Balance Advocacy and Inquiry

In my last few ezines I have been discussing Roger Schwartz’s ground rules for effective meetings. In The Skilled Facilitator (2002) Schwartz also discusses the importance of both advocating and inquiring.

If group members only advocate they often reinforce the cycle by which each party tries to convince the other. In this cycle people generally listen less and less and get more and more frustrated. If you only advocated you don’t open yourself “to gaps in your own reasoning” (p.120). And not only do you derail learning, limiting yourself to advocacy is not effective. Too much advocacy sets up the conditions where a meeting is nothing more than a series of monologues and no comment is connected to another.

On the other hand if all you do is ask questions you don’t help others understand your own thinking and how you arrived at it. Sharing your own views and the thought process that led to it can be critical.

Of course for inquiry to be affective it has to be genuine. Asking, “Why don’t you just do it my way and see how it works” (p.121) is not real inquiry. Curiosity and a desire to learn are key intentions to making this ground rule work.

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