Want to Help Someone?
Shut Up and Listen!

As Appreciative Inquiry practitioners, we are passionate about creating a space that honours the wisdom of all ‘voices in the room’ and enables people to co-create their own future.

So we were delighted to come across this amusing, informative and very passionate TED talk by Ernesto Sirolli, who developed an approach he calls Enterprise Facilitation.  

As Ernesto says, this means:

You never initiate anything. You never motivate anybody. But you become a servant of the local passion; a servant of the local people who have a dream to become a better person.

His key advice? “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!”

However, as Ernesto also advises, the best way to do this is definitely NOT in community meetings!

There is a problem with community meetings; entrepreneurs never come! .And they never tell you in a public meeting what they want to do with their money, what opportunity they have identified. So planning has this blind spot. The smartest people in your community you don’t even know, because they don’t come to your public meetings.

Instead, he tells us we need to create a new infrastructure – one that doesn’t exist. We need to create a new profession – the family doctor of enterprise‘. A “family doctor” who sits with people where they are – in their homes, at their kitchen tables, in a cafe – and helps them find a way to transform their passion into a way to make a living.

Watch Ernesto’s talk below. We hope you’ll be as entertained, challenged and inspired as we were!

[ted id=1617 width=460 height=260]