Translator: Themis Scalco Reviewer: Claudia Sander
How would Google be
if, instead of offering answers,
it offered questions?
The first time this question came to my mind
was when I received an invitation
to teach what I thought would be a leadership course
to youngsters from the Amazon riverside communities.
From the point of view of someone coming from an economically privileged region,
I thought I'd have a lot to teach these youngsters.
But what happened was exactly the opposite.
When we started to collect more information
about their lifestyles
in a riverside community in the midst of the Amazon,
I realized that nothing, absolutely nothing,
that I knew about leadership would be useful for them,
at least in the way I was used to dealing with the term.
Just to give one example,
many of them traveled four days by boat to attend this meeting;
and, to make it worse, seven days to return,
because the way back is countercurrent to the Jurua river.
What we did then was to reverse the process:
instead of class, questions;
instead of teaching, learn with the participants.
What we did was to adapt a methodology based on questions.
In three questions, in fact; the first one was,
what's good here, in your community?
Let's appreciate what we already have,
so then, yes, we could ask the second question,
what's the dream you have for your communities?
And end asking,
and now, what are you going to do to make these dreams come true?
We ended up doing two activities with them.
In the first, we handed them cardboard paper
and asked them to draw how their communities would be like
when their dreams had come true.
We thought it would be something like an urban center or similar.
But what's most interesting is that, in all cardboards,
one color predominated: green.
Instead of buildings, the community exactly as it is, with one addition;
like, for example, a school,
or an information technology laboratory,
or a health center,
so they wouldn't need to travel three or four hours by boat
to study, to learn or to treat some health problem.
The best part for me, though,
was when we did a round of interviews, like a talk show,
and called an 11-year-old girl,
and one of the questions we asked her was,
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
She answered, very seriously, "I want to be a lawyer."
And we said, "Wow, a lawyer, superb. Why?"
And, in a very unique way, she turned and said,
"Once I heard lawyers make a lot of money."
But, she continued, "But that's not why I want to be a lawyer.
I want to be a lawyer to defend my forest."
The way she answered moved us
and made us think about many things,
because it's likely few people
are so connected with their environment the way she was with hers.
I have never seen my town the way she saw her forest, for instance.
But maybe not everyone is so connected
with their communities, with the people around them.
And maybe not everyone is so connected with their own selves,
to the point of having enough awareness
to understand their purpose in the middle of it all.
The problem, though, is not so visible.
Sometimes, our lack in questioning things and asking questions
puts us in automatic mode
and we end up used to the way things are,
instead of exploring the beauty of how things could be.
Now, the fact that we don't ask many questions,
sometimes it can look like laziness,
lack of motivation, energy, or something like that,
but, honestly, I think this is truly resignation.
It's resignation to believe it can be better,
and that now, in this moment, there are new truths floating among us.
One of my favorite films explores this very well.
It's called "Twelve Angry Men."
To make a brief summary, 12 men are part of a popular jury
and they need to decide the fate
of an 18-year-old boy, charged with killing his own father.
Out of the 12, 11 are sure, positive, that he's guilty
and want to condemn him to the electric chair and go home.
Except that, of the 12, one of them still has doubts
and he asks questions that provoke others to think,
and change a history that could culminate in the death of an innocent young man.
The issue is, to manage to ask the right questions -
and, many times, the environment is quite sterile
for receiving the right questions -
some previous steps are interesting to be taken.
The first one is that people should be able to create vulnerability
in a certain group,
so we can have empathy with their mental model;
because, when we have empathy with a mental model of a certain group,
we are sure we can undo the certainties we have
so as to open room to real doubts;
to be able to ask the right questions.
But do we do this right?
When, for example, a curious kid asks,
"Why? Why? Why?" and we answer, without any patience, "Because I said so,"
what incentive are we giving that kid to make them good "question makers"
and to actually want to question what is happening?
What ends up happening, with all of this,
is that we start to get incentive to stop asking questions.
And when I stop asking questions, I start to keep myself to my world,
to my individualism;
and I also forget to ask who are the people around me.
So, what we can do is to keep on asking questions,
making the effort to ask.
And what's most interesting
is that they don't necessarily need to be verbalized.
When we are aware of the meaning of our action,
our action is our question.
For example, a good urban project can actually be a question,
"What can I do to make sure people interact more and better
in public spaces?"
An innovative school can be a question,
"What can I do to make sure human beings are formed like human beings?"
Or, even better, how can a nutcase ask,
"What's the problem in hugging a stranger?"
We're already doing this here today, as a matter of fact.
(Laughter)
The interesting thing is when we start to ask questions,
when I start to ask something about you and to put myself in your shoes,
I start to understand your perspective of the world.
Even better, I start to understand your world.
One interesting thing I heard once was:
we don't see the world the way it is;
the world is the way we see it.
And when we can understand better
other people's views,
this starts to happen much more effectively.
Much more than benevolent, this makes us more intelligent,
to solve complex problems,
that have cause and effect apart from each other.
And we make them closer with our own approach.
To manage to do this, three steps are interesting.
First, we need to connect, and to connect is very simple.
It's to become vulnerable, to manage to say, "I don't know."
It's to want to know, "Who are you?"
It's to be able to ask, "Why?" or "What for?"
Because when we manage to do this, to create an atmosphere of questioning,
the doubts that arise come with great humbleness.
Because when we ask the right questions, in fact, what we are doing
is to consider the hypothesis of us being wrong
or that we may not have all the information.
Because, when I admit that I'm wrong or that I lack information,
then, in this case I might have enough awareness to provoke an action
myself or of the whole community.
Viktor Frankl once said, "You can take everything away from a person.
Except the last type of freedom,
which is the freedom to choose, the freedom of our own attitude,
the freedom to build one's own way, regardless of circumstances."
And the process to make question asking easier,
is, in reality, a process of freedom
because when we ask the right question,
we are, in fact, opening space for choice.
Because I only choose something when I question something.
It's a true fact that we, as a species,
have always been moved by questions that enabled us to survive and evolve.
This is not new.
The big question is that, maybe, we're in an imbalance
for having too many answers,
because answers are more and more accessible and in greater quantity
and they usually come from outside;
and questions are more and more scarce,
because they demand some energy level we aren't used to anymore,
especially because they come from inside.
It is this imbalance that worries us.
That's why I urge us all to keep on asking;
keep on asking because, in a given moment,
something is going to happen.
Miguel Cavalcanti said something very nice,
"When we have all the answers, it's time we changed the questions."
But, above all, asking good questions
makes us excellent leaders,
capable of seeing the world with other eyes.
I keep thinking that maybe we don't need
more data, more information, or even more knowledge.
We just need new eyes
that allow us to see what no one has seen
and ask what no one has asked.
The answers are what exactly, after all?
A picture of the present.
But, if the present is always changing,
what are they for?
Maybe it is this:
the answers are disposable,
the questions are reusable.
(Applause)
Answers generate comfort.
Questions generate awareness and action.
At the same time, it's a dilemma, we've got to admit it.
Do I question, or do I move forward?
Because moving forward is important, it gives us a sense of accomplishment;
moving forward allows us to do something.
But when we embrace the freedom to ask a question,
we are actually embracing the freedom of choice;
and freedom of choice provokes an incredible movement
of taking us away from the victim position to the protagonist position.
and, if that seems interesting for an individual,
imagine how powerful this is for an organization
or for the community as a whole.
This power goes way beyond our comprehension.
This is much more than rational, much more than Cartesian.
So, the big question is how to know exactly
what is the right moment to question,
as this might give us knowledge
to understand if the moment to ask is right
or if it is the moment to move forward.
That's why I'd like to finish with a fable
that starts exactly with a question
between a bird and a squirrel.
One day a bird approached a squirrel and said, "Squirrel,
you, with all your wisdom, tell me one thing,
how much does a snow flake weigh?"
The squirrel answered, "Nothing more than nothing."
The bird replied, "Are you serious?
So sit down, I want to tell you a thing that happened to me yesterday."
And the bird said,
"I was on top of a branch when it started to snow.
I'm a bird, I wasn't doing anything at all,
(Laughter)
so I decided to count how many snow flakes would fall on that branch.
And I counted,
2 million, 999 thousand, 999 snow flakes.
As each snow flake weighs nothing more than nothing, nothing happened."
But then the bird said, "Snow flake 3 million fell.
And, when snow flake 3 million fell,
the branch broke and fell on the ground."
The squirrel said, "So?"
And the bird said, "So, I kept thinking,
what if the entire world has made its movement,
and it's only waiting for my move
so a great movement can take shape?"
(Applause)
And he continued,
"What if the only thing missing is my move
so I can, in fact, see the world the way I want it?"
That girl in the Amazon was a snow flake, even without knowing it.
Exactly like each one of us here.
And, as I finish here, hoping that we'll keep on asking and questioning,
I'll finish with one question:
what if only you are missing?
Thank you.
(Applause)