Ask Before You Tell

What Humble Inquiry taught me about leadership, relationships and being human

There are a handful of books that haven't just taught me something, but have genuinely changed how I interact with people.

Edgar H. Schein's Humble Inquiry is one of them.

Its central idea is beautifully simple:

"The gentle art of asking instead of telling."

Or, put another way, building relationships through genuine curiosity about another person.

I'm fascinated by people and relationships. I've made them a huge part of both my professional and voluntary life.

What is the magic that makes one relationship work? What makes another crash and burn? Why do some leaders bring out the best in people while others sometimes with perfectly good intentions - close people down?

Humble Inquiry helped me understand something fundamental:

Curiosity changes relationships.

And you cannot be genuinely curious about another person while simultaneously assuming you already know what they think, need or are capable of.

We really do love to tell

We all know a "teller".

Actually, most of us are the teller!

The person who tells you what they've done, what they know, who they know, what you should do, what happened to somebody they know and, if you're particularly lucky—what Suzanne-from-work's-sister's-boyfriend's-nephew had for breakfast.

(My mum will forgive me for that one.)

It's a long-running family joke that when I phone her, she can sometimes launch into a tsunami of information before I've actually said hello. Twenty minutes later she'll come up for air. I tease her about it, but the uncomfortable truth is that I know I'm guilty of doing exactly the same thing.

I've spent hours "telling" at my best friend. I've filled uncomfortable silences because I couldn't tolerate them. I've jumped in with my own experience when somebody was trying to tell me theirs. I've offered solutions when nobody asked me to solve anything.

And I've sometimes been so busy thinking about what I wanted to say next that I wasn't really listening at all.

That's why Humble Inquiry affected me so much.

It wasn't really teaching me how to ask better questions.

It was teaching me how to make more room for other people.

Leadership makes this even more important

Add hierarchy to human relationships and things get interesting.

We've probably all experienced the manager or senior leader who enters the room and starts telling.

Here's what I think.

Here's what we need to do.

Here's what happened when I did this somewhere else.

Here's who I've spoken to.

Here's the answer.

Or worse, they jump in and repeat exactly what you've just said!

Sometimes that's exactly what leadership requires. There are moments when people need clarity, direction and a decision.

But when telling becomes our default, we risk missing something incredibly important.

The higher our status, the less likely people may be to tell us what they really think.

A leader might say:

"Nobody raised any concerns."

But did you create the conditions in which somebody could?

You might think:

"Everyone agreed."

Did they agree, or did the most senior person speak first?

You might say:

"My door is always open."

But what happens when somebody actually walks through it and disagrees with you?

That's where humble inquiry becomes much more than a communication technique.

It becomes a leadership practice.

Control the process, not the conversation

This is an idea I try to hold onto in leadership:

Control the process, not the conversation.

Being curious doesn't mean relinquishing responsibility.

As leaders, we can set the question.

We can establish boundaries.

We can explain the decision that needs to be made.

We can provide context.

And then we can ask.

What are you seeing that I might not be seeing?

What concerns you about this?

What would make this work better?

Who haven't we heard from yet?

What am I missing?

Then comes the surprisingly difficult bit.

Stop talking.

Wait.

The silence might feel uncomfortable.

Leave it there anyway.

Somebody might simply be thinking.

Silence isn't an absence of contribution

This matters enormously to me when I think about inclusion.

In fast-paced workplaces, we can easily confuse the ability to think aloud quickly with competence.

The quickest voice gets heard.

The confident voice gets remembered.

The person comfortable interrupting gets more airtime.

But not everybody processes information that way.

Some people need the question in advance.

Some need a few seconds longer.

Some formulate their thoughts internally before speaking.

Some people process their thoughts by speaking.

Some communicate brilliantly in writing.

Some will happily challenge you one-to-one but find it incredibly difficult in a room full of senior people.

And some have learned through experience that speaking up can come with consequences.

If we're genuinely interested in what people think, rather than simply whether they can compete for airtime, we have to create different ways for people to contribute.

That's inclusion in one of its most everyday forms.

Humility isn't knowing less

I think we sometimes misunderstand humble leadership.

Humility isn't pretending you don't know things.

Expertise matters.

Experience matters.

Leadership matters.

You don't have to diminish yourself to create space for somebody else.

Humble Inquiry asks something different:

Can I suspend my certainty for long enough to discover what you know?

Because the person sitting opposite you might know something you don't.

The newest person might spot the flaw everybody else has stopped seeing.

The quietest person in the meeting might have the best idea.

The person doing the job every day might understand the problem better than the person responsible for the strategy.

And somebody whose experience is completely different from yours might change how you understand the world.

But only if you ask.

Curiosity requires vulnerability too

There's another part of this that has stayed with me.

I once made a new friend who, from the outside, appeared to have everything completely together. She was one of those people you look at and think wow, smart, beautiful, successful, lovely family. And if I'm being completely truthful, I compared myself with her and came up short. Then one day we bumped into each other outside the environment where we'd met.

She shared something deeply personal with me.

She made herself vulnerable.

And then she became curious about me.

I responded honestly.

Suddenly the relationship changed.

Neither of us was performing.

Neither of us was trying to impress the other.

We were just two human beings allowing ourselves to be known.

Her humility was a gamechanger and she probably had absolutely no idea.

It taught me that curiosity isn't simply about extracting information from somebody.

It's relational.

If I want you to trust me with something real, I may have to be prepared to be real too.

I'm still a teller – but I understand why a little better now

There's another layer to this story that I couldn't see when I first wrote about Humble Inquiry.

I wrote the original version of this blog before I knew I was autistic.

That diagnosis has given me a completely different understanding of some of my own communication.

I'm a verbal processor.

Very often, I don't have a perfectly formed thought and then say it out loud. I find the thought by talking.

Talking helps me organise ideas, make connections, work out how I feel and turn a jumble of information in my head into something coherent.

That can look like "telling".

I also understand differently now why silence can sometimes feel uncomfortable, why I can become enthusiastic and jump into a conversation with a related experience, or why my brain can make several connections while somebody else is still speaking.

Sometimes sharing my own experience is also my way of saying:

"I hear you. I understand. Here's the connection my brain has made with what you've just told me."

The intention is connection.

But intention and impact aren't always the same thing.

And that's perhaps where Humble Inquiry has become even more useful to me since understanding my own neurodivergence.

Knowing why I communicate the way I do doesn't mean I stop thinking about how my communication lands with somebody else.

Instead, it gives me another question to ask myself:

Am I talking because this person needs to hear what I have to say—or because my brain needs to process it?

Sometimes the answer will genuinely be both.

Sometimes I need to give myself another way to process so that somebody else has space. And equally, inclusive communication shouldn't require neurodivergent people to constantly suppress their natural communication style to resemble everybody else.

Perhaps the answer isn't that some of us need to talk less and others need to talk more.

Perhaps it's that we become more curious about how each other communicates.

Who needs thinking time?

Who thinks aloud?

Who needs information beforehand?

Who communicates better in writing?

Who needs to see a face to understand meaning?

Who needs a little longer before answering?

That's Humble Inquiry too.

Not assuming that the way I communicate is the way you should communicate.

I'm still practising

Understanding all of this hasn't transformed me into somebody who never interrupts, never fills an awkward silence and always asks the perfect question.

I'm still a teller.

I'm enthusiastic. I get excited. I connect ideas. Sometimes my brain is already halfway through the next three thoughts while somebody is finishing the first one.

Sometimes I still catch myself waiting to speak rather than listening to understand.

But now I notice it.

And I come back to curiosity.

That matters when I'm leading.

It matters when I'm coaching.

It matters when I'm parenting.

It matters in friendships.

It matters when somebody sees the world completely differently from me.

Perhaps it matters most then.

Try it

Over the next few days, pay attention to your conversations.

Notice when you're preparing your answer instead of listening.

Notice when somebody tells you something and your immediate response is:

"Yes! That happened to me..."

But don't automatically assume that's a bad thing either. Get curious about why you do it.

Are you trying to demonstrate expertise?

Are you uncomfortable with silence?

Are you trying to fix something?

Are you connecting?

Or are you processing?

Notice who fills the silences in meetings.

Notice whose voices you naturally seek out—and whose you don't.

Notice what happens inside you when somebody disagrees with you.

And notice how comfortable you are with simply not knowing.

Then try replacing one tell with a question.

Not a performative question designed to guide somebody towards the answer you've already decided upon.

Ask something you genuinely don't know the answer to.

And listen.

Really listen.

Because perhaps the greatest thing Humble Inquiry has taught me isn't how to become a better conversationalist.

It's something much more fundamental:

Other people know things I don't.

They've had experiences I haven't had.

They see things I can't see.

They communicate and process the world in ways that may be completely different from mine.

They carry ideas, worries, talents and perspectives that I may never discover if I'm always the person doing the talking—or if I only create space for people who communicate like me.

For me, that's the sunshine in this one.

Ask before you tell.

And perhaps, before deciding somebody is too loud, too quiet, too direct, too hesitant or talks too much, ask another question:

What's happening for this person?

You might be surprised by what you discover...

Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, a book that has profoundly influenced how I think about leadership, inclusion, relationships and the simple art of being curious about other people