5 Managing the Exchange

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

—Benjamin Franklin

In every interview, negotiation, or investigation, when you are after information for a purpose, you need to manage the conversation. In general, it won’t be advantageous for your control over the direction to be obvious to the other person, though; the guidance in this chapter helps you do it subtly.

Begin by giving your source credit for having the ability to navigate a conversation, even if she’s a 19-year-old applying for her first full-time job. Approach the situation as though you are playing chess: You begin the game with the same number of pieces, all of which have the same capability. The difference is that you’ve carefully considered your strategy on using them, whereas she probably hasn’t.

This chapter covers the four main tools of managing a conversation: analytic listening, directed questioning, choosing the location, and knowing how to play the Kevin Bacon game.

Analytic Listening

Listening means paying attention to what someone is saying. I think of analytic listening as paying attention with a specific purpose, and it has three interrelated elements: keywords, an open mind, and synchronous pacing.

Keywords

Your source’s use of keywords and concepts can indicate whether or not you are on a conversational path to getting the information you need. Sometimes you need to plant those words and concepts into the conversation if they have dropped out or have been missing altogether, or you will find yourself having a dialogue about something irrelevant.

For example, in a January 21, 2014 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, host Terry Gross interviewed Joaquin Phoenix, who had just been nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in the movie Her. He was an engaging guest who seemed sincerely interested in giving a good interview—he gives very few—but he would occasionally wander off the trail. During his biggest diversion, he made a series of comments about how boring he was, ending with: “Sometimes I just, you know, I just think, who cares?” Gross replied: “We, who love movies, care.”¹ With that she looped him right back to the point of the conversation—that is, Joaquin Phoenix’s movies.

One of my friends in the intelligence community, whom I’ll call Jack, told me a story that illustrates how much you can learn about someone by tuning in to keywords—and that includes noticing that keywords are missing from a conversation. Jack decided to get a personal trainer. At the second session, during the 10-minute warmup portion of the workout, Jack asked the trainer what she does for fun. She told him that she has a new boyfriend and they go fishing together. For the remaining nine minutes of Jack’s warm-up on the recumbent bike, she told him about hooks with no barbs, the challenges of casting well, what time of day to use different lures for different fish, and how fish at different locations require different lures. Jack thought all of this was intriguing, but not because he found the information fascinating. Not once did he hear the word “fun” come back to him. Not once did she describe what it was like to catch a fish. He speculated that she didn’t care about fishing; perhaps she liked the science of fishing and the process of fishing, but not actually catching fish. Or, maybe what she really liked was having the boyfriend share his knowledge and excitement with her about his favorite activity. He stored that thought and decided to follow up on it the following week.

Monday morning, he came into the gym and went straight to the bike to warm up. His trainer offered him a “good morning,” after which he said, “It was a gorgeous weekend. Did you and your boyfriend go fishing?” She said, “Well,” and then there was a long pause followed by, “My boyfriend went fishing, but I decided to catch up on some paperwork.” She didn’t join the boyfriend where he was fishing until later in the day when a people started to gather for an evening barbeque.

The following Monday morning was a repeat of the previous Monday’s conversation, with the only difference being “housework” instead of paperwork, which she had to do because her mom was coming for a visit. He knew the mom wasn’t arriving for two weeks.

During the next few weeks, Jack heard nothing more about fishing. A few weeks later, he heard nothing more about the boyfriend. He had already told me the first part of the story and was ready to put money on the fact that the trainer was not going to go the distance with the guy who loved fishing. Among other things, the keywords were missing.

An Open Mind

If your internal voice is responding to the person with mockery or boredom, then you are more engaged in judging than listening. Control those thought balloons rising above your head; your source might sense they are there. It’s important to allow yourself to doubt, but don’t cross the line into cynicism or criticism.

To put it in media terms, you don’t want to be like an advocacy journalist. A common occurrence in advocacy journalism is for the host of a program to air emotionally charged opinions while asking a guest a question. The result is often tension, not answers. Bill O’Reilly is a political commentator and the host of the television show The O’Reilly Factor who confronted Congressman Barney Frank about his role in the U.S. portion of the global financial crisis of 2008. Frank, a politician who had served 32 years in the House of Representatives before his retirement in 2013, was chairman of the House Financial Services Committee at the time. O’Reilly began his interview with the question “Shouldn’t everybody in the country be angry with you right now?”² Frank stuck to his facts and talking points, and answered the question, but that’s probably not what people who tuned in remember from the interview. They remember challenges like O’Reilly’s next question: “That’s swell, but you still went out in July and said that everything was great and, off that, a lot of people bought stock and lost everything they had.” After that, it seemed highly improbable that discerning viewers would get actual information from the exchange.

Synchronous Pacing

Many of us who are fast-talkers have a tendency to finish other people’s sentences if their pace is slower than ours. If you want to get the most out of your listening, do not step on someone else’s sentences, either by trying to finish them or by interrupting to interject a thought. Your pursuit of information will stop short when you do this.

In the early days of my writing career, I had the opportunity to interview an Olympic gold medalist in a slalom event to get her insights about both mental and physical training. We connected like we were old friends. Unfortunately, that made me too comfortable in taking the conversation into a more personal discussion of training, and I lost sight of the big picture—what she could tell my readers about their training. I stepped on her words, took her down a different path, and nearly lost those insights forever.

Directed Questioning

Directed questioning is the use of questions to steer a conversation. Differentiating among types of questions is a valuable starting point, because asking what we might term “bad” questions will often cause you to lose control of the exchange.

James O. Pyle, my co-author of Find Out Anything From Anyone, Anytime, sorts questions into six good and four bad types. The “bad” questions can have value when they are used deliberately, but the problem is that most of us use them without any planning, so they tend to derail a conversation.

The good questions are:

1. Direct: This is a straightforward question that opens with a basic interrogative word or phrase. You begin with who, what, when where, why, or how to get a narrative response, and something like did you, do you, would you, or could you to get a yes or no.

2. Control: You know the answer to a control question when you ask it. It helps you detect a lie, figure out if the person is uninformed, or confirm that he’s paying attention. For example, your manager might ask, “Were you able to get that report to James in time for his 10 o’clock meeting?” She knows you were not, but she wants to know if you will be honest about the problem.

3. Repeat: Pyle’s definition, and the one he teaches, is one of two variations. The Army Field Manual suggests that one way to handle a repeat question is to ask the same question as part of a mechanism to wear down the source. In contrast, Pyle instructs that they are two or more different questions related to the same information and that they reinforce each other. This distinction is very useful in dealing with someone who may have misunderstood, mis-heard, or wished to avoid the question the first time it was posed. One example is the anesthesiologist asking you the morning of your surgery, “When was the last time you had anything to eat or drink?” Aware that you were supposed to have nothing after midnight, you might say, “Midnight.” Toward the end of the conversation, the same doctor might say, “It’s 8 o’clock now and we’re ready to get you prepped for surgery. You must be thirsty by now. How long has it been since you’ve anything to drink?” Your mind goes back to that water you had sometime early this morning and you say, “About four hours.”

4. Follow-Up: Also known as a “persistent question,” this is the same question either reshaped a little or simply repeated to explore different angles of the desired information. A version of a follow-up question is simply “What else?” So, a therapist might ask her client, “Do you do anything to try to alleviate your depression?” The client replies, “I go for walks.” The therapist suspects the client may also be self-medicating, so she asks, “What else do you do?”

5. Summary: The question allows the source to revisit an answer. You’re feeding back information, perhaps repeating word for word something the person has said. For example, a mom might say to her son, “Do I understand you correctly that there were three other boys involved in the fight?” Just be careful and don’t turn this into a compound question by trying to consolidate information. An example of this mistake is: “Do I understand you correctly that there were three other boys involved in the fight and six girls were standing around watching?”

6. Non-Pertinent: Although it’s called a non-pertinent question because it ostensibly does not relate to the information you’re seeking, it can be extremely useful in getting a nervous person to talk or in establishing rapport with someone, even a hostile source. In a job interview, it might be a question about the traffic the candidate encountered on the way to appointment. On a first date, it might be “What do you think of all this rain?” If the response is a grouchy “It sucks!” then the question may actually be a pertinent one in terms of your dating future.

The following four types of questions are considered bad because they lose the aspect of good questioning that supports the discovery of information. They involve assumptions, confuse information, and lose information.

1. Leading: Your question supplies an answer. The police officer who collars a disheveled young man outside a building is asking a leading question when he says, “You were in the building when the fight started, weren’t you?” The officer has no proof, but if he gets a yes out of the young man, then he has a suspect.

2. Negative: Using negative words like never and not can corrupt the intended meaning of the question. A typical abuse is “Are you not okay?” I’ve often heard people say, “Yes” in response—meaning, “Yes, I’m okay,” even though that’s what not the questioner asked.

3. Vague: This type of question lacks clarity, so the source may not be sure what information is being requested. Example: “When you heard all the noise and walked down the street past those trucks, what did you see was going on?” It’s unclear if the question relates to what was going on where the noise was, or maybe what was going on with the trucks. When you ask a vague question, if the source intends to hide the facts from you, this sets him up to hide them without even lying to you.

4. Compound: A compound question poses two or more questions at one time. This is a common shortcoming of journalists who feel they have limited time with a source such as the president of the United States. In the December 20, 2013 press conference with President Obama, one of the White House correspondents asked the true value of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk metadata, such as that at the center of the Edward Snowden controversy. The reporter asked the president both to identify examples of its usefulness and give his opinion on two things: the usefulness of the data, and whether or not the NSA should continue to its data collection practices. Certainly, the questions are related, but they are best expressed separately. Putting them together gives the source an easy out to answer one of the questions and slide past the other.

In addition to using each type of question with intention, selecting your conversation motivators well supports your taking a conversation in the direction you want. Whether it’s using an incentive like a quid pro quo exchange of personal information or an ego-boosting remark, you can keep a person engaged in the topic you want her to be engaged in.

Regardless of how skillfully you handle questioning, sometimes people want to go in a direction that is not consistent with what you have in mind; you don’t think that direction will get you the information you need. You face three options:

Acknowledge what the person is talking about, but move her back to the subject you want to discuss. One way to do this is to feign interest: “That’s something I’d enjoying talking with you about, but before we move on, tell me more about…”

Tune in to why the person shifted topics. Your source might be giving you even more valued information that you’d been getting before. You hear keywords that pertain to your area of peak interest and might think, “Wow! Glad he’s headed down this path.”

Go with the flow. If you have the time and patience, you could let the person keep talking about the new subject to find out if there is an important point or piece of information that will surface. Many people love to wrap their insights and information in stories. They start telling you about their dog when you were sharing your anxiety over a dental appointment. It might be five minutes before it’s clear that the dog story has a direct connection to your concerns about your dental appointment.

The following dialogue is an example of elicitation conducted by Jim Pyle over the telephone. Elicitation can involve directed questioning, but fundamentally it’s a conversation designed to get a source to talk to you in a focused way without divulging your true intent. This brief exchange illustrates how someone skilled in elicitation techniques gets a simple piece of information without coming out and asking for it directly.

Pyle’s aim was to find out the recent temperatures in that part of Colorado. The point was never to ask the question directly, but to get the information through directed questioning. Non-pertinent questions have an important role in this exercise—and keep this in mind when you review Eric Maddox’s interrogation system in Chapter 9.

This basic technique just demonstrated is also how you would question someone about a sensitive issue or about something she wants to hide. Here is how this might play out in an interview if you paired a skilled questioner with a guarded celebrity. In this case, it’s a journalist who wants to know the story behind why this celebrity has never had children. He sets up a couple of avenues in his mind about how he could get to the topic without offending her, because she has shut down more than one interview when asked direct questions of a personal nature. The basis for this is an actual interview that has been changed to protect both the interviewer and the interviewee.

In an exchange like this, it’s critical to follow source leads. A source lead is information dropped by the source in the course of conversation that you feel there is value in pursuing—that is, an additional person, place, thing, or event may be mentioned that warrants attention.

Directed questioning can also involve volunteering certain information to pull the source down a path of your design. Law enforcement professionals use this all the time with suspects. They offer one fact in a case—something they know to be true and that the suspect knows to be true—and then wait for the suspect to add something to it. For example, a detective might start by saying, “The victim had a wound in the upper part of the body.” The suspect might come back with, “I didn’t shoot her!” First, the detective never said anything about shooting; second, he never said anything about the gender of the victim.

Good journalists are highly skilled in all aspects of directed questioning. It’s not an accident that they can take someone who is accustomed to being dogmatic and lead him into delivering a worthwhile interview. For example, Richard Sakwa is an opinionated man who harshly criticizes certain Western policies and actions in relation to Russia. Author of Putin and the Oligarchs, Sakwa is a professor of Russian and European politics and head of the School of International Relations at the University of Kent. Interviewing him would be a tough challenge for just about anyone in broadcasting in the United States and many European nations because Sakwa holds a number of views that are unpopular in those countries. The tendency might be to push back, which could have two negative outcomes: infuse the interview with too much emotion, and prevent Sakwa from delivering generous doses of important information. As with any interviewee who has an agenda—that is, he wants to air particular ideas and knows how to maneuver a conversation to do so—Sakwa is the kind of guest who tests a broadcast journalist’s ability to control the conversation.

After listening to Jeremy Hobson’s interview with Richard Sakwa on NPR’s Here and Now, I sent Hobson a note about it because, in critical ways, it seemed masterful to me. He asked yes-or-no questions to illuminate Sakwa’s points of view, followed by “why” questions to allow his guest to explain his views with stories from history and current events. My note to Hobson asked if it had gone the way he wanted because that’s the determinant of whether or not a person controls a conversation. His reply noted, “There were a lot of things he said that I wanted to challenge—and I did challenge some of them—but I didn’t want to veer off the path of the interview. I didn’t have enough time to go down all the rabbit holes with him, so I picked my battles to keep us on track.”³

In my interview with Hobson,⁴ I asked him to specify the techniques he uses to steer an on-air conversation. They apply to someone in any profession:

Huge emphasis on homework. He wants to be prepared to ask not only the questions, but also the follow-up questions. This was what he did with Sakwa: He first clarified Sakwa’s position on key issues and then followed up with specific “why” questions.

Relying on “what do you mean” questions to give a guest the change to provide a clearer explanation of a point of view or concept.

Repeating a question in a different form when the guest is evasive about answering. He finds this particularly useful with politicians who like to hedge on certain issues: “Even though I don’t get an answer, I show they aren’t giving me an answer.”

Opening a question with some version of “yes or no,” and then posing the question to increase the chances of getting a definite answer on a position. For example, in an interview with one guest about recent border incidents, he asked, “Yes or no: do you think they should be deported?” and the guest finally responded, “I’m not going to give you a yes or no.” That answer revealed a great deal about the guest, who was an outspoken opponent to immigration reform and had stated previously he was in favor of people being deported.

Choosing the Venue

Choosing the location for your conversation can provide distinct advantages. There are two ways to approach the issue of location:

1. Take the other person out of her physical comfort zone and put her into your space so that it’s most likely easier for you to project and maintain control.

2. Choose a location that affords security and privacy so the person will feel inclined to speak freely.

Many Catholic confessionals combine both: relatively small, dimly lit sets of two or three connected rooms, each just a bit larger than an old-fashioned phone booth. The person confessing sins sits or kneels on one side of a partition, and the priest sits in the darkness on the other side. Most people are out of their comfort zone because of the darkness, the constrained space, the awkward position, and the fact that there is an expectation that they will be telling their transgressions. They are also in a blessed place—namely, what they see as the House of the Lord—so there is an intimidation factor. At the same time, the environment affords tremendous privacy, at least while you’re inside. In whispers, you tell the priest all the horrible things you’ve done—every one of them since the last time you went to Confession.

In normal life, you probably won’t come close to a confessional type of experience, but the elements of the setup give useful clues about what gets people to spill their guts.

There is another factor at play here that can be useful in determining the location of the exchange you will have with your source: ritual. In the confessional, the person who has come seeking forgiveness says certain things to the priest, and the priest says certain things to the individual. Ritual runs throughout the experience, even down to what the priest wears to perform his role in the sacrament.

A venue like the boss’s office can trigger ritualistic behavior. The person coming to see the boss will often sit on the opposite side of desk in a deferential manner. If that employee’s goal is to get information from the boss about the possibility of a raise and promotion, that venue will not support her goal. She might ask if they could meet for coffee at the company cafeteria at a time when there is minimal traffic and people who work there always greet her by name.

Consider your source’s level of rigidity about his environment when choosing location. One of my friends worked with a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., who was a creature of habit unlike anyone else she had ever met: medium starch on the shirts, office with knickknacks in precisely the same location in all of the three offices he occupied while they worked together, replacing his car with the same model every other year, arriving and departing work at the same time every day. She told me he was in a prime position to help her make a career move to Capitol Hill, but she needed to find out up-front if he would even be willing to do it. What should she do?

I knew he was a news junkie. I suggested that she work a little later one day to match his schedule and invite him to watch a particular news show with her before they both left for the day. He agreed, and while they were in the conference room with the television on, she broached the subject of helping her out. He was sitting on a leather couch—not his usual desk chair—and seemed less rigid in this environment than usual. He said, “Of course. Let’s have lunch on Friday and talk more about this.”

It’s possible that he would have agreed if she’d asked him while sitting on the other side of his gigantic desk in his office. But the fact is, she had more control over the interaction because she chose a more relaxing setting; it worked for both of them.

Four, Five, or Six Degrees of Separation

Playing the Kevin Bacon game means making connections between seemingly unrelated topics or facts so that you steer the conversation where you want it to go. It’s a variation of six degrees of separation, based on the mathematical premise that, by association, everyone on earth is only six people away from everyone else. In the Kevin Bacon game, it’s figuring out how Actor X connects with actor Kevin Bacon—with the point being that you always come back to Kevin Bacon. If you are skilled at making connections, you can always find a way back to the topic you really want to address in a conversation.

For example, say a rumor about massive layoffs has been flying up and down the hallways at your office. You’ve heard that thousands of people might lose their jobs, and you want to find out if you might be one of them. Vanessa, your regional HR director, is a tight-lipped individual; nothing confidential or inappropriate ever seems to leak out of her mouth. But Vanessa is the one person in the building who would know if there was going to be layoffs. You knock on her door and ask to see her for a couple of minutes.

At this point, you’ve probably heard all you need to hear from Vanessa. The last two comments she made involved the phrases “cut back” and “cost-reduction measures.” She also insulated herself from the concepts—in effect, putting a barrier between her and the bad news—by starting her sentence with “the company.” Without telling you about layoffs, she’s leaking what’s on her mind and how she feels about it. To conclude, you let her know that she’s helped a lot and that you’ve decided to take the course in preparation for the certification exam. When she gives you a broad smile and says, “I think that’s a great choice,” you have additional confirmation of the layoff. She won’t be as stressed out about giving you a pink slip if you’re on your way to another career.

The skill of making connections between one topic and another to get the information you need is probably something you do every day and don’t even realize it. When you have an agenda, all you need to do is find a seamless way to connect what you need to know with whatever someone is saying. The operative word is “seamless.”

Exercise: Connecting Concepts to Manage a Conversation

Take two topics that seem to have no relationship and see how you can move smoothly from one to the other. To illustrate how this might happen, I randomly chose two unrelated headlines from MSN.com on July 23, 2014: “McDonald’s Fires Mom who Let Girl Play Alone” and “Mars to Raise Chocolate Prices.”

Here is your challenge: Take two topics on a page of news and link them within six steps. It doesn’t matter if it’s a newspaper, MSN.com, or any other news source. It won’t matter if it’s fighting in Gaza and 401(K) retirement plans in the United States, or Justin Bieber and ragweed, you can find a way to get from one subject to the other without the process being laborious.

Listening in concert with questioning well helps you avoid the pitfalls that prevent you from getting the truth—or at least keeping yourself on the path toward it. The pitfalls include missing clues like keywords that tell you what the person knows and is focused on, misdirecting a conversation by asking a bad question, and talking too much. This last pitfall may be the biggest mistake that people in need of information often make in a sales situation, negotiation, interview, or even a personal conversation.