The Question Practitioners Don’t Ask Out Loud
On why this keeps getting harder — and what that tells us
This is the first of four articles co-authored by Bob Dick and Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl, exploring the foundations of relational practice through the lens of Chris Argyris’s action science. The series builds toward a four-session webinar program, “Repairing Relationship,” offered in July 2026.
There is a question that many experienced practitioners carry quietly through their working lives. Not a question about method, or strategy, or which approach to deploy in a difficult situation. A quieter one. More personal. Something like:
Why does this keep getting harder?
Not hard in the sense of technically demanding. Hard in a more intimate way — the sense that even when you know what to do, and genuinely want to do it, something in the room resists. Something in the relationship. Something, if you stay with it long enough, in yourself.
Most practitioners don’t ask this out loud. Not because they haven’t noticed it. But because asking it feels like an admission — that the years of practice, the training, the accumulated experience, haven’t quite delivered what they were supposed to. That there is still something missing, and you can’t name it precisely.
This article is for people who recognise that feeling. Not newcomers to the field. Not people who are still assembling their toolkit. People who have been in the room long enough to have felt the friction — and who are honest enough to keep wondering why.
Something has shifted
For those of us who have been doing this work for more than a decade, there is a recognisable change in the texture of organisational life. The rooms are more pressured. Attention spans — both our own and those of the people we work with — have shortened in ways that are qualitatively different from a decade ago. The interventions that used to create movement seem, more often than before, to create friction instead.
It would be convenient to blame this entirely on external conditions. And external conditions are genuinely relevant. Organisations are navigating economic pressure, technological disruption, and a level of ambient uncertainty that has few historical precedents. The relational temperature in most workplaces is elevated. The bandwidth for honest, unhurried conversation has narrowed.
But that is only part of the answer. And it is the comfortable part — the part that locates the difficulty outside ourselves.
The less comfortable part is this: some of what makes the work harder is structural. It is built into how we learn to practise, how our professional cultures form, and — most importantly — into dynamics that operate in all of us, regardless of experience or intention. Dynamics that Chris Argyris spent five decades studying, with results that were initially surprising even to him.
The attention we can no longer take for granted
Before we get to Argyris, there is something more immediate worth naming.
The capacity for genuine, sustained attention — to another person, to a group, to our own interior state — is under a pressure that is qualitatively new. This is not simply about mobile phones or notification culture, though those are real. It is about the informational environment we now inhabit becoming structurally hostile to the kind of presence that honest relationship requires.
Presence is not a luxury in relational work. It is the substrate of it. When we are genuinely present with another person — not performing attention while managing our internal commentary — something becomes possible that no technique can substitute for. The other person feels met. Real contact occurs. And from real contact, movement becomes possible.
When we are not present — when we are navigating our own anxiety, or managing the room from behind a professional screen, or half-attending while our mind runs ahead to the next move — the intervention may be technically correct and relationally hollow. It lands in a room that is not quite there to receive it.
This matters because the conditions that make genuine presence difficult have intensified. And because — here is the uncomfortable observation — practitioners are not immune to the same attentional fragmentation as everyone else. We, too, are living inside systems that are running hot.
Get Context Collective’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The first micro-practice this suggests is disarmingly simple: before your next significant conversation, pause. Not to plan your opening. To arrive. To notice where your attention actually is, and to bring it, deliberately and without judgment, to the person or people in front of you. This is not a technique. It is the precondition for everything else.
The question as practice
Rilke wrote, in his Letters to a Young Poet, that we should try to love the questions themselves — to live the questions, not as a prelude to answers, but as a sustained and honest dwelling that, gradually, becomes its own form of understanding. He was writing about life. He was also, without knowing it, describing the epistemology of relational practice.
Because the question why does this keep getting harder is not a problem to be solved. It is an inquiry to be inhabited. And the willingness to inhabit it — to sit with it without collapsing into either self-blame or external attribution — is itself a relational act. It is the same quality of attention we are trying to bring to the rooms we enter. The same tentative, curious, non-defensive openness that, Argyris would say, is the precondition for genuine learning.
Most of us were not taught this explicitly. We were taught frameworks, tools, approaches. We were taught how to design a process and how to read a room. We were less often taught how to stay curious when the room resists us. How to remain genuinely open to the possibility that our intervention is part of what is making things harder.
That is what the next article in this series is about.
What you can do today
The immediate practice is this: take the question seriously enough to write it down.
Not why does this keep getting harder in the abstract. Your specific version of it. The relationship or the team or the intervention that has been nagging at you. The situation where your best efforts seem to be missing something. Where the friction persists despite genuine effort.
Write it as a question, not a problem statement. Not what went wrong but what might I be missing? Not why are they resistant but what might my assumption about their resistance be preventing me from seeing?
Then — and this is the harder part — share it with someone you trust enough to be genuinely corrected by. Not for advice. For a quality of honest attention that you might not be able to give to yourself on this particular question.
That act — of voicing an assumption as an assumption, and inviting genuine correction — is the foundational move of everything Argyris spent fifty years teaching. We will examine it in depth in the articles ahead. But you can begin practising it today.
What comes next
The following three articles move deeper into the dynamics that Argyris mapped — and the specific, learnable tools that Bob Dick has spent five decades developing and refining from that lineage.
Article 2 explores the gap between the values we espouse and how we actually behave under pressure — and why that gap is so much wider, and so much more consequential, than most of us realise.
Article 3 examines why well-intentioned attempts at repair sometimes make things worse — and what the alternative looks like in practice.
Article 4 brings the threads together, exploring what becomes possible when these tools are inhabited as a practice rather than applied as a technique — and extending the horizon toward what the best futures thinkers call future consciousness: the relational depth that makes genuine adaptability possible.
The July 2026 webinar program, Repairing Relationship, is the place where all four threads are worked with directly — in conversation, in practice, in a small and carefully held group. Two free orientation sessions precede the program on June 9th or 16th. More details by contacting Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl directly.
Bob Dick is a Brisbane-based educator, consultant, mentor, and coach with more than fifty years of experience in action science, facilitation, and organisational learning. His work draws directly on Chris Argyris’s research and practice.
Sebastian Wolf Siebzehnrübl is a Berlin-based Systemic Inquiry Practitioner working at the intersection of systems thinking, evaluative inquiry, and relational practice. He is affiliated with context collective, Berlin.
