Reflective entry week 9: Advocacy & Inquiry

Chi Phuong NGUYEN

Using Advocacy and Inquiry technique can promote mutual learning. Therefore, I decided to apply this model to analyse a conversation that I had last week during a meeting with my colleagues in a teamwork.  The teamwork consisted of running a marketing business strategy simulation, making decisions for a virtual company in a competitive market. The “game” consists of several rounds and each week we have to make decision about the pricing strategy, advertising and commercial budget, product specifications. Last week we had to make a big decision whether to enter a new market to grab extra profits. Our team is composed by four people, Albert, Williams, Joseph and me. In our discussion, I made notice of our positions. Albert is the leader and who knows the best about the game, he made all the calculations to adjust the numbers whenever we need to make decisions. Joseph contributes actively to our teamwork and is quite aggressive in his strategies. Williams and me are a little bit more conservative. Williams, Joseph and me met in the study room and discussed that we shouldn’t take risks to go to the new market as we were always the best team for 5 previous rounds. Joseph started by pointing out some of the risks that we could encounter such as loosing our market share, diversification of our expenditures, costly development investment for the new product. A perspective of high advocacy, low inquiry can be recognized as Joseph stated out his point of view resulting from his good preparation. He had the habit to give his opinion with all the information but rarely asked other for their opinions. After listening to Joseph, I and Williams were found more in a situation of Low inquiry, low advocacy as we reacted as observers facing to the decision. Perhaps we were unable to decide to take the risk and afraid of all the consequences for our decision. Therefore, we didn’t state out our real thinking but only agreed with Joseph by adding some more justifications for his point of view. One hour later, Albert came from his office after working. He invited us to share our ideas and listened carefully. Taking a little break and he started giving the reasons why we should invest in the new market and describing the scheme of this plan. He asked for our concerns about the new opportunity to enter the market, giving all the possibilities that could happen in the next rounds, explaining with patience about different steps to take. It was an approach of High advocacy combined with high inquiry as Albert stated his views and encourages other to inquiry his views. He didn’t force us to make the decision as he suggested or tried to influence us but invited us to an open discussion where everyone could share and justify his opinion. He also brought light to the issues, helping everyone to understand more about the game. We finally agreed on investing into the new market.