I Walk the Line, or How to Ask Provocative, Disruptive Questions

Over the past couple of weeks, I stepped in it. Or almost stepped in it. How, you ask? By asking a system I was working with a question that was:

• Not respectful of the people on the receiving end of the question

• Perhaps more than they were ready to answer

• Not landing how I wanted it to land

Ugh. As someone who has been doing this for a long time (coaching teams and systems and people), shouldn’t I be beyond this? Shouldn’t I be able to ask a big question in a safe manner?

Yes, I should, and that is what I want to work through here: How do I ask provocative or disruptive questions in a mindful, respectful way?

A Little Background…

Magnesium is a program I created back in 2020, deep in the throes of the pandemic. It has a similar frame each year, using anywhere between 3-5 sessions to complete three chapters of the workbook. Every year, I revise the workbook, the questions, the material. I sit with the work, think on it, pull it apart and put it back together again, but it is the questions I ask that I spend the most time with. They change every year as sections are added or removed or shifted.

That work is now in its fourth year, and for the first time, it has a Europe cohort as well as an Americas cohort. The program also has some new sections, namely suitcase phrases and sacred cows. The suitcase phrases are a new way for me to help people play with metaphor and a shorthand way for people to communicate in systems. But that second section, the sacred cows….that’s what I’m taking a deeper look into here.

So what is it exactly that I asked? What has me doing deep, reflective work?

What are my “sacred cows,” the questions I am unwilling to ask myself or aspects of my life I am unwilling to examine?

My intent aligned to Wikipedia’s definition of the sacred cow idiom, “a figure of speech for something considered immune from question or criticism, especially unreasonably so.” But honestly, that question is a bit of a doozy. Actually, it’s more than a bit of a doozy. It was tone deaf at the very least, rude and culturally misappropriate at its worst.

Provocative and Disruptive Questions

Have you ever looked at something so long that you stop seeing it? You know what I’m talking about—that pile of unread books on the shelf, the bags in your garage that need to go to donation, those items in your backlog that are good ideas but remain stuck in the good idea phase. We all have them in one form or another, and generally, whatever “it” is has been there so long that we stop seeing it. How do we get from “Everything is fine” to “housecleaning of the soul” to examining the unexamined?

Answer? Disruptive questions, questions so brazen that they are a shock to the system. They are that just-above-freezing, open-water winter swim. They are the thing that pulls you up short and suddenly, you can’t stop seeing what has been right there all along.

I sat with this concept, turning it over in my head, when I realized I wanted to see it defined by others. I turned to the International Coaching Federation (ICF) for guidance.

A provocative question is one that is meant to be challenging. These questions may differ from others in that they may create more of an emotional stir with the intent to stimulate a reaction, a thought or emotion in someone, or incite a certain thought or feeling.

Disruptive questions enable us to cultivate fresh perspectives and insights about 'what currently is' and 'what could' or 'might be' in the future. They fearlessly puncture 'in the box' thinking to uncover counterintuitive and surprising solutions.

Side note: I cannot hear, speak, or write the word disruptive without thinking of Clayton Christensen, the eminent Harvard professor and thinker who passed away in 2020. In 1997, Christensen wrote The Innovator’s Dilemma, coining the term “disruptive innovation” to describe an innovation that “creates a new market or value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.” His book quickly became required reading for leaders and creators alike, and since the publication of this book, I’ve heard countless people in product and user experience talk about being disruptive in the market. Many want to be disruptive, few actually are.

But I also learned something by reading these definitions. Notice how different these descriptions are from our old warhorse powerful questions. Powerful questions are open-ended, non-binary, stopping evasion and confusion. Provocative and disruptive questions use words like “emotional,” “stimulate,” and “incite.” They also use “challenge” and “puncture” and “uncover.” The language here is stronger, inflammatory, wanting something to happen. I feel like I need to be mindful of my own biases, that I have no attachment to any outcome, when using provocative or disruptive questions. I need to be clear in my own coaching on why I feel the need to use them.

Another side note: The above paragraph is not meant to disparage powerful questions, not in the slightest. Powerful questions are the bedrock on which my coaching work is built, the come-from place in all of my work. For me, provocative and disruptive questions are simply powerful questions with a bit more linguistic heft to them.

Provocative versus Disruptive versus Volatile

There is provocative, there is disruptive, and then there is volatile and insulting. My sacred cow question was most definitely provocative, clearly disruptive, and to some audiences, it teetered on insulting. As a coach, not my best moment.

The language the ICF provides in its definitions is very clear: a deliberate poking to create a reaction, the breach of stale thinking to uncover novel solutions. Provocative questions, disruptive questions—these are both needed by systems. But volatile questions—does a system need volatile questions? Hmmmm….the jury is debating that topic.

I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s excellent book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. In it, she describes four types of fire starters or accelerants to be avoided in conflict:

• Group identities

• Conflict entrepreneurs

• Humiliation

• Corruption

Using Ripley’s work, I don’t think a volatile question plays into corruption, or at least not in this case here. But volatile questions could challenge a group’s identity, and poorly handled, a volatile question could be a conflict entrepreneur. In its worst moments, a volatile question could be humiliating to people within a group. None of these are good territory to be in when working with people or systems.

Walk the Line

Clearly, I’ve given this topic a lot of thought. This is great. As systems coaches and workers, we need to do this deep, reflective work, too. But what could I do to walk this line more effectively?

Whenever I co-lead courses for CRR Global, students always want to hear about experience and application. And rightly so! Having experienced practitioners talk about what they do and why in certain scenarios is a real bonus to any learning. But I’ve also fielded queries about times a particular tool didn’t work, about my failures and face plants—those giant wrecks where you get bloodied and bruised as a systems coach and need to figure out what you didn’t see, what you need to learn, and how you moved forward. Learning comes from both successes and failures alike.

I’ll ask that question of myself: what was the learning from asking this sacred cow question in that moment?

Designed Partnership Alliance for Magnesium 2024

1. More container. When I write “more container,” I mean more care in building the container for the system, that people in the system feel that they belong. I’ve written about and spoken at length on the need for strong containers for any group or system, calling forth designed alliances or the ability to charter a system. This year, I even moved the accountability pairing of Magnesium up to the very first session so that participants could design their partnership using a Team Canvas mural I created.
   
   Yes, this is linked to the “more patience” option above, but it goes a bit further. People need time to get to know one another, to know who is in the room with them as well as who is not in the room. I sometimes imagine observers in any room where I am working. These observers might represent empathy, courage, an I’m-for-you spirit. When building this container, I needed to make certain my observers were in the room, too. In that moment, they were on their way, but they hadn’t yet found their seat.

2. More patience. The sacred-cow question might have landed a bit differently if the system had had more time with me. Midway through session two was a bit early to ask for that kind of trust, to assume that kind of safety.
   
   As always, language matters. Word choice is important. In all instances, I need to attune to the system, listen for what is there and what is not. Here are some other ways that I might use to ask that disruptive question:

   • What are you pretending to not know? What are you pretending to not see?

   • What are you not confronting?

   • What are you ignoring?

   • What are you walking by?

   • What are you unwilling to examine?

   • What questions have I not wanted someone to ask me?

   • Where have I been afraid to look?

   See? Lots of great options here. Patient language provides a way.

3. More humility. I could have just as easily written “softness” or “gentleness” here. After a drought, the earth needs soft, gentle rain, not a violent deluge. I need to meet a system where it is at, not where I want or expect it to be.
   
   This is repair-bid language from marriage and relationship expert John Gottman. You may know his work such as the Cascade Model of Relationship Dissolution (better known as the Four Horsemen or the Four Toxins) and his 5-to-1 research model of bringing positivity into system: for every negative interaction during conflict, a relationship system needs five positive things. But it can also be thought of as the metaskills that I want to invoke in myself in order to evoke in the relationship system.

4. More chutzpah. Disruptive questions take a certain amount of chutzpah to ask, and I don’t want to lose that. I never want to lose that. It’s part of what makes me a good coach, a needed coach, for so many systems. I need to better balance the polarities in myself.

5. More forgiveness. As coaches, we don’t always get it right, or at least not all-the-way right. My very good question was asked in an unskillful way. It happens. I need to normalize that I, too, am still learning and working to improve.

Would I ask a person, team, or system this kind of disruptive question again? Yes. Without a doubt. We need provocative, disruptive, borderline too-much questions in our systems and people willing to hold the space for them. These questions shock systems in ways that nothing else can, forcing them into undiscovered country. But the next time I ask a question like this, I’ll be more mindful about the people in the system before doing so.

Gratitude…

My writing here was very much influenced by conversation in the Magnesium cohorts themselves, but also in some deeper conversations with Jeffrey Morgan, Betsy Block, and Dino Zafirakos. Rosy Elliott, Kristin Hoins, and Miriam Grogan also helped with reading and clarifying my thinking. The afore-mentioned Amanda Ripley book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, helped to shape my thinking, as did Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma. My thinking and writing here also benefitted from some long walks with my dogs, some long drives to a client site. I’m one of those people who needs space to work through my thinking on an issue.

As they are for every post, this image was captured by Linda Nickell. Connect with her on Instagram as @coznlinda, or join in on Wednesday evenings for her Happiness Hour. Details, upcoming presentations, and links to past recordings can be found on her site. You can also find her on YouTube.