The Blameless, Curious “How Come?”
Imagine a situation where you expected something from a person, but got something other (less) than what you expected.
Stop now. Really imagine the scenario. Get that situation in your mind. It probably amps you up a little bit, doesn’t it? Notice the feeling it brings with it.
Set that feeling aside for a few minutes and let’s unpack the whole story.
In order to know what happened (with the team, couple, partnership, etc), you have to tell the story together. You have to hear all sides and all perspectives, because no one person has the whole truth of the story.
Let’s say you have two personas: The expector(s) and the expectee(s). (These are made-up words.)
The expector(s) are the people who expect something from the expectee(s).
What do you both need so that the expector(s) and the expectee(s) can tell the whole story together?
Courage. Trust. Psychological Safety.
With those three things, expectee(s) and expector(s) can look at the situation and answer the following:
What was expected to be done?
What was it that we think we agreed to?
What actually happened?
And then the real kicker: The “Blameless, Curious How Come?”
“What actually happened?” is seen through our own filters, so there is no way to be certain of what happened, even if we think we’re certain. There is nuance to every incident. We can measure some things, sure. But that isn’t the whole story. It doesn’t capture the nuance.
It misses the human experience, the essence, the “perfume”…So we inspect, make transparent what we can, and then we experiment. We’re hopeful that our experiment helped, but we won’t know until after we’ve tried. And who knows what is good or what is bad?
We also don’t know the long-term impacts or the ripple effects. And our hindsight inspection can only see a small portion of what we impacted. Yet we keep going and keep inspecting and keep adapting. Because what else is there to do?
After the “Blameless, Curious How Come?” is unpacked, we are in a decent position to use an “inspect and adapt process” to help us decide what will make the next iteration of this ‘event or agreement’ better next time, so we are less likely to experience the stress and frustration of unmet expectations for both the people who expected some particular outcome and for the people who sincerely tried to meet the expectation but didn’t.
With the knowledge gained through the storytelling of both perspectives (the people who expected something, and the people who were expected to do or deliver something) we are ready to craft a new agreement.
We don’t know what is trying to happen. We only can see in hindsight the impact that our choices made.
