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.

The paradox of questioning is that simple questions can lead to detailed, on-target answers, but complicated questions get you single-word answers from a subject who doesn’t want to talk, and unrestrained answers from a person who does. In this book, I will teach you the process of skillfully asking simple questions to extract the information you need, regardless of the type of subject.

The questioning techniques exposed and explored in this book come from the world of Human Intelligence Collection through interrogation, interviewing, and debriefing. Interrogation is a science because there are specific scientific techniques to follow and model. It is an art because, in a real sense, it is theater for one. It is also a discipline in that it follows a system of organization.

Questioning is the foundation for effective interrogation; it is the central component of the discipline of interrogation. At the same time, in learning questioning, it’s important that you separate it from the any preconceived notions you have about interrogation. The questioning process you will learn in this book has nothing to do with coercion, intimidation, or any other techniques associated with uncooperative sources. The process of questioning I teach can turn someone who is only marginally cooperative into someone more willing to talk, but it is not designed to convert a hostile source into a friendly one.

As you begin learning the process, consider this good news: We’re all are all natural born questioners! From the time we start uttering real words, we ask, “Why?” and every other interrogative. It’s human nature for kids to try to verify and validate every day. In learning how to question effectively as an adult, you need to recapture that persistent and unbiased curiosity of your youth.

But it’s more than recapturing that childlike curiosity. It’s a matter of focus. When kids ask a question, they want to know one thing. They point to a bug they’ve never seen before and ask, “What’s that?” As adults, our biggest downfall in questioning is that we try to get too much information at one time. Adults point to a bug and ramble on: “Look at that strange bug. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Where did it come from? Do you know if it bites? Do you suppose it will eat my tomatoes?”

So a foundational lesson in the questioning process you will learn in this book is this: Find out one thing at a time. The alternative is finding out a lot of information that you have to sort through in order to get the facts you really need. And that’s the downfall of the White House correspondents.

ORIGINS OF THE QUESTIONING PROCESS

Fort Huachuca, which is in Arizona about 15 miles north of the border with Mexico, is home to the United States Army Intelligence Center and School. It’s where I began my career as an interrogator, human intelligence collector, and later, a military instructor for Department of Defense interrogators and strategic debriefers.

In the mid-1980s, the interrogation course at Ft. Huachuca was a mere nine weeks, which is short if you consider the breadth of skills interrogators need to perform effectively in the field. Classes on interrogation approaches, cross-cultural communications, and a number of other interpersonal skills ran back-to-back. The course was linked to the language training program at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. The concept was to absorb a defense-critical foreign language in a condensed period of time and then bring it into the interrogation course and apply it as needed.

Questioning training was a critical component for effective and efficient interrogation. It was a five-day block of instruction, eight hours a day, or a total of 40 hours of instruction. It took the students from question #1 to the last question they could ever possibly ask in areas of military-related questioning such as missions, logistics, and personnel. Slide after slide—there were hundreds—listed an exact sequence of questions for each area. It was mind-numbing to the extent that no one wanted to teach it.

My grandfather had always told me, “You get the job nobody else wants and you’ll always have job security,” so I volunteered to teach the questioning block. I hated it too, but found a way to put the experience to good use when I left the Army.

A company called Phoenix Consulting Group was just starting up and had secured a contract from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to teach interrogation courses. Prior to that, the Army and Marine Corps had been the only entities offering such courses for military and intelligence personnel. Phoenix remained the only certified non-military source of such training for the next six years until the company was acquired and systematically dismantled by another organization. When Phoenix hired me, we were under United States Senate supervision and had the distinction of our students never being associated with any of interrogation scandals like Abu Ghraib that shook public trust in military interrogation practices.

The program of instruction I developed at Phoenix of course included questioning. Not the boring version that forced students to memorize a series of questions in a precise order, but the kind that you will learn in this book. I developed an effective process of questioning that does have rules and structure, but not rigid rules and structure. It engages your intellect and personality in the process.

Good questioning is not about knowing what questions to ask, but how to ask questions the right way. You will know which ones to ask by understanding and employing my formula for questioning.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?

The first class we taught through Phoenix Consulting Group was of Navy SEALs, and we went onsite to teach it in a bunker on the Pacific Ocean. These may have been the best group of students I’ve ever experienced. They were hungry to learn everything I knew so they would make no mistakes when lives were at stake.

My guess is that you have a laser-like focus analogous to theirs and that’s why you’re going to be a great student. Your probably aren’t in life-or-death situations like the SEALs, but you have a distinct purpose for wanting to know how to question well. You want this skill set so you can achieve something that’s important to you.

What you are about to learn is how to:

Identify and practice good questioning techniques.

Recognize types of questions to avoid.

Know the questions required when hearing unconfirmed reports or gossip.

Practice good listening techniques and exploit all leads.

Identify questioning models.

Determine when and how to control the conversation.

Gaining these skills will give you an advantage in whatever you do—sales, law, law enforcement, parenting, customer service, human resources, medicine, counseling, teaching, negotiating, journalism, and more. The list is endless. You wouldn’t be asking questions right now unless you needed to have answers. The skills of questioning help you get complete answers faster.

Questioning is one of the interpersonal skills that delivers instant gratification: You ask a question; you get an answer. In addition to that, the long-term benefits of learning a questioning discipline are these:

Your rapport-building skills take on another dimension. Good questioning relies on rapport to some extent, but knowing how and when to ask questions also goes a long way to enhancing your rapport with another person. Questioning well is a skill that helps you get closer to people. It can be a warm, interactive process, even if you have an agenda.

You learn to use active listening techniques habitually. In the way interrogators use it, active listening involves both demonstration and perception. You indicate through words and body language that you are engaged in what the other person is saying; at the same time, you are listening for subtext and observing behavior.

Your critical thinking skills sharpen. Your well-ordered construction of questions is a workout for your cognitive processes. Instead of spewing questions that are tinged with emotion and/or expressing a collection of random thoughts, you take a refined approach. As a matter of habit, the structure of your questions and your word choices reflect discipline. Your critical thinking also develops through looking for holes in answers, hearing what extraneous bits have been planted in them, and planning the next question.

You have one more screwdriver in the toolkit that gives you a competitive advantage. If you’re in sales, your toolkit might already include in-depth product knowledge, charisma, and a well-respected company backing you up. Add questioning skills to that and the odds of closing deals shift even more in your favor. If you’re a parent—let’s say of teenagers—your “competitive advantage” might be discovering all the facts about something they’d like to cover up. I know what it’s like to have to teenagers and I would never say that I used my questioning expertise against them; I used it to help protect them. One of my grown daughters told me recently, “I know I wasn’t easy, but I would have been harder to raise if you hadn’t stayed a step ahead of me.”

An offshoot of all of the benefits of cultivating questioning skills is a deeper understanding of why people are willing to answer your questions. It’s valuable to look at these reasons because, if someone is giving you answers but none of these descriptions of motivation seem to fit, ask yourself if the person might be making up a story.

The subject is naturally inclined to divulge information. When most people hear a phone ring, the tendency is to answer it. Similarly, a good many people hear a question and immediately want to answer it. Every day on the MSN.com home page, there is a survey question about a current news item. The basic question, tweaked to reflect the day’s news is, “What do you think of...” Within a couple of hours or less, you might see 250,000 responses! As a skilled questioner, you will be able to sail through a session with someone who can’t resist responding to the daily poll. You will need to stay disciplined, however, because people who are comfortable with giving up a lot of information have the potential to take you off course.

The subject stands to benefit by giving you information. In a sales situation, a serious buyer has compelling reasons to tell you the whole truth. You ask the questions to determine the must-haves and the other factors that would please the customer; the customer answers the questions so she can get what she wants. The disconnect in the scenario is that you may not have what she seems to wants, so your next set of questions may have to be “what else” questions until she hits on features of your product.

The subject stands to lose something by not giving you information. Physicians in an acute care position have a distinct advantage as questioners: If the subject doesn’t deliver truthful and complete answers, dire consequences might result. There are many situations in which this relationship isn’t quite as drastic, of course. Parents who issue the dangling ultimatum, “Tell me what happened—or else!” suggest that confessing will involve a lot less pain than hiding the facts.

The subject feels as though he owes you something and information might repay the debt. This can be part of a quid pro quo exchange in which you give a little information about yourself to make the other person feel obligated or more comfortable to give a little information about himself. Or, it might be that you did someone a favor and the person literally feels indebted to you, so when you ask a question, he feels it’s his duty to answer it.

A friend told me a story that illustrates why someone who lacks all of these motivations would answer questions. She had become so irritated by daily robo-calls from politicians and political parties in the run-up to a major election that she decided to participate in one of the non-robotic calls. For the most part, she gave the pollster truly odd responses—a.k.a. lies. So if you’re in a sales, legal, or other situation in which you start to suspect the person really has no motivation to talk to you, start looking for signs that the information isn’t credible.

ONE THING AT A TIME

Earlier in the chapter, I noted that a foundational lesson in the questioning process I teach is to find out one thing at a time. This is a tenet to carry forward as you go through the book. Focusing on one thing at a time may not sound like a mentally challenging task, but consider some common ways we fail to achieve it:

A mother asks her second-semester college freshman, “What happens when you finish the term and come home and can’t get a job?” She gets frustrated when he responds, “We have a few days to kinda wrap up the semester—you know, some parties and cleaning up the dorm—and then I’ll head back. But you know, I’ve been working on my resume and got some contacts through Facebook.” He didn’t pay much attention past “What happens when you finish...” In Mom’s mind, she asked, “What will you do if you can’t get a job this summer?” so his answer seems evasive. She thinks she stuck to the one-thing-at-a-time rule, but what came out of her mouth did not.

A police officer asks, “Why didn’t you slow down as you came around the corner into the school zone?” The driver responds, “Of course I slowed down. If you don’t slow down around that corner, you’d go flying into the guard rail.” The officer thought he asked why the motorist didn’t slow down as he entered the school zone. If he had, the question would have been, “Why didn’t you slow down as you came into the school zone?”

Now think back to the beginning of the chapter and the questions related to Nik Wallenda versus the questions on policy issues posed by journalists at a press conference. The distinctions between good and bad questions should be starting to take shape. A key distinction is that simple questions such as “Why is he wearing jeans?” have two important qualities: They require a narrative response and focus on a single issue.

So, if you stop here and remember everything you learned, you’re about 10 percent better at questioning than you were when you started reading. Let’s go for the other 90 percent!