There is a scene in the movie “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” where a young Jake Moore (played by Shia LaBeouf) is walking in Central Park with his mentor and his firm’s managing Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella). Zabel has become disillusioned with the industry and doesn’t understand how he can be told a loss is a profit. He gives Jake a $1.5 million bonus & encourages Jake to marry Winnie and have a kid. The company’s stock starts crashing. Zabel doesn’t come in to work so Jake goes and finds him walking his wife’s dog in the park. Jake asks him if Keller Zabel is going to go under, but Zabel just tells him that he’s asking the wrong question…he should be asking, who isn’t in trouble.
The issue of asking different questions comes up quite a lot in storytelling…are we trying to listen just to get answers that we are anticipating or are we listening to learn and solve problems and expand a narrative for those around us.
I thought about this idea…and about Lewis Zabel of all people, when we were recently in The Duomo in Florence. It was now because of the massive dome which draws millions to the third-largest Cathedral IN Europe, although that is impressive enough. It was because of the large clock, a one of its kind, at the back of the Cathedral.
The clock is not set up in a standard 12-hour format. Rather it is in a 24-hour format, meticulously kept and updated throughout the year. Why? When it was built, the concern was NOT about what time it was, it was about how many hours of daylight those patrons had to make sure their tasks were done in the fields and the vineyards at whatever time of year it was. It didn’t matter to them that it was five o’clock, what mattered was there were two hours, or 45 minutes of daylight left so they could plan their best use of time. Once the sun went down it was hard to do the work…and if you didn’t know, how could you complete your tasks?
It was a perfect, and very unique way, of asking the right questions. The designers of the clock knew that their core audience had worries other than a number for a 12-hour time piece. So, let’s design something that addresses what their needs were, not what the needs were that we assumed they would have with a traditional clock.
You ask the right questions; you get the answers that solve the issue or grow the narrative. I raise this as we strive to be better bridge builders, not wall makers. We are time challenged in different ways than those artisans and farmers of Florence, but often we are just asking questions in anticipation of answers that take the shortest route to partial success. We don’t ask questions to learn, we ask questions to move along, and learners we should be. It’s how the best stories get told.
When we have people come to class, we ask students to do the provocative homework…to not just come up with box checking questions, but to ask questions that will inspire different answers and expand the reach of storytelling. It’s not easy to do, but it can be both helpful and fun, and sometimes it makes the speaker, or the subject, think about areas of their story they had not previously considered.
The narrative pie gets bigger.
So, as we head into the last month of the year, maybe we should keep thinking like the clock makers of Florence…or the late Zabel…think about the questions more deeply…the solutions may surprise you.
