Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change

CHAPTER 8

THE SOLVABLE PROBLEM

Mission Questions

HOW CAN YOU USE the power of questions to build a team, clarify your mission, and define your goals? How do you ask people to join you in partnership to make a difference in the world or in your work? You may be trying to raise money for a cause or organize a neighborhood activity, looking into a mentoring program at the office to work with at-risk students, or launching a social media campaign to mobilize people to combat global warming. Perhaps you need to invigorate your team to compete with the new business in town that has hired a bunch of young hotshots.

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Mission questions ask more of everybody. They help you draw people into a genuine conversation about shared goals and what everyone can bring to the task. They help you convey your priorities. Mission questions require you to talk less and listen more.

In this chapter you’ll see how you can connect people to purpose and forge a common mission. You will learn how to ask questions that can take you from conversation to collaboration. My friend does it to feed the world. One of the most iconic brands did it and turned shared values into a recipe for success that built a legion of loyal employees and customers. A leader in philanthropy draws from pages of great questions to nurture relationships and raise millions of dollars.

Get good at these mission questions and you will be able to do more than build a team. You will inspire it as you help people discover their purpose, find a role they can play, and collaborate to get things done. In asking people to sign on and pitch in you’re asking them to:

Identify your mission. Determine interests and see where experiences intersect. What do you care about? What would you like to change or fix or build?

Share values. Find out if you’re rowing to the same place. What are your bedrock principles? Where is your true north? How can we partner?

Play a role. Figure out what each party adds to the equation. What are others prepared to do about the problem? What’s their expertise, their passion, their capability?

Aim high. People are excited by big ideas. How bold can we be? How will we change the world?

Whether you’re raising money for a university or trying to get your kids to participate in a local charity, asking people to commit time, energy, or money to a cause is a big deal. They have to care about your endeavor and want to be a part of it. They have to believe in you and in your objectives. So, ask about values and priorities. Find out what resonates and where your common interests lie. The answers may lead to collaboration and commitment.

Listening for Common Goals

Ed Scott and I met in New York in 2012, when I was speaking about the sorry state of American politics. Pretty bad, I said. Polarized, paralyzed, nasty. And the media? They’re not helping. Happy to swarm a controversy or scandal, slow to cover solutions or compromise, the media bring a 24/7 microscope to the bacteria of politics. The public bears responsibility, too, I said. Voters should do their homework so they can separate what’s real from what’s noise. They need to hold politicians, the media, and themselves to account.

After my talk, Ed said he had some ideas he wanted to discuss. We scheduled a meeting a few weeks later in my office. As I prepared for our meeting, I learned that Ed cared about a lot of things—public health, HIV/AIDS, autism, education, civic engagement. I learned that he’d made a bunch of money in technology and since getting out, he’d quietly invested in causes as well as businesses. He helped start the Center for Global Development; Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria; the Scott Center for Autism Treatment at the Florida Institute of Technology; and the Scott Family Liberia Fellows Program.

We met on campus in the modest conference room down the hall from my office. Ed talked about his exasperation with the political process, his frustration with the media, his concern that the public was ill-informed, and his determination to do something about it. I wanted to understand what he was thinking.

What worries you the most?

Politicians getting off with vacuous ideas and ridiculous sound bites that drown out serious debate about real problems.

Where does the problem lie?

In endless campaigns, fueled by bottomless bank accounts, blind ideology, and scattershot media.

What are the consequences?

People have more opinions than facts. We need to get better information out there—verifiable, impeccable, nonpartisan information. Facts, not opinions about where and how America spends money on foreign aid, education, infrastructure, jobs, climate change, and more. People should have information about jobs and the global economy and trade. That way, Ed felt, maybe we’d have a country where politics and big decisions would more closely correlate to reality.

What could we do about it?

After hours of brainstorming, we came up with an idea. Ed would provide financing and build a board of advisers for “Face the Facts USA.” It brought together undergraduate and graduate students and professional journalists to produce a website, videos, infographics, TV specials, and live events built on original, deeply researched facts—100 facts in the 100 days leading up to the 2012 election. It was an ambitious idea with a preposterously short runway.

We developed and launched our fact-a-day project in just three months. We gave away our daily facts to news organizations, talk shows, and civic groups. We used social media to build audience. While our project did not change the world or transform politics, we showed that it was possible to drive conversation built on undisputed and straightforward facts.

Ed and I had discovered our common goals by asking one another about the challenges the country faced and listening closely to each other as we kicked around ideas about what should be done and what each of us could contribute. Ed is a man of conscience and clear vision. Collaborating with him was richly rewarding.

“I try to fix things I care about,” Ed said, “driven by values and mission.”

The Value Proposition

Asking about goals and interests—and listening closely for the answers—drives Karen Osborne. Karen started the Osborne Group to provide advice and instruction on fundraising for schools and nonprofits that depend on philanthropy and has raised money for hospitals, schools, research organizations, civic groups, and cities. She draws from pages of questions she has composed to create a customized discussion. Like a menu at a restaurant, she offers starter questions to get you going, then main courses to chew on and desserts to end on a high note. I met her through a colleague who had heard Osborne speak and was impressed with her insight on the power of questions to establish shared mission and meaningful associations.

Osborne grew up in the South Bronx. Her family had emigrated from the West Indies. Her father, a manager with the Social Security Administration, was about the only person she knew with a white-collar job. The neighbors in the duplexes around them—African Americans, Italians, and Jews—were mostly firemen, cops, transit workers, and teachers. Surrounded by diversity long before it was celebrated, Osborne was captivated by the people around her, each a compelling character, each in search of some form of the American Dream. A voracious reader, young Karen devoured five or six books a week. She loved getting lost in her reading, getting to know the characters and their adventures, imagining the places the books took her.

In college, Osborne majored in English literature, hoping to be a writer. But she didn’t have the luxury of spending years in the attic hoping to hit on the great American novel. So, after college, she got a job in Tarrytown, New York, helping to figure out how to access state and federal funding. She got good at it. She started working with universities, hospitals, and other nonprofits that needed to raise money.

When she set up her own consulting company, Osborne developed a set of questions to help her identify what people care about and where and why they give. She asked about their work, life passions, goals, and objectives. If they had a track record of giving philanthropically, she wanted to know where that came from, what it connected to.

What values underpin your philanthropic decision making?

Osborne’s discovery questions generate a conversation. They ask what people care about and the motivations behind their passion. Perhaps someone lost a relative to cancer or was moved by an experience with at-risk youth. If they are now in a position to do something more about the problem, what will they do?

“In a discovery visit, I’m trying to learn enough about you so I can craft a strategy that I can develop for you to have a joyful experience,” she says.

How do you like being engaged?

How do we fit?

Osborne’s “rapport building” questions define principles and goals and connect past actions with future aspirations. They establish a conversation and build a relationship.

What are the guiding principles that have helped you in life?

What do you hope to accomplish with your philanthropy?

What values do you consistently support?

Osborne asks her questions to get answers, but she also asks to be sure the other person is doing the talking. She explained to me that her experience bears out the research: “People forget what they heard, but they remember almost everything they say.”

Imagine you’re trying to raise money for a new pediatric cancer wing at the local hospital and you’re looking for community leaders to sign on to help. You take James out for lunch to see if he will join the cause. You can talk for twenty minutes and explain the new wing, what it will do, why it is needed, who else is supporting it, or you can ask James about the initiative.

What have you heard about the project?

How familiar are you with what the new wing will allow us to do?

What do you think it will mean for the community?

If James says, “This could make a huge difference for these kids,” or talks about what he’s read or heard about the project, or if he reflects on a friend who had a child with cancer, he will have joined the conversation more personally than if he just sat and listened. Your questions prompt him to answer and to engage. That’s a critical step, Osborne says, if people are going to embrace a cause for which they’re going to provide significant financial support.

Want to get people to turn out for your class reunion and give money? Get them talking about what they did the last day at school or about the all-nighter they pulled when they were working on the hardest paper of their lives. Ask them about their favorite home game or their best friend. Invite them to tell stories about what the place meant to them and the difference it made. Then connect it back to the fundamentals.

How did you use the education you got from this institution?

What values did you learn?

Are there ways you would like to help the next generation of students?

Your questions move to the next level: how can you work together? They seek genuine engagement, and Osborne insists that engagement is the key to philanthropy. She cited a Bank of America study of wealthy people who were philanthropic. The more they were involved in an initiative, the more they gave to it. If their children were involved, they gave even more.

Connect passion to mission and you can generate excitement and meaningful involvement.

“Now I’m excited about the outcome and I start seeing myself as a donor,” Osborne instructed me. “And [it’s] not just my money, but my interests, my intellectual capital, my human capital, my network capital, and how I might leverage all of those things to help solve this problem together with you, in partnership with you. We’re asking for so much more than money.” You have defined and are pursuing a common goal.

Change the World

Once you have established the mission and concluded that your goals coincide, you can start thinking about the next step: actually doing something.

What will your partnership look like?

How far will you reach?

Who will do what?

What can you accomplish?

My friend Rick Leach has asked these questions his entire career, dealing with some of the most difficult challenges in the world. He helped lead child immunization efforts, antismoking campaigns, and programs to crack down on counterfeit drug trafficking. In 1997, he started the World Food Program USA, which supports the global World Food Program, the world’s largest humanitarian program to combat hunger.

The organization’s goal would make Karen Osborne proud for its boldness, clarity, and big question.

Imagine a world without hunger … what would it take?

Leach rallies support, raises money, and finds partners in business and government to support efforts to get desperately needed food to victims of drought, poverty, war, and natural disaster. For such a daunting and urgent job—there are more than 700 million people who face food insecurity in the world, including more than 60 million people displaced by war—Leach is one of the most optimistic guys I’ve ever meet. He often greets friends with a loud, “Sweetheart!” from half a room away. He wears a steady smile under his thick mustache. He believes passionately in humanity’s capacity for good even though he has stared into its darkest, most desolate places.

Leach has rallied some of the biggest companies, government agencies, NGOs, and hundreds of thousands of citizens to his cause. To attract people to social movements, he believes, you must engage their curiosity and connect passion with mission. He focuses on turning commitment into concrete action. “It’s about earnestly asking questions and learning to more fully hone the need in search of the opportunity to address the need,” he told me. Leach is an organizer.

His template for partnerships is built on four questions.

How do we define the problem?

What are the strategies to solving the problem?

What’s the goal?

How can we all play a role in achieving the goal?

Leach is especially interested in answers to that last question. That’s how he and his team know whom to ask for money, time, logistics, and support when a crisis erupts.

“It all gets back to ‘What’s the problem?’” Leach explained. “What do we need to address it? What’s your role?”

He offers the 2015 Ebola crisis as an example. When Ebola hit, food and nutrition quickly became one of the big problems as whole areas of some countries shut down. Business stopped. Leach turned to his longtime sponsor, UPS, knowing its capacity in logistics. With staging areas around the world, the company delivers 18 million packages every day. Leach asked if UPS would help distribute food, medical supplies, generators, and equipment. UPS agreed. The company provided invaluable logistical support, using its Cologne-based facility to assemble material, equipment, and relief supplies and fly them into West Africa for use by the humanitarian community. World Food Program distributed food to more than 3 million people in the year and a half after the Ebola outbreak.

Leach’s approach to mobilizing people and defining roles can be applied at virtually any level—whether you are trying to change the world or the town where you live. You may want to organize your friends at work and launch a high school mentoring program or engage your neighbors to give up a few weekends and clean the riverfront. Maybe you’d like to raise money for the agency that provides housing for the disabled. Get good people together and use Leach’s questions to define the challenge, consider strategies, and set roles.

Thousands of ordinary people—25,786 to be exact—contributed to his organization in 2015. Commitment like that is what inspires him to go to work each day and maintain his optimism.

“Hunger is a solvable problem,” he says in his completely confident way. “We can do this.”

Sharing Works

Discovering shared purpose can be about changing the world. Or it can be about changing your life and partnering with someone who shares your sense of adventure.

For Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, finding their shared values was easy; figuring out how to act on them was the harder part.

What would we really like to do?

Their story is well known. They met in seventh-grade gym class, where, by their own admission, they were the “slowest, fattest kids in the class.” In high school they became best buds. Jerry attended Oberlin College. Ben started out at Colgate, before dropping out. Jerry thought about medical school but went into pottery. Both liked to eat. They considered going into the bagel business but the equipment cost far more than they had, which was just about nothing. So they decided to make ice cream. And with that, Ben & Jerry’s was born.

With only a $5 correspondence course in ice cream making under their belts, they weren’t exactly in line for the Forbes 100. What they did have, however, were deeply shared values and goals. Pretty simple ones. In their book, Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip, they wrote, “We wanted to have fun, we wanted to earn a living, and we wanted to give something back to the community.”

What values do we bring to the enterprise?

They opened their first store in Shelburne, Vermont, in 1978. By 1990 they had grown into an iconic brand known for quality products and a distinctive voice. They built the company around values. They sought ideas from employees through companywide surveys. They asked about the product, the workplace, and their causes.

How do we incorporate values into our work and activities?

Ben and Jerry translated their values into public actions. They launched a foundation to support community causes and devised a compensation model that initially capped the bosses’ pay at no more than five times the lowest employees’. They championed a string of public causes, emblazoned on every pint of ice cream: 1% for Peace (1988); Take a Stand for Children (1992); Rock the Vote (2004); GMO? Thanks, but NO (2013), to name a few. Though the company has changed since Ben and Jerry actually owned and ran the place, it has retained a good bit of its DNA. The company still asks its employees those survey questions.

If you want to launch an enterprise, go into partnership, or start a values-driven business, ask mission questions to test commitment and direction.

How does the idea reflect your values?

Will others find this worthy?

What’s the bumper sticker higher calling?

Can you define roles and will people want to fill them?

Maybe you’ll discover the next Cherry Garcia.

What Brings You Here?

At the upscale end of the corporate spectrum, questions are effective tools in defining purpose and motivating mission. I learned how powerful they could be from Diana Oreck, who was working for Ritz-Carlton at the time we met. She explained how the company uses questions to imbue its employees with its “gold standard” ethic.

We ran into one another on one of those packed flights that prompts commiseration among strangers about survival instincts and contortionist skills. Our conversation in “economy class” turned out to be supremely ironic since Oreck is a first-class connoisseur. She hails from the famous family that made a fortune in vacuum cleaners. Growing up in Mexico, she often traveled with her parents as they tended the business. They frequented fine hotels and young Diana fell in love with the glamour and mystique of the fanciest, most exotic places they stayed—the ones with ornate lobbies and mysterious people from around the world. If they stayed long enough, she found that staff became family. The adventure was thrilling. She went into the hotel business, leaving vacuums to the relatives.

Ritz-Carlton owns more than eighty hotels in twenty-six countries. With revenue of more $3 billion a year, the hotels employ 38,000 people. Their goal is to dominate the luxury hospitality business and create genuine brand loyalty in their well-heeled customers. In this super-competitive world, Oreck told me, visitors expect service that goes above and beyond.

“If you have a satisfied customer, you’ve only met their needs. In this environment that’s not enough. You need to exceed expectations.” The customer can’t be just a transaction and a “head in a bed.” There has to be something more.

Oreck trained Ritz-Carlton managers and staff to understand and share the mission so they could fulfill it. Committed to “unique and memorable” experiences that will turn guests into “customers for life,” the company wants to create an experience that “enlivens the senses, instills well-being, and fulfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests.”

What defines us?

What do we stand for?

How do we deliver on the promise?

At staff meetings and other gatherings, employees are asked about their ideas and suggestions, their successes and failures. They’re encouraged to tell stories—the good, the bad, and the unbelievable. They act out hypothetical scenarios to see if they’re living up to the credo that’s been drilled into them. A young couple comes to the restaurant with a toddler. What is the first thing you say, the first thing you do? An older couple arrives at check-in and the woman appears stressed and angry. What do you say?

Oreck calls it “radar on, antenna up,” driven by good questions, careful listening, and thorough training. She explained that every employee who dealt with guests had authority to unilaterally spend, credit, or discount up to $2,000 per day to “make it right or delight.” If you’re going to build a workforce that buys into the culture, she explained, you have to empower and engage your employees.

“As an employee, if I have to run to the manager every time I want to help a guest, the company is telling me I’m too stupid to help, or I’m going to give too much away, or you as the company were joking when you said you trusted me.”

Ritz-Carlton’s training teaches employees to use their own questions to create relationships with the guests and deliver on the mission. A guest goes up to the concierge and asks where the gift shop is. Rather than simply directing the customer down the hall, the concierge will, when possible, accompany the guest partway and may ask, “What brings you to our lovely city?” If the guest says she’s in town for a wine tasting, the concierge can use the information to recommend a restaurant with an amazing wine cellar.

Questions don’t win the war if they’re not accompanied by active and effective listening. “We have a ratio: two ears and one mouth,” Oreck notes, telling me that the hotel staff must make “emotional connections.” She counsels everyone she trains to listen hard for emotional indicators—joy, anger, frustration. Her lesson plan is mission-focused: Create that experience that will lead to a “customer for life.”

Ritz-Carlton is no charity. It is big business. But like Ben & Jerry’s and the World Food Program USA, it cannot succeed with its gold-plated mission if the people who work there aren’t asked to be part of it and execute it.

Asking to Listen

Throughout this book I’ve connected the discipline of asking to the art of listening—deep and active listening. In the case of mission questions that seek shared purpose, you’re listening for comments and clues that reveal motivations, ambitions, and capacity that align with your mission. If you’re asking Jordan to support your cause, you’re listening for indications of his commitment and passion. You’re listening for comments that show optimism or outrage, inspiration or indignation, or some expression to suggest that Jordan agrees that yours is a worthy cause and he is interested in doing something to advance it.

If you’re talking to Clara about financing a business, you will be listening closely for anything she says about the viability of the idea, about the marketplace or the business plan, or about the competition or cash flow. You’re listening for hidden or unexpected places to explore and connect. If you hear a suggestion about the satisfaction that comes from giving, you have another topic to ask about:

What have you supported that has really made a difference?

“Oh, that’s easy,” Clara might say, “It was the work we did on the home for sick kids. We saw the wonderful place get built. It helped entire families get through their ordeal.”

How did you get involved in that?

“We met with this amazing woman who so impressed us with her commitment and her approach. We knew that she could pull it off.”

Here’s where the close listening comes in, and an echo question.

We?

“Yes,” comes the reply. “My husband and our daughter, Emma. We make these decisions as a team.”

You’ve just learned essential information about why the family gives, what made for a credible project, and, importantly, how they give as a family. You build the relationship accordingly.

Karen Osborne counsels that we can all be better listeners. First, consider what type of listener you are.

Do you listen for data, facts, and specifics?

Do you key into stories because you relate to people?

Do you respond to emotion?

What interests you and gets your attention?

What prompts you to respond?

How hard is it to remain silent?

Figuring out what kind of listener you are will help you listen better and craft more precise questions and areas for follow up.

Next, identify your weaknesses.

Are you an interrupter?

Are you someone who has to drive a conversation; who has to fill silences and pauses?

Does your mind wander?

Do you look down and do email?

Is it because you have trouble focusing or are just bored?

Can you identify the types of conversations or the points along the way when your mind might wander?

Do you suffer from the “I syndrome,” a habit of instantly turning what you just heard into a comment about or reference to yourself?

If you listen closely to yourself and to others, you will discover how many people fall into the “I syndrome” trap and how often it occurs.

Eva is chatting with Tom, who tells her about a minor car accident he was in yesterday. Eva says, “Yeah, I had a fender bender just like that last year …”

John is talking to a colleague at work who is worried her higher insurance premiums are going to eat up this year’s raise. John says, “Same thing happened to me last year …”

You’re talking to that potential donor again, who says the best place in a hospital is the maternity ward. You say, “Yes! When my wife had our son …”

Stop! Stay focused on your listening and asking. Keep your questions like your eyes, locked on that other person, on the project you’re discussing, and on the shared goals. Mission questions demand selfless listening. Talk about we, not I. Ask more, speak less. This conversation is about common goals, not what you think or what you have done. Understand the connection between the question and the listening. General Colin Powell has a 30 percent rule: When you’re running a meeting, speak 30 percent of the time; that forces you to listen 70 percent of the time.

“Questions actually help you listen better,” Karen Osborne says. “They help you focus.”

And the golden rule in listening is to listen to others as you would want others to listen to you. Be genuinely interested in the other person and what the person has to say. Find the facets of that person’s story that are significant or surprising or remarkable to you. Know what they’ve accomplished or been up against. Be familiar with what makes them special and unique.

Now you’re exploring common goals and shared purpose with someone you care about.

Solve Problems with Purpose

Recently, I interviewed a panel of experts who work with the disabled. My job was to ask them about the challenges they faced in connection with a new law about employment for people with disabilities. The discussion centered on the new rules, but my hosts didn’t want it to get lost in the weeds of process and bureaucracy. So we focused on the calling, and how to work most effectively with the 38 million Americans who have a disability. I found Rick Leach’s organizing questions a useful outline for the conversation.

What is the challenge?

What can you do about it?

What can each of you bring to the enterprise?

What will it take?

In your work and volunteer activities, you can define mission and rally people by asking them first to think about what matters and then where your interests overlap. Ask how they want to participate and engage. Ask them to aim high. That’s what Rick Leach does when he asks people to join his campaign to end global hunger. It’s why he believes hunger is a “solvable problem.”