Pebbles on the beach: the discipline of asking “And What Else?”

A child walks along the shore, where the sea has done its quiet work of sorting stone from stone. Pebbles are everywhere: clustered in patches, scattered in lines, half-buried in wet sand.

There is no strategy. Only curiosity.  A hand reaches down. A pebble is picked up, turned over, rubbed between fingers. It might be smooth or oddly shaped, or faintly glint when it catches the light. For a moment, it is held as if it might be the one. Then, without ceremony, it is placed back down again.  Another is picked up.

There is something buoyant and generous about this kind of searching. Nothing is final. Nothing is precious in a way that prevents movement. A pebble can be admired and still released. The next one might be better. Or simply different. There is an optimistic belief that the shoreline provides abundance.

Sometimes the child returns to an earlier stone, as if recognising something familiar that was not seen properly the first time. Sometimes several are held at once, weighed against each other in small hands, compared without language. There is no urgency to decide. Only the quiet assumption that there are more pebbles than can ever be held.

There is a kind of freedom that comes from belief in abundance or from non-attachment to early certainty. In coaching conversations, something similar is possible, but not easily practised.

You ask a question. Your client offers a first response. It is sensible, coherent, and often neatly formed. It is the pebble that sits closest to the surface. And because it makes sense, it can be tempting to treat the first response as complete. To pick it up, admire it briefly, and move on. Or worse, to assume it is “the one”.

Coaching needs us to be more patient. It asks us not to stop at the first pebble that fits in our hand. The discipline of “and what else?” is a way of walking further along the shoreline. This question (the “AWE question”, coined by Michael Bungay Stanier in The Coaching Habit) is really a refusal to assume that what appears first is what matters most. It invites the possibility that the most useful thinking is still partly buried, and waiting to be turned over in the light.

At times, it can feel slow or  slightly uncomfortable. The client has already answered. The “obvious” work has been done. Yet something changes when we resist the urge to conclude too soon.  

More pebbles appear.

Not because they were not there before, but because attention has shifted. As the client’s thinking deepens, the surface layer gives way to something less rehearsed, less obvious, and more human.

This is where first answer bias quietly shows itself: the tendency to treat the first coherent response as complete, rather than provisional. In coaching, this can narrow the possibilities without anyone noticing.  “And what else?” is a small intervention with significant effect. It interrupts the pull towards closure. It slows the pace of agreement. It creates space for thinking that has not yet been rehearsed into familiarity.

In transformational coaching, this means resisting completion too early, staying with curiosity a little longer than feels necessary, and remembering that the first pebble picked up is rarely the only one worth holding.