulnerable position and must, therefore, first be reassured before they will fully commit to open communication and collaboration.

Consider again the situation of the hospital patient. One thing that the doctor can offer in this situation by humbly inquiring is to make the patient feel like a whole person rather than a scientific subject. The oncologist who asked my wife about our travel plans won her over immediately because she realized he cared about us, not just about containing the cancer. Consider the leader in the relay race who asks whether the receiver is right- or left-handed and has a preference or a need that should be considered. Consider the surgeon who says to the team, “I am completely dependent on you. What do we need to work out to make things go smoothly?” Consider the lawyer who has taken over the power company site that contains a nuclear plant and goes to the operators and maintenance people to ask what they do, what their world is like, what worries them. Such Humble Inquiry becomes especially relevant when leaders realize they are completely dependent on all the workers in the plant doing their jobs, using a technology that they themselves do not understand and, therefore, could not tell the workers what to do even if they wanted to. Consider how much of the work done in today’s technologically complex world cannot be done by the leader; hence the leader must learn to live with Here-and-now Humility. Now that the particular problems of asking and telling in superior-subordinate relationships have been identified, the next chapter explores further the impacts of culture, rank, and status and suggests how they can best be approached.

In Summary

The U.S. culture is strongly built on the tacit assumptions of pragmatism, individualism, and status through achievement. These assumptions introduce a strong bias for getting the job done, which, combined with individualism, leads to a devaluing of relationship building, teamwork, and collaboration except as means to the end of task accomplishment. Given those cultural biases, doing and telling are inevitably valued more than asking and relationship building. However, as tasks become more complex and interdependent, collaboration, teamwork, and relationship building will become more necessary. That, in turn, will require leaders to become more skilled in Humble Inquiry.