Lovely Humans,

What's something big or small someone who loves you (dead or alive) is really proud of you for in your life?

Ask anyone this question today and then watch their body language and how you immediately reduce the distance between you and them. Instantaneous connection.

I use a version of this question when I meet folks for the first time. It builds trust because you created the space for someone to share courage, vulnerability, and passion.

Some more of these questions I use are:

Here is what I think is actually going on when you ask one of these.

"What do you do?" asks a person to hand you their title. We spent last week's issue on why the title is now the least reliable thing about anybody.

But "who is proud of you" does something sneaky. It makes someone answer from another person's eyes. They cannot get there from inside their own head. They have to go and stand where their mother, or their old boss, or a friend who is no longer here is standing, and look back at themselves.

That is why the body language changes. You did not ask them to perform. You asked them to remember being seen.

And you learn more in that thirty seconds than in an hour of "so what does your company actually do."

Most of us never ask these questions because we are frightened to answer them if we are asked. There is also a beat after asking this type of question where the other person is deciding whether to trust you. That silence is scary since we are forcing the subject of trust, upfront.

I encourage you to try one of my questions this week. Use it in the first five minutes of a meeting where you already know someone and assumed there is nothing left to learn about them.

What are you afraid they might say?

Religious Focus this month: Ubuntu

Every month we pick one religion or way of living. It allows us to open our minds and be mindful of how we and others live better, healthier, joyful and meaningful lives.

Last week we sat with the Ubuntu phrase everybody quotes, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. This week we look at what Ubuntu does when it walks into a room and a decision has to be made.

The community hall in Ixopo has one working ceiling fan and forty-one plastic chairs, and by four in the afternoon every chair is occupied.

Sipho is fifty-one. He is a water engineer for the district and he has been sent here to settle an argument about a borehole.

He has run the meeting exactly the way he was trained to. Agenda. Options. A show of hands.

Twice now the hands have gone up. Twice the matter has come back the following month, angrier than before.

An older woman near the door, MaDlamini, has not said a word all day. When Sipho starts packing his folder she speaks without getting up.

"You keep asking us to choose. You have not yet asked us to speak."

What happens over the next three hours is not efficient. She makes him go around the room. Everyone. The two men who have done all the shouting, yes, but also the school caretaker, the woman who walks furthest for water, and a teenager who has been quiet because nobody has ever asked him anything.

The teenager is the one who mentions that the pump runs dry by ten in the morning because three households have been running a car wash off it.

Eleven months. Nobody had asked him a single question. This is indaba.

The word is isiZulu and isiXhosa and it means, roughly, a matter, or the gathering where a matter is discussed. What it actually names is a form. Everybody with a stake speaks, in turn, and the meeting does not end when a majority is reached. It ends when the thing is genuinely settled.

It is slower than a vote, and that is the entire point. A vote produces a decision half the room is quietly waiting to overturn. An indaba produces one that nobody needs to.

It works well enough that in 2011, when the climate talks in Durban deadlocked and were hours from collapse, the chair abandoned the formal process and ran the room as an indaba. Delegates were asked to state not what they wanted, but what they could live with.

Guiding question:

In your last difficult meeting, who was in the room and never actually got asked anything, and what do you think they knew?

Three steps. One meeting.

1. Pick the meeting you already think is settled.
Not the contentious one. The one where you assume you already know what everybody thinks. That is where the person nobody has asked is sitting.

2. Go round the room before you go round the agenda.
One question, every person, no skipping, no "I agree with what she said." Ask what they can live with, not what they want.

3. Do not close on a vote. Close on a sentence.
"Here is what I heard. Is that right?" If anybody hesitates, you are not finished. The hesitation is the data.

Sipho ran that room by a show of hands for eleven months. The answer came from a teenager nobody had thought to ask a question.