The modern workplace can look like a supremely inhuman place. Data and algorithms drive every decision, and an obsession with profits, shareholder returns, and the bottom line often trump workers’ individual agency and creativity. HR policies seem to be set by unfeeling bureaucrats, and a healthy work-life balance seems impossible. Employees quickly become burned out and purposeless—and business suffers as a result.

How can we return humanity to the workplace? The answer, David Brendel, MD, Ph.D. and Ryan Stelzer argue in their new book Think Talk Create: Building Workplaces Fit for Humans, has been with us for centuries. As ancient as the Socratic dialogue and as modern as the latest research in neurobiology, the discipline of active inquiry gives us a fundamentally different way of conducting human-work interactions. Through moving stories, Dr. Brendel and Mr. Stelzer show us how to think carefully about a challenge or an opportunity, engage in dialogue via open-ended questioning, and collaboratively build a strategy.

Dr. Brendel and Mr. Stelzer are the co-founders of Strategy of Mind, an executive coaching, consulting, and leadership development firm rooted in philosophy and psychology. Dr. Brendel is a board-certified psychiatrist with an MD from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago. His writings have appeared in Harvard Business Review and Huffington Post and is the author of Healing Psychiatry: Bridging the Science/Humanism Divide. Mr. Stelzer served in the Obama White House as a presidential management fellow where his team was responsible for improving and sustaining high levels of performance across federal agencies. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Huffington Post and LinkedIn Pulse.

Dr. Brendel and Mr. Stelzer will be in conversation with Marianne Bertrand, Ph.D., the Chris P. Dialynas Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor.