Afghanistan: A lesson in using active inquiry when faced with difficult decisions

As the news from Kabul flooded onto our phones at breakneck speed, a veteran – with two Afghanistan deployments under her belt – reflected on the experience. At one point in her article, she highlighted the complexity of strategic decision-making in a country where the options were often A) worse B) more worse or C) most worse.

She illustrated the point with opium fields, a major source of income for the Taliban. To cut the Taliban’s access to cash, the US government had a few options. If the fields were left alone, the Taliban would make money by extorting regional opium farmers and buying guns with the cash. Alternatively, the US could simply destroy the opium fields, but doing so would bankrupt and enrage the farmers, all but guaranteeing these farmers would join the Taliban cause. For another option, the US could enable and encourage the farmers to grow wheat in place of opium. However, when they provided the farmers with wheat fertilizer, the farmers sold it to the Taliban who paid top dollar because the chemicals could be used to make improvised explosives. So, which of the three scenarios was ideal?

While engaged in promotional work for our upcoming book, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to highlight news headlines and apply the Think Talk Create methodology to the scenario at hand. In other words, how could Think Talk Create and the process of active inquiry have solved the dilemma facing US intelligence officials regarding the opium fields? How might President Biden have used Think Talk Create to implement an effective solution in the withdrawal from Afghanistan? How is Think Talk Create going to give us the magic answer to our most challenging questions?

The truth is, Think Talk Create is not a solution. Active inquiry - the process of asking open-ended questions and a key fixture of Think Talk Create - is never the answer itself. We would not suggest that by adopting a Think Talk Create approach the US government would make the best or the right decision ten out of ten times. They wouldn’t, nor would any private organization making ten business decisions via Think Talk Create.

Instead, Think Talk Create is a methodology; it is a framework for collaborative innovation that can increase the possibility of reaching a positive outcome when building solutions. Walking President Biden through a Think Talk Create exercise might or might not have resulted in the same decision, but there is inherent value in the process.

On the surface, active inquiry requires at least two participants willing to engage in constructive dialogue with one another. It’s practically founded on the adage that two heads are better than one. Through open-ended questions, participants put their minds together and weave the fabric of a cooperative solution.

More deeply, active inquiry can also be an exercise we do on our own, as the veteran demonstrated when she reflected on her experience in Afghanistan. Sure, we can use active inquiry to come up with a team-based decision on the opium fields, but if confronted with terrible options we can also use active inquiry to resolve some deeper questions about what got us in any given predicament to begin with.

In so doing, the veteran posed a significant open-ended question to herself that others might have considered earlier: what was it all for?

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Co-authored by David Brendel and Ryan Stelzer, Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans will be published by the Hachette Book Group under the PublicAffairs imprint on September 21, 2021. Now available for pre-order!