Inquiry vs. hurling opinions

One of the things I am motivated to help all of us get better at is moving away from hurling opinions and ideas at each other and moving toward more reflective inquiry.

And I mean “inquiry” as more than just a question, but instead a process that leads toward resolving some challenge or problem. More on that below.

I note this after having had a wonderful conversation about curiosity and community listening with Beth Salyers, the force behind #CuriosityTour2025. During our chat, she asked if there were anything about what I see happening in community listening that pisses me off, and how do I work through it?

It’s this: Talking past each other by hurling solutions and ideas and opinions during community forums and gatherings.

My experience is that, in a hurling-of-opinions/solutions contest, resolution comes only through an exercise of power. The loudest and most visible voices dictate the outcome, or some group with formal power (a board, council, organizational leader, etc.) exercises their power to declare the winning idea.

Neither of those options has anything to do with whether the idea may actually resolve the challenge.

I am not naive enough to believe that all challenges can be, or should be, resolved through dispassionate inquiry and reflection. Especially during these Trump/Musk times when the very foundations of our society are being bludgeoned by folks who simply don’t care about other folks. We need to shout, resist and use power to rebuild that foundation in the long term and to protect the most vulnerable in the short term.

At the moment I am particularly angered by the Trump administration’s efforts to disappear transgender folks. It’s not just wrong; it’s inhuman and heartless. I am keeping an eye open for opportunities to shout at people in power and urge them to find space for these folks. I am also looking for ways to be more supportive locally.

Which gets me to my point about inquiry.

What happens if a door opens, even a sliver, to work toward making our transgender citizens feel like they belong in our local community? Or any youth/adults who identify differently than the majority? What are the activities which lead to a greater number of the majority population embracing trans folks?

At this point, wins are unfortunately at the very fundamental level of reversing or subverting efforts of censorship – the literal editing out of references to transgender from government policy, research and historical content. That censorship has more consequences that simple editing. It will impact human lives.

But I am an optimist and always wonder: How do we do better, once we get past the shitshow?

Inquiry is an approach and habit that may help us exercise the muscles to better co-create with our fellow community members and not just depend on those “in power” to be the sole decision makers and solve the problem for us.

Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action deeply influences my understanding of inquiry as a process. His work – like many that also influence my thinking about community – stands on the shoulders of philosopher and educational reformer John Dewey.

Schon describes the inquiry process as reflection-in-action. Puzzlement leads to exploration, which leads to reframing the problem and conducting on-the-spot experiments to see if the reframing produces a better path. It’s a continuous conversation with the problem; “the situation talks back, the practitioner listens.”

The situation talks back. The practitioner listens.

Mind you, the inquiry process as defined and examined by Schon and Dewey does in fact move toward resolution. Some solution to address the puzzlement. It is more than active listening and experimenting. All the listening and experimenting is done with purpose – to make progress toward some desired outcome.

It also, in my mind, shifts the power. It’s more “we” than any one role or individual.

Engaging many voices in inquiry is challenging work. But it is challenge with a large, known set of tools with which to start experimenting. In my experience that is an advantage; no one need invent from scratch how to get a group to make sense of diverse voices, or make decisions to progress toward resolution.

Yet we also need to pay close attention to the very specific context and setting of the group and individuals with which we are working. It becomes a dance of discovering a productive set of tools and tweaking them to meet local conditions.

It is indeed a case of: The situation talks back, the practitioner listens. Maybe let’s make that the thing that guides us, when the door opens a sliver and we have an opportunity to imagine and activate more sustainable progress.

Note: The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community; my neighborhood, my city.