PRACTICE
5
Ask Questions, Make Connections
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
—Henry David Thoreau
Mitchell Sipus is a humanitarian aid worker and consultant who has worked in some of the world’s most conflict-laden environments: Ethiopia, Lebanon, Somalia, Syria, and Afghanistan.
He was hired by the mayor of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, to help solve some of the city’s problems. Mitch does a lot of exploring and observation when he enters into something like this. He immerses himself in the situation.
Among other things, he simply walks around and asks people questions, like:
“How do you feel about your life?”
“Is it everything you wanted it to be?”
“If not, why not?”
“What do you think is your biggest obstacle?”
“What would you like to do in the future?”
“What do you think you need to do that?”
What Mitch is doing is trying to understand not just what’s going on, but how people see things. He is trying to understand their needs, their beliefs—trying to get a breakdown of everyone’s hopes, dreams, and frustrations.
Here’s a story about how Mitch operates.
He was hired by the Mayor of Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, to help solve some of the city’s problems. He was wandering around Mogadishu, asking questions like the ones above, and he came across some fishermen. So he asked them his questions, and they told him, “Well, the fishing is great. We are catching more fish than ever before. We’re drowning in fish. But we are still not making any money.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Well, we take the fish to the fish market, and there’s no refrigeration there, so the fish sit out in the sun all day, and at the end of the day, if nobody buys them, we have to discount the fish to the cheapest price possible, and we practically have to give them away. We don’t make any money. Of course, everybody knows this, so they just wait. They don’t even show up at the fish market until the end of the day. So we have a problem here.”
So Mitch said thank you, and he filed that away and kept exploring. A few days later, he was walking in another part of the city, and he got himself some lemonade in a can and started to drink it. There was ice in the can. He thought, wait a minute, there’s no electricity in this part of town either, so how can there be ice?
He went back to the lemonade stand, and they told him how to find the guy they got the ice from. And he found this guy who was selling ice. He had rigged up some machinery and with gas-powered generators and using giant sarcophagus-sized containers, he was making huge refrigerator-sized blocks of ice, which he was selling.
So Mitch said to him, “How would you like to expand your business? To sell more ice? What would you need in order to do that?”
And the guy said, “yeah, sure,” and within a short period of time there was ice in the fish market, and electric lights, too, thanks to this guy. That is how Mitch works his change magic, by wandering around, asking questions and connecting the dots.
Because he is coming in from outside the system, when Mitch wanders around he will tend to ask questions about things that may seem “obvious” to the people who live in that system. Because of his outside perspective, he can sometimes notice things that insiders don’t, or see familiar things in new ways.
By asking people for their hopes, dreams, fears, and frustrations, Mitch is looking to reveal the latent needs and goals of the people in the system—a kind of ecosystem of needs and solutions.
By asking questions, Mitch finds liminal, in-between spaces that people may not have seen or considered. Then, by finding possible intersections between needs and solutions, and forming new connections, he creates new opportunities that were already latent in the system, just waiting to be discovered.
PRACTICE 5
Ask questions, make connections.
Try to understand people’s hopes, dreams, and frustrations. Explore the social system and make connections to create new opportunities.