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of packages. “Wow!” I said to her, “How many friends do you have?” She volunteered that all of packages were for her daughter (and her family), who had dropped out of college to have children. She then went on to tell me how displeased she was about that choice. She and her husband had even asked the daughter to pay back the money they’d invested in her “lost” two years of college. All I did was ask a question and I got a peek under the hood at this woman’s emotional engine compartment.

      Placing value on questions means that, to some extent, you adopt the mentality of my students: “Interrogation never stops.” In other words, the person you’re posing questions to may think that the conversation has moved on past the job interview, for example, but you are still listening to every answer and discovering relevant things about the person. You may no longer be asking questions related to work history or education, but your question, “What do you think of this weather?” might lead to the knowledge that the applicant has panic attacks when she has to drive in the rain.

      The secret to finding out anything you want to know is simply to ask good questions. Most people trip through life asking bad questions – of teachers, friends, coworkers, clients, prospects, experts, and suspects. Even people trained in questioning, such as journalists and lawyers, commonly ask questions that get partial or misleading answers. People in any profession will find immediate benefits in developing the skill and art of good questioning.

      In this book, Maryann and I will explore:

      ✗ What’s so hard about asking a good question? You’ve been asking questions since you could talk. The problem is that the more knowledge you acquired and the more sophisticated your vocabulary became, the worse you probably got at asking questions.

      ✗ Changing the way you think. The structure and flow of effective questions probably won’t come naturally to you. You’ll need to rewire your brain a bit, to become a little more like Socrates.

      ✗ Structuring a good question. Effective questioning is about accuracy and efficiency, and the way that most people structure questions on a day-to-day basis is about neither one.

      ✗ Using different types of questions to your advantage and knowing the difference between a good question and a bad question.

      ✗ Identifying discovery areas and knowing how to stick with a line of questioning that tells you all you need to know about a person, place, thing, or event in time.

      ✗ Honing the essential skills of listening and note-taking.

      ✗ Analyzing the answers you get to determine if you need more information or if the information you’ve been given is flawed or untrue.

      ✗ Using effective questioning to enable you to gain measurable advantages in your professional life and to gain real expertise fast.

      When I was part of the interrogation world, I was known mostly as a questioning instructor and a strategic debriefer – meaning that the people around me expected me to be the best at asking questions and getting answers. I’ve been training other interrogators in questioning techniques since 1989. You are now the students who can exploit the questioning skills of our best interrogators and use them to your advantage in your profession.

      I encourage you to see questioning as a handshake. Asking questions is an invitation to a relationship. Rather than being an aggressive or intrusive exercise – which is how some might view it – I see it as a process that enables you to connect with other people and what they want to share.

      Introduction

      What’s So Hard About Asking a Question?

      On June 23, 2013, Nik Wallenda crossed a gorge near the Grand Canyon on a two-inch wire. With no tether or safety net, he made the quarter-mile walk 1,500 feet above the ground. Millions of people watched the televised feat with wide-eyed, childlike fascination. The stunt inspired a flurry of questions from viewers: What is he thinking? When did he start walking on wires? How does he feel? Where are his kids? Many questions popped up in the 700,000 Tweets about #skywire; consistent with the Twitter protocol, they were concise: “Why is he wearing jeans?” and “Why did his wife let him do this?”1

      From my perspective, Nik Wallenda’s spectacular act stunned millions of people into becoming better questioners – at least for 22 minutes and 54 seconds, which is how long it took Wallenda to cross. The bursts of what, when, why, where, and how were the basis for a lot of well-structured, informative stories about the man and his achievement.

      But complex news issues such as foreign relations, federal budgets, and trade deficits seem to invite us to ask more “sophisticated” questions – to stuff a few more syllables and concepts into our questions. For example, consider some of the questions journalists asked U.S. President Barack Obama at an April 30, 2013 press conference. The two opening questions, posed by the same person with no break allowing for an answer in between, were as follows:

      On Syria, you said that the red line was not just about chemical weapons being used but being spread, and it was a game-changer. Do you risk U.S. credibility if you don’t take military action? And then on Benghazi, there are some survivors of that terror attack who say they want to come forward and testify…and they say they’ve been blocked. Will you allow them to testify?2

      This pair was followed by a string of similarly flawed questions from multiple White House correspondents:

      ✗ By game-changer you mean U.S. military action?3

      ✗ Will you help them come forward and just say it once and for all?4

      ✗ A senior member of the Armed Services Committee has said that Benghazi and Boston are both examples of the U.S. going backwards on national security. Is he right? And did our intelligence miss something?5

      ✗ Are you getting all the intelligence and information you need from the Russians? And should Americans be worried when they go to big, public events now?6

      ✗ Do you still have the juice to get the rest of your agenda through this Congress?7

      Note that this is the exact sequence of the questions. So in the first nine questions posed to the President – and this is about halfway into the press conference – what are the only words President Obama would have needed to answer each of these questions? “Yes” and “no.” He did not give yes-or-no answers, of course; he talked at length about the issues raised. This is why some people who watched the press conference may have concluded that the journalists did a marvelous job of drawing out information from the President. In reality, the journalists with substandard questions merely benefited from the fact that President Obama had a great many points he intended to make during the press conference.

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