Advice Versus Collaborative Inquiry

River

Active member
While reading in the forum today it occurred to me that sometimes people will offer or ask for advice when what might be of greater use is what might be called collaborative inquiry.

By collaborative inquiry, I mean exploring a topic or question together not so much in order to get to advice but in order to explore toward possible insights, epiphanies or discoveries of information.

As I considered sharing this idea, I also realized that sometimes advice is just what is needed. But sometimes what is really needed is this "collaborative inquiry" process.

Collaborative inquiry can sometimes look like assisting someone in exploring feelings which are as of yet not entirely formed or clear, maybe even a bit buried. Or not understood well. One does not have to be a licensed psychotherapist to help an acquaintance or a friend with such an exploration of feelings or emotions and their associated thoughts, beliefs, etc....

Collaborative inquiry can also be about helping someone think things through carefully, not just about "processing" or exploring feelings. Sometimes hashing things out in collaborative inquiry will facilitate breakthrough insights and epiphanies which we could not achieve so rapidly or readily without another, external, voice in the mix.

As I see it, oftentimes collaborative inquiry works best when it's more oriented to exploration than to problem solving, per se. Sometimes problem solving actually gets quite in the way of insight and epiphany, by creating tension instead of opening up internal space, or by being overly goal-oriented rather than process-oriented.

Your thoughts on this?
 
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I don't know if this is what you mean but I find it very helpful to try send adopt people's philosophies and view a situation through their lenses, so to speak. I find things are far less about right and wrong that way.

When it is an issue of my own I'm trying to solve, hearing the value system of others sometimes helps me figure out my own feelings on the matter.

I'll give an old example. Early on, I was in a situation where I basically wanted to use rules to lessen my insecurity. I wanted to reduce my partner's autonomy (and my metamours) because I was scared and felt my partner owed me security and they should dump the other partner if necessary.

I heard out a few different people. Some explained the usual stuff about why it was so terrible to exercise such couple's privilege and it just made me defensive. The person who changed my mind actually agreed with my plans and gave an indepth explanation as to why they agreed. Their views were based on very traditional, monogamous ideas of relationships and I didn't agree with most of those general premises. It made it much easier to decide that rules and control wasn't the way I wanted to achieve a happy relationship.
 
I don't know if this is what you mean but I find it very helpful to […] adopt people's philosophies and view a situation through their lenses, so to speak. I find things are far less about right and wrong that way.

[….]

I'll give an old example. Early on, I was in a situation where I basically wanted to use rules to lessen my insecurity. I wanted to reduce my partner's autonomy (and my metamours) because I was scared and felt my partner owed me security and they should dump the other partner if necessary.

I heard out a few different people. Some explained the usual stuff about why it was so terrible to exercise such couple's privilege and it just made me defensive. The person who changed my mind actually agreed with my plans and gave an indepth explanation as to why they agreed. Their views were based on very traditional, monogamous ideas of relationships and I didn't agree with most of those general premises. It made it much easier to decide that rules and control wasn't the way I wanted to achieve a happy relationship.

I think there may be very many strategies for Collaborative Inquiry. Hypothetical adoption of a person's viewpoint -- where it is understood by both parties that it's a kind of thought experiment and not a real adoption of a viewpoint, per se, might be a useful strategy. Perhaps especially when one the one doing the deep dive is feeling defensive. (?)

Using Collaborative Inquiry to explore relationship challenges and issues involves lots of different skills and knowledge, when done at its best. Sometimes the practice (CI) can be broken into roles. Sometimes not. Sometimes, when broken into dyadic roles, for example, one person can be the "facilitator" or "[pick a name that works for you]"..., and the other is the one with the difficulty who is engaging with the facilitator (or whatever) in such a way that the whole thing is an "experiment" in which the result or consequence is unknown to both parties. So it involves play, in a sense, a bit of lightheartedness can be brought in by making it into experimental play, when so decided.

The task is not to solve a problem in CI. The task is to seek insight or epiphanies … or clarity of understanding. Even more precisely, CI is not directly focused on problem solving or even the pursuit of insight or epiphany, directly. It is for creating spacious inquiry of a particular kind which is most conducive toward epiphany and insight. Its less about going after something than "dancing" around the apparent thing with playful curiosity and open- mindedness/ -heartedness. If problems get solved in the process, fine, but that's not the goal, and so the whole thing can proceed as a playful but sort of also serious inquiry, an exploration involving some aspects of play, including inventing strategies and checking in with one another to see if that strategy feels useful or helpful, potentially.

This allows one to slowly, kindly, patiently dance around the thing instead of going right in directly and suddenly, abruptly, to extract a "solution" to "the problem". Sometimes we need to radically reframe a "problem" before we can even begin to find insight or epiphany which is useful to problem solving.

Often advice is not what is needed at all. Often what folks need is someone to explore a question with and not to have the question be overly solid, determined, certain.... Maybe the "real" question is something other than the one which is most immediately and apparently present!?!

Regards polyamory, for example, most difficulties seem to involve the presence of a relationship paradigm (the conventional one, where possessiveness and jealousy are considered both 'normal' and 'appropriate', for example). So it is often quite difficult to begin to even explore an alternative paradigm for relationships in one's feeling nature -- not just as a heady / conceptual thought. So sometimes we need to bring our intellect in to meet our feelings and vice versa in a new paradigmatic space, and to seek breakthrough insights or epiphanies... just in order to continue exploring one level deeper than we realized we'd need to go in order to finally have our felt and known AHA! experience.

Now how can we possibly get to our insight or epiphanies when we're overly goal oriented on solving a problem as we're defining it... when the very problem definition is standing in the way of our epiphany?

CI is based on the KNOWLEDGE that we often know things which we are simply not aware of the fact that we know them -- because the knowledge is less explicit in our awareness than it is secretly implicit or tacit. Or simply hidden from view.

CI is a set of skills which have been developed to help folks get in touch with a deeper, more hidden level of their own knowledge and wisdom than the most forceful and obvious layer that initially presents itself.

CI is not a limited and definitive, fully elaborated set of such skills. It's more vague and open than that. But one could borrow from explicit particular methods, such as (for example) Eugene Gendlin's Focusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Gendlin#Focusing

The beauty of CI is that it's not a single, closed form, but an open form of inquiry which can be collaboratively created by its participants.

This formless form called "CI" is less a thing at the moment than an idea space in which I invite you to playfully explore and invent. It's not trademarked. It's yours. Use it with love and compassion curiosity and enjoy! You are helping CI to evolve by practicing it with sincerity and interest.
 
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Usually when folks offer advice they are taking sides on an issue or topic, rather than helping the person think and feel things through carefully and deeply, reflectively.

But often what folks need is not to have "sides" during their personal inquiry into the topic at hand. In fact, sometimes what folks need is -- for example -- …

  • To realize that in fact there are not just "two sides" to the story, but sometimes three, four, five... eight, ten, thirty sides or more.
  • That "sides" may in fact be beside the point, and that multiple "sides" are perfectly valid and legitimate.
  • that selecting a "side" may not even be necessary
  • that this side and that side can be merged to form a whole new kind of "side" which one hadn't considered previously
  • That what I thought love was last Thursday could be subsumed under a bigger paradigm or dissolved happily into it.
  • That what I thought made me feel unsafe and insecure in opening (or closing) a relationship (or whatever) wasn't really the core thought-feeling involved, and once I could discover what was at the core the problem could resolve itself in a whole new imaginative space than one I ever imagined possible for me.
  • ad infinitum
 
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Your thoughts on this?

I appreciate all the thought you've put into this, but people are just gonna lob out their opinions - like they do on every internet forum and message board. Perhaps when someone asks a specific question he might get specific answers, but otherwise it's the Wild West of ideas around here. Seems to be working pretty well.
 
I appreciate all the thought you've put into this, but people are just gonna lob out their opinions - like they do on every internet forum and message board. Perhaps when someone asks a specific question he might get specific answers, but otherwise it's the Wild West of ideas around here. Seems to be working pretty well.

Sometimes it works well and is genuinely helpful, especially when the one offering advice is experienced and insightful.

Other times what folks get when they ask for advice is worse than useless, because it can't possibly take into account the unspoken details and particulars which the one asking for advice could not possibly lay out in a forum post -- since the full context would take more of everyone's time than any of us want to devote to it.

The person with the problem or challenge almost always knows the situation way better than the advice giver. So why not simply help them explore their question with the thought that maybe they'll gather a whole new way of exploring their question … and have an "aha!" moment of their own creation (in collaboration with the listener / facilitator).

I'm not against the Wild West approach, but to say it "works so far" may be a bit of an exaggeration, since it only sometimes proves helpful, at best.
 
I appreciate all the thought you've put into this, but people are just gonna lob out their opinions - like they do on every internet forum and message board. Perhaps when someone asks a specific question he might get specific answers, but otherwise it's the Wild West of ideas around here. Seems to be working pretty well.

Just to be clear, in no way was I intending to play Sheriff in this Wild West town. I wasn't proposing that everyone stop offering advice, by any means. Sometimes advice is what's needed and what 'works'. Its up to us all to decide when collaborative inquiry might prove a potentially more useful approach.

One one or more occasions in this forum one or more people thought my suggestion, gently offered, was some kind of demand, and she ridiculed me for deigning to assume the role of Mr. Authority Figure. But this person made up Mr. Authority Figure in her own mind and projected it onto me, then sought others in the forum to gang up on me for such an affront. So I thought I'd try and circumvent that possibility by encouraging folks to take responsibility for their own imaginings and to trust that I understand my intentions better than they imagine they do. :p:eek:
 
I tend to cringe when I see people giving specific advice, or even worse, jump to wild conclusions based on one or three lines of text. I like to try to get people to think about things, maybe from a different perspective than they have been.
 
I think inquiry is happening, often, to a lesser or greater degree. I rarely give an opinion, without asking a question too. And, almost always when reading advice, I strive for understandings.

It can be helpful to have a term though, so that we're more easily able to state what we want from our posts. Between "I just want to upload" and "I need advice on a specific topic" is a grey area where people just write stuff out... in search of clarity.

As a danger, I see folks hiding their opinion behind biased questions.

So what do you think, River, what are the guidelines to help inquire well?
 
As a danger, I see folks hiding their opinion behind biased questions.

This is an excellent observation!

More often than not, loaded questions -- "A loaded question or complex question fallacy is a question that contains a controversial or unjustified assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt)" -- are not recognized as such by the questioner. So in CI, part of the skill set is to develop the capacity not to load questions, by slowing things down and reflecting before speaking a question. That is, before asking a question we formulate it silently to ourselves and then check it for unconscious loading. This, of course, requires the "facilitator," when there is one, to be quite sincere in offering himself/herself in sincere service to one's inquiry partner. (I say, "when there is one" because CI can be done in so many ways that we should not assume that we've got anyone "leading the dance".)

Suggestive questions are also generally to be avoided in the practice of CI. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suggestive_question

So what do you think, River, what are the guidelines to help inquire well?

Well, you just shined the light on a crucial principle or guideline. It can be stated positively as: "Avoid the use of loaded and suggestive questions" when facilitating.

I'm sure there are dozens and dozens of good guidelines of this sort which we could collaboratively make explicit together here. And I'm all ears!

But before we get to formulating such a list, I'd like to simply say that many people have a strong, intuitive and experiential grounding in CI without having ever made a formal attempt at a comprehensive description of it. I've seen plenty of folks here in polyamory.com over the years who are naturals at CI. We who are intuitively and experientially attuned to CI know it has its own implicit shape and feel. That doesn't mean we've ever written out a comprehensive list of guidelines -- which task might take months of years of careful inquiry!

But I'd like to suggest that we can all learn from one another in doing CI around CI itself! CI is the best guide to CI, in other words. It's all about making the implicit and tacit knowledge more … present, and sometimes explicit.

Eugene Gendlin's Focusing seems like it would be wildly helpful in unfolding CI around CI, because it's designed to nurture our capacity for connecting with what I'd like to call "feeling-knowing". We often don't explicitly know that we know many things in feeling which we don't know in thinking. So I'd offer up that as a principle to be set down beside the potential list of guidelines.

It should not be too hard to come up with a list here of both Guidelines and Principles (two lists, really). We should try and gather the most salient ones first, thus using those to discover what is implicit in them as inspiration for the more nuanced Guidelines and Principles.

I would offer up as a Principle of CI that CI is best done in an atmosphere of trust, kindness and gentleness -- both in the facilitator's attitude with herself and her dance partner (or whatever we might call him or her).

The phrase "dance partner" is suggestive of a principle, too. Which is that ultimately, in CI, no one is leading the dance. Even a "facilitator" is in continuous responsive (not reactive) relation to what is fresh in each moment of the dance. That's why CI ultimately cannot be formulaic and comprehensive as a procedural method or system. It's much too open for that. Thus Guidelines and Principles are not a box to trap or contain CI. They are suggestions about what works best and is most helpful.
 
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About my phrase "leading the dance"...

It's of course an analogy and metaphor, a figurative usage.

CI, as I see it, works best when it is supple (suppleness could be on a list of principles). The more supple, the better! Therefore, CI sometimes can be led, at times -- for moments -- but tends to lean in the direction of Contact Improvisation as dance forms go. Ironically, Contact Improvisation is also abbreviated with the letters CI ! :p

In the actual dance form of Contact Improv usually no one is leading (at least in my limited experience with this dance form). I just literally got shivers in my body in realizing just how much "material" Contact Improv dance can offer as analogous to Collaborative Inquiry! You see, C. Improv is improvisational and so is C. Inquiry! Both involve the sharing of weight (Read about or watch the dance to know what I mean) and the movement away from such weight sharing at moments. Both require sensitive attunement to the dance partner/s. Man, one could devise an entire set of common principles by dancing between the literal and the metaphoric between these two CIs!! :)

And both CIs are best thought of as "somatic practices".

Anyway, back to dance in general as metaphor and analogue for C. Inquiry... There is a spectrum of kinds of dances, with "no one is leading" to "one partner is strongly leading" … and it being a spectrum we also have the middle place and variations on that, such as variations in which the leading role is swapped back and forth -- sometimes with the participants exploring this very swapping of roles via subtle, embodied cues. (An amazing thing to explore, I can say from experience!)
 
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Here's a contact improv teacher talking about sharing a common center of gravity in that dance.

https://youtu.be/jcrbIdY3HZc

As an analogy or metaphor to be employed in C. Inquiry, it can be misleading (no pun intended). In C. Inquiry boundaries are crucially important and merging into "one animal" is neither called for nor helpful. In fact, it could be harmful. If there are two partners collaborating together in C. Inquiry each needs to maintain healthy, appropriate boundaries -- but this should in no way hinder healthy, appropriate merger or merging into a larger whole -- which is the very process of C. Inquiry itself.

Contact Improv dance just happens to be a dance practice in which the only way to follow the dance is to follow your dance partner through sensitive attunement to your dance partner AND the ever-changing moment which unfolds between the partners. Both partners are attuning sensitively both to one another and to the process they are engaging.

C. Inquiry also works best when "Both partners are attuning sensitively both to one another an to the process they are engaging." If one is playing the facilitator role, however, the "center of gravity" belongs strongly to the one being facilitated or assisted (in inquiry), while the facilitator's center of gravity is more of a shared awareness / attention process. One has got to attend carefully to one's own experience as facilitator to be really helpful and beneficial, but the facilitator is continuously encouraging the one being facilitated to go--and flow--into their own inquiry process and not to get caught up or distracted by the facilitator. Both parties are "vulnerable" and "open" and doing their own inner work, though, while engaging CI. The facilitator is not "working on" a person. She is rather making herself and her skills available in assistance.

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There is a tradition in "research" called "Collaborative Inquiry," and surely what I've here been calling Collaborative Inquiry and that will have their points of common ground and overlap. But the CI I'm talking about is not that one. It will need its own name, eventually, but that name would have to arise out of a collaboration, naturally! I don't want to be the sole inventor and describer of what we're talking about here.

What we're talking about here is an emerging / emergent, process-oriented inquiry in partnership process … which borrows from many traditions, including psychotherapy traditions. But it is distinctly and decidedly NOT psychotherapy, which is something which is done by licensed and trained psychotherapists.

The CI I'm talking about is much more like a contemplative practice than a therapy one. Many contemplative practices, however, have he weakness of not being fully relational practices. That is, they are overly isolated (if not paired with relational practices), and often overly non-verbal for use as a near-complete contemplative-relational practice.

So for the time being I'll call ours "Contemplative Relational Collaborative Inquiry (CRCI)" in order to distinguish it from other practices.

Let's just start out by saying that CRCI is (and draws inspiration from):

somatically oriented (It draws inspiration and insight from the somatics tradition and somatic psychology, including Focusing).

Draws inspiration from the communications studies field.

Belongs to everyone, not to anyone. It is not for licensing by the state. If certifications are ever to be issued, the certification process will not be trademarked in order to control and limit certification. So the practice is, broadly spoken, "generic" -- rather like "cooking" or "back rubs" -- as contrasted with "massage" which is now licensed by the state. If ever a certificate in CRCI is to be issued, its issuer will be a fully self-accrediting institution whose certificate is only as valuable as the teaching and the institution. Nothing more. And besides, CRCI is not to be sold as a service in a market economy, but always to be given freely as a gift. If the receiver of the gift wants to partake in a gift economy by offering a gift in the process to a facilitator, fine. But such is not to be expected or demanded. Ever.

Let's say CRCI is "open source". And freely given in a gift economy. More from Charles on Gift Culture: https://youtu.be/6S1egXWYwXo

Like most true fields of inquiry or knowledge, CRCI is a community of inquirers, not a fixed and final body of knowledge to be packaged and sold, regulated and constrained. It belongs to all of us -- rather like the word "polyamory". No cops are going to bust down my door if I deign to know something about cooking, backrubs or polyamory and give my insight away freely without charge. So should it be with CRCI -- or whatever it ends up being called in the long run.

See also:

Open collaboration
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Open collaboration is "any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and noncontributors alike."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collaboration
 
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