As many of you know, over the past few years I’ve begun making custom fountain pens and rollerballs on a lathe. I’ve never really considered myself a craftsman or artist, but what has emerged for me (and those who enjoy writing with one of my pens) has been transformative.
At a recent art show where my pens were displayed for sale, a customer approached a line of handmade resin fountain pens that I recently finished. She picked one up and unknowingly inverted the pen, trying to write using the crown of the nib. I smiled and said, “If you rotate the pen 180 degrees and write using the underside of the nib, the ink will flow very smoothly.”
To which she replied, “No one has ever told me that before and I’ve been wanting to write with a fountain pen for a long time.” I smiled and simply stated, "I’m sorry about that, good thing you know what to do now.”
She returned the smile and proceeded to write this lovely note. In reading it, I was reminded of a recent experience with a Client and how even knowing what to do can be challenging to do in the moment.
Jack has been a Client for about six months and he and I have been working on building more open and connected relationships between him and members of his team. Jack’s organization is a large multi-state diocese, made up of sixty-five churches. One of the challenges Jack and his team have been experiencing is that many church leaders have lost trust in his team’s ability to lead the diocese into the future. This loss of trust has impacted people throughout the church, creating fragility in relationships, sideways venting, and loss of accountability in their relationships with one another.
This is not just a Jack thing, or his team’s thing, or for that matter the other leaders in the diocese thing.
It is all of their thing.
Jack and I have been working on creating a more vulnerable and psychologically safe space for all leaders. Jack’s six-member leadership team has done some really hard work in sharing their fears and concerns about relationships within the diocese and their hopes for what it could look like if these relationships were restored. Like I said, they have done some hard work.
One of the diocese’s largest systemic challenges is that many of its organizing documents (by-laws, rules of order, and polity guide) have not been updated for a very long time and are out of date. Many team members are reluctant to change these documents because they fear pushback from long-term members who “like things the way they are.”
This systemic dynamic has created additional relational challenges between leaders including making assumptions about what others think and feel, unhelpful uses of power, and fear of retaliation.
Over the course of the past several months, Jack’s team has been learning how they can improve their relationships with others through the use of humble inquiry. Humble inquiry is a way of drawing out another person by asking a question that you don’t already know the answer to, while revealing a little more about yourself in the process. [1]
Humble Inquiry creates a place for relationships to form at a deeper level and reduces the assumptions we make about others by creating a more open and trusting relational environment. All of this may sound simple, but when tensions rise, emotions flare, and when a person’s power is threatened, our brains can go a little haywire.
During a recent meeting of diocesan leaders, a young priest shared a story when she experienced, among other aggressions, gaslighting from a male colleague. All of a sudden, the Zoom room fell quiet. No one said a word.
Her story was a good example of how leaders have been challenged relationally in the church, in particular female leaders. In this very moment, asking a humble inquiry-oriented question (what the team had been working on) would have been helpful in creating a more psychologically safe environment.
Unfortunately, they inverted the pen and tried to write on the crown of the nib. Nothing flowed.
After about twenty seconds, I ask everyone, “I’m sensing some unusual energy, what just happened?” After a few more awkward moments, another female leader, said “Everyone froze and we didn’t know how to respond to Sarah’s story.”
The team was given another opportunity (to turn the pen 180 degrees and let the ink flow) to pose a humble-inquiry oriented question to Sarah and go towards relationship.
The truth is all of us have opportunities like these every day. Opportunities to ask more questions, to listen more deeply, and respond more empathetically.
Take the opportunity this week to go towards developing more open and trusting relationships with others and let the ink flow!
[1] Humble Inquiry 3rd Edition, Ed and Peter Schein, Berrett-Koehler, 2025, page 3.