Say Less And Listen More. Learning From The Edges.

I recently heard an amazing story from Paul Bennett, Cheif Creative Officer at IDEO, that illustrated the power of quiet observation, saying less and listening more.

In 2009, Paul traveled to Grameen Bank an hour outside of Dhaka in Bangladesh as part of a corporate tour party, “Inside Grameen”. It was sweltering hot in the small stuffy branch office as various officials spoke about the glowing wonders of Grameen, its local workers, and Grameen Bank’s founder, the much-lauded Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. The small, sugary tea biscuits and strangely incongruous mini-bananas he was given to eat were melting and swarming with flies. He was surrounded by curious, gentle-eyed locals with gazes fixated on the guest speakers. The tea itself, made with local water, sat there; they were all too afraid to drink it. Paul tried to maintain the impression of being interested, trying to stay engaged, to act respectfully ceremonious, but the phrase “Poverty Tourism” kept ringing in the back of his mind.

Sitting in the back of three assembled rows of people was a mother and son. The son was a young man dressed in his smartest shirt and cleanest pants. The mother wore a bright green veil but Paul couldn’t see her eyes; she refused to look at Paul, resolutely staring down. He got the sense that she did not understand much of the hoopla that was going on and probably felt a bit forced into the situation. They were sitting next to two other young men and two young women, all of whom were clearly model Grameen protégés. Each person falteringly told a story of how Grameen had helped them, but it is the story of this mother and son that really stuck with Paul.

Yunus began telling her story, explaining how she was illiterate and did not speak any English, but more importantly, she was consumed by her shame, hence the hanging of her head. She had been a beggar, abandoned by her husband at a very young age and forced to live on the street. One of her three young children had died. She was penniless and had no choice but to beg trawling from person to person for money to feed her children first and then herself. She had often feared that her other children might die.

Eventually, after hearing about it through a local community network, she had asked for and been granted a Grameen Bank “Struggler” Loan. She explained that they are called “Struggler Loans” and not “Beggar Loans” for a reason: because everyone is struggling, some more than others. The loan she took out was the equivalent of $12. With that money, she bought a cow; Grameen’s 16 Decisions philosophy dictates that any money loaned not only goes towards purchases, but more importantly, towards changing a person’s life fundamentally. Although she only earned a small amount of money with the cow she was able to repay her loan plus the accumulated interest. Horrified to learn that they charged a street-beggar interest, Paul later discovered that interest was in itself a form of dignity, that everyone, whatever their circumstances, is taken seriously as a customer and charged accordingly.

After many years, she bought another cow. Following another of the 16 Decisions, Yunus had to put a child through school as part of Grameen’s explicit written social contract that the money was to be “invested” somehow in the borrower’s future. Her future was her son. For years and years she struggled to put him through school, and eventually he was accepted to a university in Bangladesh. And, he had just graduated from college at the top ten percent of his class with a degree in mathematics.

After Yunus spoke, Paul went up to the mother and son. She looked up tentatively through her veil as Paul asked her son for his contact information. Paul said to him: “Your mother must be so proud of you.” “No Sir,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation, “I am so proud of my mother.”

Why did Paul tell me this story? He learned two things from that trip. First, that it’s so rare in life we get to see for ourselves the first-hand impact of the things that we do, but when we do, it’s truly powerful. To truly connect, even if it’s through one person and their story, speaks volumes over any number of anonymous statistics and pie charts. Paul has read countless books and white papers on micro-finance and its effects, but seeing the impact on one family convinced him a million times more than reading about it in print.

Secondly, Paul learned an important lesson about the function of business. A successful business is not about transaction, it is about meaning. It is about empathy, morality and humility. It is not about the quantity of big bold interactions, but the quality of small, intimate ones. Grameen happens to be a bank, but it is operating from a place of higher purpose, to elevate the lives of its customers. As Paul said, “It’s not a bank, it’s a dignity-engine.”

UNCOMMON SENSE OBSERVATIONS

• Talk less and you’ll hear and see more.
• There’s always more to the story, if you look and listen closely.
• Your eyes hear more than your mouth.