Flip the question
Read this first, then watch the video:
Every year under a unique leadership development program run by my wiser than wise friend, Eliav Zakay, small groups of 15-17 year olds in Israel are given an assignment: Develop a community service project that will last beyond your work on it, that will help those who haven’t been helped by other community service projects, and that will enable you to enlist other volunteers to help you.
One year, a small group of the students decided they wanted to do something to help citizens with mental retardation in their community. They debated and researched and came to a dead end. What on earth could they do to help this group of people? How could the community support and provide assistance and charity to those with mental retardation? They couldn’t see how to proceed.
Their heart was in the right place. They truly wanted to help their neighbors with mental retardation. But, as Eliav could see, they needed to see the problem from a different perspective. "What if you flipped the question?" he asked them. "Try that."
After much discussion, they realized what Eliav meant for them to do. What if the question wasn’t "how can the community help people with mental retardation?" What if, instead, the question was "how can people with mental retardation help our community?"
With that one small shift in their own thinking, the people they most wanted to serve became the agents of a bigger change in the community. With that one small shift, they empowered people with mental retardation instead of cared for them. By flipping the question, they took people with mental retardation out of the role of "receiver of aid" and into the role of "giver of aid." Take a look at the video to see the full story. Get out your hankies first, though. What an incredible story. We should listen to teenagers more often.
37days Do it Now Challenge
We need to flip the question.
When humans were first contemplating how to fly, they kept asking the question, "how can a machine fly like a bird?" Over and over and over again, that was the question. Until the Wright Brothers and Langley flipped the question. "How," they asked, "does a bird fly like a machine?" Then all hell broke loose and human flight became a reality. (Okay, Mr Brilliant tells me it’s an oversimplification of the story, but you get the idea and otherwise we’ll be here all night and Mama needs her beauty sleep)
Where are you stuck? What question has you roadblocked? How could you flip it?
Sometimes we have to have other people help us flip the question because we are so stuck in our reality that we can’t see past it. If that’s the case, pose your original question in the comments and perhaps other 37days readers can help you flip it…
