Humble Inquiry, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

4 The Culture of Do and Tell

A critical enabler or inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up, live, and work. The U.S. macroculture frames our views on living, loving, working, and dying. We work in a technical culture that may be driven largely by our professions, our occupations, our industries, and our markets. And we live and work in a social culture that reinforces and adapts to our macrocultural norms and creates for us the roles and rules of daily social life, what we end up calling “good manners,” “tact,” and “etiquette.”

When we observe our culture, and analyze it with some detachment or objectivity, we can describe language, art, design, and social conventions as “artifacts.” The artifacts of a culture also include ...