Thankfully—very thankfully—it's been several years since I've been stuck in one of those icebreaker situations, the kind where the exercise itself makes you want to leave the room because you are so uncomfortable, and where the question is so bad you can't even answer it.
Like: what's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you?
I've embarrassed myself plenty. Really good stories. And some bad ones, too. But asked to produce one in the next three minutes, while trying to pay attention to what other people are sharing, I go blank. And get anxious. I've been drafting this note for a couple of days and I still can't come up with one.
I can tell you I've been embarrassed. I just can't tell you about it right now.
But here's the answer I'd like to give the next time I'm asked:
There's no more embarrassing moment than rolling into an interaction with the confidence of a thousand suns—and slowly realizing, or not, because holding strong to a belief is a very human thing, that the situation is a lot grayer than I walked in thinking.
I've learned you gain very little by being "right" about a situation before you know anything about it. And your odds of being "right" are slim. Even if you're a person who thinks you're usually "right", you're only ever correct generally. Never specifically.
Which is where Ed Schein comes in. He has a name for the other way of walking in:
"Humble Inquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person."
Humble Inquiry isn't something I can argue you into. Nope: You try it, it works, and that's the end of the debate. A conversation you would have walked into more sure of the facts than facts allow goes somewhere better, and it's noticeable—less friction, nobody leaving worse off, and you find out what you couldn't have known from the start.
Do that a few times and certainty starts looking like the risk it always was. Especially here and now—uncertainty, complexity, constant change—when the sky above any given conversation is more overcast than it's ever been.
So I do my best to show up asking. No, there's no perfection. Some version of tell me more. What am I missing? Say more about that.
A few more moves.
When you find yourself disagreeing, ask instead of argue—What are you seeing that I'm not? How'd you get to that?—and the question turns up the thing the argument would've run right over.
Say it back, too: Here's what I'm hearing—do I have it right? The back-and-forth that follows is the whole point.
Leave the silence when it comes; give it a second and people tend to keep going.
Ask about their read of the situation, because you walked in with a theory and theirs is the one with information.
And name what you don't know—the gap you'd work to hide is the gap nobody's going to fill for you.
None of this holds if it isn't genuine.
Oh—and I've found it works pretty well at home, too.