Agitated Inquiry
Lesson 12 from: Courage, Creativity and the Power of ChangeBeth Comstock
Agitated Inquiry
Lesson 12 from: Courage, Creativity and the Power of ChangeBeth Comstock
Lesson Info
12. Agitated Inquiry
Lessons
Class Introduction
08:15 2Permission
13:44 3Learn Courage
05:41 4Job Crafting
08:12 5Mentor Coach Champion
05:23 6Discovery and Fringe Futures
05:18 7Field Trips
03:23 8Going on 3s
08:41Lesson Info
Agitated Inquiry
the next part about making changes. The hardest part and usually what turns most of us away. It's what I've chosen to eloquently call agitated inquiry. Um, and I mean it in two ways. I mean the ability to ask tough questions and also the ability to navigate tension, tension and conflict. Tension in the kind of things we were talking about earlier. The got to get stuff done, but I've got to plant the seeds for the new. So if Discovery was about sort of capturing these exotic conversations outside, agitated inquiry is kind of beating up inside your ideas to make sure their sturdy to have those conversations inside between people to make sure that you're ready to go to go forth. What you're doing is you're beating up your ideas to make sure they're ready and worthy to go the distance of time. So to me, it starts with really good questions. One of things I feel like I've had to learn in my career is how to ask better questions. Too often we ask questions because they won't approve how smar...
t we are because you want to say gotcha. I know I'm better. I'm smarter than you are. Gotcha. You didn't exactly know that, did you? He didn't remember that number on page five of last week's presentation of 300 pages. Gotcha. But the reality is in this sort of phase of okay, are we? Here's what we've done. We've given ourselves permission, Did fight for better. We've discovered we've got a good story of vision of where we're going. But how do we know it's gotta beat it up a bit? So maybe the first question to start with is, What problem are we trying to solve? Are we doing this because we can, or should we do it? Why us? Why me starting a new business? Why me? Can I answer? Why me versus someone else? Maybe you're just starting something, and I love this positioning. Here's my hypothesis. It's a great way to think about. It's not get you off the hook a bit. You don't have to say, Here's and here's the best answer I've ever had, or here's the definitive way we should do it. Too many people do that already. Maybe your path is to say I have a hypothesis. We have a hypothesis. What if it's true how will we know? How can we test it? So I love some of those kind of questions as a way. Teoh change. Change the angle. Another one about timing. Why now? Timing is a critical one. Why should we do this right now? Just because you want to thes gauge may help you in some of those other things you were asking earlier, Aziz to how'd how'd away filter filter through that? One of the things in terms of conflict that I've loft and liked is actually a practice kind of. I call the Red Team Challenge where you're pitting one team against another. It's a very orchestrated way of creating conflict. This comes from military world. You've probably heard of Red Team Blue team exercises, military, the military. Does I like this with teams? I like this even just to do this with myself. It's a bit schizophrenic, but to sort of have point counterpoint in terms of how you how you think about it. Um but what you're doing is you're setting up two teams and you're intentionally giving them opposing points of view and a platform to do that. When we were launching our clean tech effort of imagination. We do this very deliberately. People were there was a lot of debate even then about, um especially then I should say about climate change. And so what we did is we took actually the science and engineering teams who were very pro fossil fuel. We said You must be about global warming and climate change, and we took the climate change experts and said, You must be about fossil fuels and we staged an orchestrated debate out of that. The the definitive answer was, Climate change is gonna happen. It is happening and here's what we think we can do about it. But it was really important that we forced people toe have that opposing point of view. So I think this is something I found really helpful when you can to create those mechanisms where people can have really this orchestrated debate.
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Ratings and Reviews
Julie Hankes
Wow, this class was such a privilege to be a part of! There are so many gems in here, but what I loved most, is that she opened my thinking even bigger and offered me tricks and tips to facilitate that for myself and others long into the future. This is a tremendous gift as I'm already pretty outside of the box (i.e. I just took a client kayaking and then out in a seaplane yesterday for a visioning session) and creative in my work, so yes, what a gift! She also profoundly underscores the vital role the creative/imaginary mindset plays in the role of innovation and greeting our world's most wild challenges and opportunities. What a joy, have shared her work with many since this class took place. Thank you Beth for your courageous offering of imagination and championing it's vital role in our everyday work place and in our world's next steps into a more thriving, creative and innovative future!
Arthur Yakumo
I really enjoy this class. If you want a mind shift, having difficult seeing opportunities in front of you, especially living and working in a corporate job, this class is for you. Working for a fortune 500 job, I see how work is constantly changing, I didn't see the opportunities and how we can influence the change or be part of the change. This class helps you see and be part of the changing job revolution.
Christine Denker
If you want a mind shift to create change for yourself or your organization, then this class is a no-brainer! As a middle school English Language Arts teacher, I thought about how I could apply the concepts Beth teaches to my students who I have the privilege of interacting with daily. As a writer, I thought about how much I'm holding myself back and how I need to give myself permission to try new things knowing I'm going to fail and it's okay to do so. I really appreciated this course and had several takeaways that I can't wait to implement.
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