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

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.

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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?

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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;

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figuring out how to act on them was the harder part.