The Provocateurs:

Stuart Crainer:
Hello, I am Stuart Crainer. I’m the co-founder of Thinkers50, and I would like to welcome you to the monthly podcast series, Provocateurs, in which we explore the experiences, insights, and perspectives of inspiring leaders. Our aim is to provoke you to think and act differently through conversations with some fantastic people. This is a collaboration between Thinkers50 and Deloitte, so my co-host today is Steve Goldbach. Steve leads Deloitte’s sustainability practice in the US, and with Geoff Tuff, is the author of two best-selling books, Detonate and Provoke, which inspired this series. Steve, welcome. Please, could you introduce today’s brilliant guest?

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. My pleasure, Stuart. It’s really cool to welcome someone that I know very well to this podcast. Welcome, Jeff Wetzler. Jeff has been on a quarter-century quest to transform learning opportunities. He blends a unique set of leadership experiences in the field of business and education, and he’s pursued this quest, initially as a management consultant where we started our careers together at Monitor Group; as a learning facilitator for leaders around the world as Chief Learning Officer at Teach for America; and most recently as co-CEO of Transcend, a nationally recognized innovation organization.

And we are excited to talk about the essential question that’s animated Jeff’s career. Whether it’s working with children or educators or executives, he’s always been curious about how we can create learning experiences that are deep, powerful, and enduring. Jeff is the author of a new book called Ask and we’re excited to welcome him here to the podcast. It’s great to have you, Jeff, and see the culmination of a lot of your thinking. I know that a lot of this, the origins behind the book started with your experiences back in the day at Monitor. Maybe you can give a little bit of the history of how you came to want to write about this topic.

Jeff Wetzler:
Absolutely. And thanks, it’s great to be with you and Stuart as well. Yeah. So Steve, you and I started our careers together at this consulting firm called Monitor Group. And one of the things that drew me to Monitor, this was back in the mid-90s, was that Monitor had, among its leaders, a professor named Chris Argyris. He had joint appointment between Harvard Business School and Harvard Education School. And even in college, I was obsessed with learning. So, that was one of the things that actually drew me to Monitor at the time. Chris was constantly working on this question of, why is it that sometimes our smartest, most successful people are the worst at learning from each other? And here was Monitor filled with smart, successful people. And Chris was taking on the question of, what could we all do to actually communicate and learn far more productively with each other and with our clients?

And as an information-knowledge-economy-kind of organization, Monitor’s ability to actually transmit knowledge, learn from one another, et cetera, was fundamental to the business. So, it was a very important business investment. And what I quickly learned is that the methods and tools that Chris introduced into the world and that were then further developed by people like Diana Smith, Jim Cutler, Jamie Higgins, many others, were just incredibly powerful. I got to see firsthand both some of the things that I needed to do better and learn, but also I got a chance to spend a lot of my time at Monitor teaching these methods to people all around the world.

And I realized this is like pure gold. When people encountered them, they would say things like, “I now see how I’m totally contributing to the very problems that I am most vexed by. But equally, I can do something about it.” And it doesn’t take long to build that kind of awareness. And so, it really has become the foundation of my own leadership, and it’s the first thing I go to when I coach and develop other people around me.

Stuart Crainer:
Chris was way ahead of his time, wasn’t it? Because that was 30-40 years ago, he was writing about single loop and double loop learning with Donna Schön.

Jeff Wetzler:
Exactly, exactly. Those are timeless ideas.

Stuart Crainer:
Yeah. Who else was a mentor to you in your early stages of your career then, Jeff? I know you’ve mentioned Ted Sizer at Brown.

Jeff Wetzler:
Yes. Even prior to coming to Monitor, there was a professor at Brown named Ted Sizer, who was, at the time, really one of the foremost thinkers in education reform. And that was actually one of the seeds for the organization that I now co-lead called Transcend. But Ted Sizer really obsessed about, why does the American high school serve students so poorly? It’s a model of education that many people call the industrial model of education, where we essentially batch kids together, group them by age, just keep progressing them through regardless of whether they learn or not.

And at its time, at the turn of the century, it was actually a brilliant innovation because it got millions and millions of kids who were immigrants or in farms, et cetera, got them an education, and that changed tons of lives. The problem is the world has changed dramatically and schooling has not changed enough. And that was something that Ted Sizer was dealing with back in the 90s, and something that Transcend, my organization now, is tackling as well.

Steve Goldbach:
It’s something that you don’t think a lot about, but you’re right, there really hasn’t been a disruptive innovation in the field of education, or certainly K-12 education. I can’t think of one in my… I mean, I’m sure you can, because I don’t think about this space every day, but until you said that, a light bulb just went off for me.

Jeff Wetzler:
It’s one of the only fields, if you think about it, that if you fell asleep 100 years ago and woke up today, you wouldn’t recognize medicine, you wouldn’t recognize transportation, you wouldn’t recognize communication or media, but you’d feel at home at a school because you’d still see a teacher standing in front of 30 kids, often who are in rows, often who are sitting down and shutting up and just listening to the teacher.

And I think there’s actually an interrelation between the way that we educate young people and what we see in the workforce and in organizations as well. And if we want to actually see the workforce of the future with skills that cannot be replaced by AI, we’ve got to do things differently at every stage on the journey, both inside organizations and well before then.

Steve Goldbach:
Totally agree.

Stuart Crainer:
And before we’re too hard on the American system, it’s a universal issue, isn’t it?

Jeff Wetzler:
That’s right.

Stuart Crainer:
It’s a pretty universal application. I’m based in the UK, so I understand the UK system is very… That rigid, hierarchical, traditional, functional view of the world. The overlap with the business world is quite interesting, isn’t it?

Jeff Wetzler:
Right, exactly. If we are sticking people through basically a factory system of education that was designed to produce compliant factory workers, we shouldn’t be surprised that in organizations we don’t see people with the kinds of leadership, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and learning skills that we need.

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. And it’s interesting, and maybe this is a good segue into the book. I know that there’s been efforts – in fact, we were just emailing a few weeks ago – there are some efforts to actually take Chris Argyris’ content and start to teach it to kids to give them that skill. So, maybe let’s start, for folks who aren’t familiar, with the core principles of what I call productive interactions, some people call double loop learning, there’s many names for this space. You’ve focused on a particular aspect of double loop learning, which is the withholding of information that people do in the proverbial left-hand column. So maybe, can you just give us a sense of what kinds of information people tend to withhold and why asking is the answer to that problem?

Jeff Wetzler:
Yes, absolutely. The core problem that the book is tackling is that too often people keep important things from one another. And that could be in a managerial relationship, in a client-professional services relationship, even in a friendship or a family relationship, et cetera. And you can come at that problem from two angles. One angle, which I think Kim Scott does a brilliant job of, is really helping make sure that the person who’s withholding something is doing a better job sharing that, especially if that’s constructive and important feedback. The angle that this book is really coming at it from is if the person that you’re talking to maybe hasn’t read Radical Candor or isn’t doing that, what can you do to elicit it from them? That’s the asking side of it.

And so, the first thing I think that we need to understand and appreciate is what are the kinds of things, as you said, Steve, that people tend to withhold? And often, I have found it’s the things that we most need to know and find out. So in the research for the book, there were several categories of things that emerged. One is really-really what do they actually think about an issue? It’s amazing how often people actually don’t tell you their full view or their headline view of what they’re truly thinking. If you’re a leader, what do they really think about your strategic plan, for example? Or if they do say it, what they don’t often say is, where do their views come from? What are the reasons, concerns, experiences that are animating what they actually think? So, that’s one category. 

A second category is what they’re struggling with themselves, what they’re up against. The number of times that I, as a leader, have discovered only too late that somebody that I’m managing was really dealing with something that I could have helped them with if I knew sooner has been way too often. So, their challenges and struggles. 

A third is their observations about us and how we’re operating and their most important feedback for us. And the last, which I think is really important for innovation, is people have the seeds of pretty wild and audacious and crazy ideas of things that could actually be different or better. I think that organizations and teams are filled with that kind of collective genius, and far too often people don’t share that partially out of fear that they’re going to seem crazy for sharing those kinds of ideas. And so, I think there’s just a goldmine of insights, wisdom that people have that we too often don’t find out.

Stuart Crainer:
I think it’s a common complaint in research that the issues that leaders encounter are… The twin problems they have is isolation and ambiguity. A factor feeding both of those is that no one tells them the truth.

Jeff Wetzler:
Exactly.

Stuart Crainer:
The higher you go up the organisation, the less truth you’re exposed to.

Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah. When you look at the research, there are studies that talk about upwards of 70 to 80% of people in organizations report not actually sharing something that’s really important or a concern that they have in it. There was even a piece of research that I found that, patients, 60 to 80% of patients don’t tell their doctor something important about their health because they’re afraid that the doctor’s going to judge them in some way. And so, I’m like, “If people are not even saying something that pertains to their own health, imagine what they’re not going to say about a strategy or some other issue in an organization.”

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. What is the underlying thing that makes it… What’s the motivation for withholding? And why is it also hard on both sides? What is the person who is withholding experiencing? And you mentioned judging as one thing, but what are some of the other things that cause them to withhold? And then, why is it so hard? Why do we also resist asking about it? On both these sides, people are culpable to this massive withholding that we see. So, what are the human barriers that are at play here?

Jeff Wetzler:
There are several drivers at play. The number one barrier is fear of what the impact is going to be of saying the truth. So, the impact could be you’re going to judge me. The impact could be I’m going to expose myself as someone who you don’t like, or is an imposter, or doesn’t know what’s going on. So, just fearing the impact. What’s the impact going to have on our relationship? Is by far the biggest one. But there are some other ones as well.

A second one is people essentially feeling that it would just take too much time, energy, effort to do it.

And I think in the workplace, especially these days, especially post-COVID, people are exhausted. And they’re constantly making a calculation, is it worth bringing this up? Is it worth telling the truth? Because it’s going to take a lot of emotional energy to do that. Then they’re going to ask me for more, then they’re going to want to deal with it. And so, it’s just easier to not do that kind of thing.

A third one is people don’t… They don’t have the words. Sometimes they know that the way it’s occurring to them is, “You’re a complete jerk.” But if I say that, it’s just going to make it worse. Or sometimes they just don’t know actually how to put it. They actually might want to raise it, but they just don’t literally know how to put it. And raising things, as we know, and telling the truth, is a skill, and they may not have learned that skill. Sometimes they actually think they have. “I thought I communicated that somehow, maybe I gave a look, maybe I did this,” but that wasn’t it.

And sometimes it’s just like, I don’t think that you could actually do anything with what I’m going to say, or I don’t trust you’re going to act on it. I think it’s over determined. There’s a whole set of different causes that cause people to withhold. I would say it’s amplified and complexified across lines of difference, whether power dynamics, differences of identity, et cetera. All of that can essentially exacerbate all of the barriers that I just talked about. So on the withholding side, those are some of the biggest things that I discovered in doing the research for the book.

Stuart Crainer:
I suppose, traditionally, it’s assumed that the leader knew everything and-

Jeff Wetzler:
Right, they should know.

Stuart Crainer:
Yeah. So asking questions, if they ask questions is a sign of weakness, traditionally. And that still applies in many cases.

Jeff Wetzler:
100%. And I think that is the second part of Steve’s question, which is why don’t we ask? And Stuart, you’re putting your finger on one of the biggest causes, asking is countercultural, especially for leaders, it can make us look weak, it could make us look like we’re not doing our job. I should know it. But I think there’s a couple of other reasons that we don’t ask as well, that are important to look at. I think the most insidious one is because we’re actually not curious. We don’t ask if we actually think we know what’s going on in the situation. If we’ve sized up a person, if we’ve sized up an issue and we just think, this is the way it is, it’s logical not to ask a question because we know what’s going on. And we can tie that in a minute to the ask approach and what to do about that. But I think that’s one of the most important ones.

There’s also some interesting research that people don’t ask questions because they think the questions are too sensitive. They think the other person is not going to want to answer that question. They think that they’re going to put the other person on the spot by asking that question. But the research shows, overwhelmingly, that people actually appreciate being asked those questions. Things that we actually think might be too sensitive to ask, people are like, “Actually, you’re showing interest in me and what I think and my life, et cetera.” But it can be a barrier that holds us back. And then, the last thing I would just say is it’s a skill to ask questions. We don’t think it’s a skill because we all just talk and we ask or whatever. But it’s a skill set, and so people aren’t trained to ask the right questions.

Steve Goldbach:
I almost wondered, Jeff, is there… And maybe this exists and I’m just not aware of it. But on both dimensions, it sounds like there’s a cognitive bias of “I overestimate the impact of my question. I overestimate the impact of the effect, and I also overestimate the impact of sharing what I’m really thinking on the other person. I think that the impact of my statement is almost always greater than what it is.” There’s an overconfidence bias that, I think, has been published where people are more confident. But I almost wonder whether people, systematically, overestimate the impact on… Maybe that’s been published and I’m just not aware of it. I haven’t seen it in my reading of that literature. Maybe you have. But I’m curious if you think that that might be just a human bias that we have.

Jeff Wetzler:
Yes. And the other side of that same coin is that we underestimate the resilience of the other person. We think that the other person is more fragile than it turns out that they are.

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. So, tell us a bit about the ask approach then. What is it that we can do differently in order to make it more likely that we get that important information?

Jeff Wetzler:
Yeah. I’ll say one thing, which is that the approach is not only designed to get information out of other people, but it’s really designed to make it better for both people. It’s really meant as a mutual benefit, mutual learning. Because when we use the ask approach, we make better decisions together, we collaborate better together, we innovate better together, we save each other time, we’re deeper in our relationship. And so, sometimes I think it can inadvertently come across as, I’m just extracting something from you. But the spirit of the ask approach is really that it’s a mutual learning process, and it’s got five practices to it.

The first one is all about breaking out of the certainty that stops us from even being curious in the first place. I call it choosing curiosity. And instead of just looking at curiosity as a trait that some people have or don’t or a state of mind that we’re sometimes in or sometimes not, I’m posing the possibility that curiosity is a choice that is always available to all of us all the time. And it’s simply a matter of putting one question at the center of our attention, which is, what can I learn from this person? Because I believe that there’s always something important that we can be learning from someone else. And so, that is the first practice, choosing curiosity.

In the chapter of the book, I unpack a tool that Chris Argyris developed that he calls the Ladder of Inference, which is really a model for understanding how quickly we race to conclusions about what’s going on in a situation based on just selecting a tiny fraction of the data, and in microseconds figuring out our story about what’s going on. And this tool, I think, is one of the most powerful tools there is to help us realize our opinion about something, our conclusion about something is just one of many different ways of looking at a situation.

And so, if we can actually realize that we are jumping to our certainty based on preexisting assumptions and biases that we have, but that there’s other ways to look at it, we can start to inject question marks in the story that we have about someone. And so, the chapter really starts to say, “Here’s some specific questions that you can ask. Things like, what other information might I be missing? How might someone else interpret the story? Et cetera.” So that’s number one, choosing curiosity. Shall I keep going through the other ones?

Stuart Crainer:
Curiosity is always interesting because that’s something that’s encouraged in schools, isn’t it? Effectively. You get rewards. Pupils who ask questions about things are encouraged, but when you get to organisational life, you don’t get promoted for being curious in general.

Jeff Wetzler:
What’s interesting is that there’s a lot of research on how curious kids are naturally. And there’s actually some really interesting research out of the UK that talks about young kids asking, something on average, like 400 questions a day to their poor parents. But by the time they get in through grade school into middle school, it’s dropping down almost precipitously. And there’s other interesting research that shows that at home, kids are asking 50 questions a day, but at school they’re asking two questions a day. And then, by high school, no questions a day.

And so, I would actually argue that, as kids get older, schools are not encouraging curiosity. Schools are encouraging kids to have the right answer. And usually, the person asking questions is the teacher, not the students. We need to completely flip that on its head if we actually want kids to graduate and enter life in the workforce far more curious. But most of the time, this factory model of school is not about curiosity. It’s really about the right answer and getting things done.

Stuart Crainer:
So curiosity is the first stage of the ask approach.

Jeff Wetzler:
Exactly.

Stuart Crainer:
What’s the next stage, Jeff?

Jeff Wetzler:
The next stage is what I call make it safe. And this draws on a lot of research about psychological safety from Amy Edmondson. And I learned this the hard way. After I left Monitor and I had been trained in questions and productive interactions and all that kind of stuff, I went to my first big operating role. And I thought I was asking the right questions of people, but what I failed to realize is that even if you ask the right questions, if people don’t feel safe telling you the true answers, it doesn’t matter if you’re curious.

And so, this step is all about making it feel safe, easy, appealing for people to tell you the hard stuff, the stuff that they might actually fear you’re going to have a bad reaction to, or that you’re going to judge them about as well. It includes things like, how do we create the right connections with people? When I interviewed a number of CEOs for the book, they were very deliberate to say, “The context of where I have the conversation matters. I don’t bring them into my office and have them sit across the big desk from me because that’s going to reinforce power structures. We sit at a couch, or I go to the cafeteria, or I go to their turf, or I do a ride along with a salesperson because when I’m on their turf, they’re much more comfortable.”

I find the same thing in my own personal life with my daughter, who’s a teenager, when she comes home from school and I say, “How was your day?” I don’t get anything from her.

Steve Goldbach:
Fiiine.

Jeff Wetzler:
Fine, at best. Or, “Leave me alone, dad.” Whatever. But if I stay up at 11:00 PM with her, she won’t stop talking. She wants to share, etc. And so, part of making it safe is actually creating the connection in the context that the other person feels most comfortable and where they want to do it.
It also includes things like ourselves opening up. If we want someone else to share, we’ve got to share too. We got to let them know why we need to learn from them, why we’re dependent on them, but also some things that might be hard or vulnerable for us to share. And we have to let them know that we can handle it, which I call radiating resilience. We’ve got to demonstrate to them that, “No matter what you say, I’m not going to hold you responsible for my reaction. I can handle it.” And there’s a bunch of ways we can do that.

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. And it’s interesting, Charles Duhigg, in his latest book, Supercommunicators, talks about how the importance of sharing something personal about yourself makes it more likely that you’re perceived to be a good communicator, at least in the early stages of his book. I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve read the first few chapters of Supercommunicators. That reciprocity is super important. I mean, Jeff, I always find it interesting in my own reflections. For the longest time in my prior role at Deloitte, when I had a strategy team, one of the things that I would continually say, “If you’re ever thinking about exploring other career options, come to me because I want to be of help.” Because we were never going to be a large group of people in our internal strategy team. And so, I knew that there were going to be people leaving and I wanted folks to go out and have impact as alumni of Deloitte.

But oftentimes, I would get brought in at the last minute, I would literally get a note that would say, “Steve, can I get five minutes on your calendar?” And I knew then, it was like, “Okay. They’re telling me they’re leaving.” And I kept saying in large group settings, “Look, I’m here to help. I’ve got a good network. I’d love to connect you if you’re thinking… We don’t expect everyone to stay for the rest of their lives.”

But it took a long, long time before I had people coming to me and saying, “Actually, I am thinking about exploring. Can you help me?” But it literally for me took years to establish that kind of psychological safety. And so, all these little cues that I think people can use are so important. Because we think we’re being safe and because we have only information about our intentions, but other people experience them differently. And that’s a hard lesson to learn, isn’t it?

Jeff Wetzler:
Absolutely. And I continue to learn and relearn that lesson. And it’s so easy, particularly if we’re in a position of authority, to underestimate the fear that the power of our position creates in other people.

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:
Working through the ask approach. So we got curiosity, we’ve got make it safe. It’s interesting the overlap, again, between management and organisational theory and stuff that works in schools, like Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety. What’s the third element?

Jeff Wetzler:
The third element is actually posing quality questions. And it’s amazing how few of us really ask high quality questions in most of our interactions. There’s research that literally studies the dialogues of executives and organizations, and something like less than 15 to 20% of the time what comes out of their mouth is questions. The rest of them are assertions. And there’s a lot of things that we utter that have question marks at the end that’re not actually questions. They are leading questions. They’re, what I call, sneaky questions. They’re questions that are designed to maneuver someone to a particular outcome, as opposed to questions that are truly designed to learn something from people.

And so, this step is really about posing questions, expanding our repertoire of questions to be able to understand what’s at the heart of what someone else knows, thinks, and feels. They’re questions, for example, like, how do you hear the headline of what someone truly thinks about your strategy or your idea or your proposal? Questions like, where do you come down on this? What’s your view on this particular issue? And oftentimes, if we ask that question at all, we then stop there. But what we’ve got to do then is to say, “We got to dig deeper. Where does that come from? What leads you to think that? Tell me more about how you got to that conclusion.”

And then, we got to keep going and see what they see. “What are some examples of what makes you think that? Tell me a story.” Sometimes we ask for data and people think, “Well, if I don’t have hard data, I can’t share it.” But stories are forms of data too. So we can ask people, “Tell me some stories of what experience you’ve had that helped you to get to that.” And it’s amazing how much more that can uncover than just asking someone for what’s your view on an issue. There’s questions like that.

There’s also questions, which I think are very rare for leaders to ask, which are requesting reactions to our own ideas. We’re very comfortable saying, “Here’s what I think.” But just to add the question, “What might I be missing? What’s the hole that I’m not seeing? What am I overlooking in this? What’s your reaction to this?” That can unleash all kinds of things that people would otherwise not tell them. And then, there’s questions that can invite innovation and ideation. “How might we do this? What’s your best idea for how to do this kind of thing?” Those are a few categories of what I call quality questions.

Stuart Crainer:
So curiosity, make it safe, pose questions. What’s next, Jeff?

Jeff Wetzler:
Once you pose the question, you’ve got to listen to what people have to say. And so, the fourth part of the-

Steve Goldbach:
What? You got to actually listen?

Jeff Wetzler:
[Laughing] You got to listen.

Steve Goldbach:
Yeah. This isn’t just performative?

Jeff Wetzler:
It could be, but if you really want to know what they actually think and feel, turns out you got to listen. And for the book, I interviewed professional listeners, including journalists who, all of the time… As you know, just ask questions and listen. I interviewed one named Jenny Anderson, who told me a fascinating story that wherever she can, she records her interviews, and then she will go back and listen to them two, three, four times. And every time she goes back and listens to them, there’s something important that she hadn’t picked up the first time.

And so, it’s just amazing. We think we’ve heard it once, we got what someone has to say. But there’s so much that we’re actually not hearing. And one of the other gurus and mentors that, Steve, you and I had at Monitor, was a leader named David Kantor, who was a leader in family systems. And he professionally… His whole career was about studying how families interacted. And what he discovered is that you actually have to listen through three channels. It’s not enough just to listen to the content of what someone’s saying, but a second channel is, what’s the emotion of what they’re saying as well? And a third channel is, what’s the action that they’re actually taking? And so, in this chapter of the book, I talk about, how can we triple the amount of information we’re getting in what we’re hearing by training ourselves to listen through each of these three different channels?

Stuart Crainer:
And what’s the final element? After listening.

Jeff Wetzler:
After listening, it’s really comes down to, how do we make sense of it all? The final step is called reflect and reconnect. And reflection is… I think sometimes people think that’s just something that monks do on a mountain in a monastery, who has time for reflection? But reflection, I actually think this is the most important step, because this is actually about converting talk into action. This is about taking what we’ve heard and squeezing the goodness out of it. Stuart, you alluded earlier to Chris Argyris’ theories of single loop and double loop learning. This is what reflection helps us do. It not only helps us think about, what can I do differently based on what the person said? But it also helps us if we take that next double step to say, not just what can I do differently, but how can I think differently? How can I actually reevaluate my assumptions, my stories, my mindsets about the situation? And then, on particularly important things, we can take it one deeper step and say, what is this teaching me about my deeper world views, my deeper biases, my deeper ways of being, et cetera? And so, in this chapter, I talk about three turns of reflection. Reflecting on the story that we have about the situation, reflecting on the steps that we take, and reflecting on our deeper stuff about ourselves. And that’s where the deepest, I think, richest, most powerful learning comes in.
But we can’t stop at doing this reflection. If we just do this reflection and walk away, then we leave the other person thinking, “Did they just want to take something from me? Are they going to do anything with what I shared? Is it worthwhile?” And so, this reconnect is so important to close the loop. It also gives the other person a chance to correct if there’s something wrong that you took away. If you said, “Here’s how I’m making sense of what we got in our conversation.” And they say, “Well, I didn’t actually mean it that way.” Now you actually have a chance to adjust, get the right takeaway. And it makes it far more likely that the next time you ask a question, they’re going to think it’s worthwhile to share with you because they can see how valuable what they shared was before.

Steve Goldbach:
Jeff, as I’ve come into, over the last few months, a new focus in my life around sustainability, in my particular case from a professional standpoint and helping people think and helping organizations think about how they can be more sustainable, one of the things that I have come to strongly believe, and I’d be curious what you view on this, is that the challenge that we have as a planet to navigate climate change, actually at the core of it, is going to be helped by this approach. Because this is such a complicated issue, and there’s so many multiple things that we need to consider, right?

We need to consider societies in the global self being able to develop, and use fossil fuels to develop at the same time that other societies should be decarbonizing, and what the impact on different communities might be, or how do we retrain people who have historically been part of it? Everyone comes at this major transition that the planet’s going to have to go through from a different point of view and a different lived experience.

So, if we’re effectively shouting at each other about, I believe this or I believe that, we’re likely to be left with inaction. But if we actually employ some of the approaches that you’re talking about in the book, we might have a chance. I’m curious how you look at some of the challenges that we face today and think about the benefits of taking the stance towards solving really complex problems.

Jeff Wetzler:
It deeply resonates, what you just said, Steve. Any one of the big challenging issues that are vexing us from climate change, to inequality, to health crises, and global war, whatever you name it, we’re so interconnected. We’re only going to solve these problems if we actually deeply understand the context and perspectives that every stakeholder is bringing to them. But I think, and what I would add to it, is I think that the solutions to most of these problems actually exist. If we could tap into the insights and genius and wisdom of people, the seeds of figuring out, what do we need to do to take on sustainability? People know the answer to those questions, but I don’t know that those answers have been surfaced and reflected upon and integrated.

And so, by just the same way that an organizational leader, I think, can unleash the collective intelligence of their organization, or we personally can unleash the collective intelligence of our friend group or whatever. I think for these big issues, the collective genius and the answers live particularly in voices that are not often heard enough. And this kind of approach, I hope, will help to surface that and get us to solutions faster. I think one of the biggest problems that I’m concerned about right now is the problem of polarization, where it seems like too often people who have opposing views are seen as the enemy.

And if there’s one challenge I would offer to all of us would be to say, what would it mean if anytime there was someone who has a different view, we could just put the question to the front of our mind, “What could I learn from this person?” It doesn’t mean we have to do what they say or agree with them, but there is something important that we can learn from this person. And my hope is that there’s something that this book and this ask approach can do to transform some of that dynamic and polarization that’s plaguing us right now.

Stuart Crainer:
I mean, it strikes me, as you were going through these issues, Jeff, that there’s big cultural differences, isn’t there? Say something like asking questions. I mean, I’ve run sessions in Asia with a classroom, and you say, “Any questions?” at the end. And there’s a resounding silence, because it’s not in their culture, it doesn’t come naturally to ask questions. And there must be cultural things at work with all these elements.

Jeff Wetzler:
Absolutely. And I’ve also, when I was at Monitor, taught this in Asia as well to consultants and leaders in different cultures. And I do think there are true cultural differences, and things need to be translated and shown differently, and it looks different to ask a question. But I have found that the underlying ideas of, “Are we curious or not?” Can translate. How we express that curiosity needs to look different.

And I think in some cultures, particularly cultures in Asia, where there’s a tremendous respect for hierarchy and where there are certain norms about what can be said and what not can be said, the step of make it safe is especially important. And what it looks like to make it safe will vary based on culture, but it can be especially necessary to do that, to open up this kind of dialogue. Chris Argyris found that the same patterns of how people communicate hold true across every different culture, even if the way that the solution needs to get implemented needs to get tailored.

Steve Goldbach:
Jeff, maybe one last question from my standpoint is just where do you take this next? What’s the next challenge that you want to use as you’ve walked through your life as a consultant and an educator and an innovator? What’s the challenge that you look at the horizon and say, “I’d love to apply what I’ve written about to that challenge”?

Jeff Wetzler:
I think the challenge that this book is trying to take on is one that I hope will cut across whatever the sector or the industry is, which is, how do we vastly increase the learning that we get that’s right in front of our noses that we too often don’t get? And so, I’m interested in actually seeing how do we apply this in business settings, but also in climate, and also in polarization, and specifically also in education.

One of the things that Transcend, my organization, deeply believes is that you can’t come into a community and tell them, “Here’s the right answer for what school should look like.” We need the community engaged, participatory design process. And so, also infusing this into any kind of change and transformation process, including with schools or including with organizations, is something that I’m very fired up about.

Stuart Crainer:
Is there a readiness for change, Jeff, do you think? Is the timing right? You encounter people where there is an appetite to embrace these ideas?

Jeff Wetzler:
There absolutely is. And we actually see this in our own work at Transcend with school communities. Over the years, we’ve seen communities that are incredibly fast and successful at innovating and building great things, and communities where things completely stall out. And we’ve developed a theory of five conditions that really matter for the readiness to do this kind of work.

And what we have discovered is you can start anywhere, but you can only move as fast as your readiness conditions allow. And so, I wouldn’t say that this is… It’s like a binary yes or no, you’re ready for this or not ready for this. But depending on your level of clarity about what you want, your level of conviction in it, the culture in your organization, you’ll need to tailor the approach and the process to your starting point.

Stuart Crainer:
Jeff, thank you very much. The book, Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You. Jeff Wetzler, thank you very much.

Jeff Wetzler:
It’s been great to chat with you both. Really appreciate this.

Stuart Crainer:
Thank you.