Humble Inquiry: Are You Asking the Right Questions? – SM4 Safety News…

An excellent organization is one that can nimbly execute its strategy while continually learning from itself. Its structure is designed to provide management with constant feedback and performance from normal work. Its safety leadership spends considerable resources to carefully listen to the ”weak signals” from frontline employees, work teams and key stakeholders alike to help build the capacity and risk tolerance necessary for employees to fail fast, fail softly, learn how to learn quicker and perform brilliantly.

Shoemaker and Day define these weak signals as, “A seemingly random or disconnected piece of information that at first appears to be background noise but can be recognized as part of a significant pattern by viewing it through a different frame or connecting it with other pieces of information.”¹

Detecting Weak Signals With Humble Inquiry
While managing today’s specialized work teams and flatter organizations, senior leadership and safety professionals can seldom remain experts in what is going on within all aspects of their company. At the same time, high-performance work teams require a significant amount of interdependence, effective communications, strong relationships and knowledge management. For management to continually improve and support team performance, it must develop the art of asking the kind of questions known as humble inquiry.

What Is Humble Inquiry?
The notion of humble inquiry was originally developed and explained by Edgar Schein, a former...