Chapter 3

Question Types

Questioning is a straight beam of light; we’re putting it through a prism so you can see all facets of it and the different results that can come out of the process.

There are categories of good questions and bad questions. In the world of interrogation, so-called bad questions are sometimes useful, and I will explain why in this chapter. The emphasis here is on asking good questions, but depending on your reasons for reading this book, you may have cause to employ bad questions to confuse someone deliberately or to destabilize him or her in a kind of intellectual martial arts move. The aim would be to make your subject more vulnerable to your probing. This could be true for someone in law enforcement, code enforcement, criminal justice, or other environments in which you are dealing with suspects and/or suspect information. And although it sounds like I’m beating up on journalists, the fact is that many of them routinely ask bad questions—and it isn’t always because they don’t know the difference. They do it intentionally to catch candidates and celebrities off guard.

GOOD QUESTIONS

There are six types of good questions: direct, control, repeat, persistent, summary, and non-pertinent. To describe them briefly:

1. Direct—You pose a simple question with a basic interrogative.

2. Control—You already know the answer to it when you ask it. It’s a way of finding out whether or not the person is lying, uninformed, and/or not paying attention.

3. Repeat—You ask two different questions that are after the same information.

4. Persistent—You ask the same question in different ways to explore all facets of the desired information.

5. Summary—You ask a question that is intended to allow the source an opportunity to revisit the answer.

6. Non-pertinent—It doesn’t pertain to the subject you really want to know about, but it’s one the person will probably not lie about; it serves the purpose of seeing what the truth “looks like” and getting the person to open up to you. It can also tie in to the context of the questioning exchange.

Direct

Think back to the Santa Claus exercise I did with Judith as part of Chapter 1. All of those simple questions she asked were direct. Direct questions are the best: One interrogative, one verb, and one noun or pronoun.

Who are you?

What happened at the party?

When did you arrive at the office?

Where are the car keys?

Why did you leave the meeting early?

How much did you pay for that iPad?

Eric Maddox, the Army Staff Sergeant who was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and other distinctions for his prominent role in capturing Saddam Hussein, was one of the interrogators we trained at Ft. Huachuca. In his book, Mission: Black List #1, he recounts a critical interrogation of a fisherman whose information led him directly to Saddam’s #2. Maddox’s time in Tikrit was nearing the end, and being pressed for time, he simply asked a series of direct questions—embedding a sort of coercive rapport-building into the exchange:

“How long have you lived in Samarra?” I asked.

“My whole life.”

“How long have you owned the fish farm?”

“For only a month.”

“How did you get it?”

“It was given to me by my mother’s family.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“My mother’s brother. My uncle. He is dead.”

I glared at him. “If he’s dead, how could he give you the fish farm?”

“It was his son,” he stammered. “My cousin. He is dead, too.”

I almost laughed. Did this guy hear dead people? “Listen, asshole,” I shouted. “I want the name of someone alive. Who gave you the pond?”

He was quaking now. “My cousin,” he told me at last. “He has a business partner. He gave me the pond.”

“What is your cousin’s name? The one who is still alive.”

“Muhammad,” he said in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Muhammad what?” I demanded.

“Muhammad Khudayr.”¹

With that uncomplicated line of questioning, Maddox got the link he needed to Muhammad Ibrahim, the cousin’s business partner and Saddam’s #2. This interrogation is a prime example of the quality of information a good questioner can get by staying on track with direct questions.

I would point out two things to keep in mind about this exchange as you proceed to the discussion of the next two good types of questions, control and repeat:

1. Maddox had a great deal of certainty who the cousin named Muhammad was, but he pressed the source for the answer. A truthful answer meant that Maddox could proceed with this line of direct questioning and likely get reliable answers.

2. The “who gave you the fish farm” question was asked three times in slightly different ways.

Control

When do you say, “I’m deliberately not going to ask a direct question”? When you check the truthfulness or accuracy of a response. Then you use a control question and look for consistency.

Control questions are questions you already know the answer to, so they are not about discovery of information. They are about discovery of behavior, patterns of speech, and level of truthfulness or accuracy. Perhaps it’s something you talked about before with the person. For example, if you know that someone on your human resources team alienated an employee because the employee sent an e-mail to complain about the HR person, you might ask a control question similar to, “How did it go in the performance review with Pamela today?” You already have the information; you just want to find out how your HR person answers the question.

Not long ago, I asked a direct question that immediately morphed into a control question. The situation required an immediate response to remedy a serious situation. I was introduced to Matt, a U.S. Army soldier home on leave, and I asked the normal questions I would ask any service member in general conversation, such as, “Where are you stationed?” “What is your military specialty [job]?” And in this case, I asked him when his leave would end and he would have to return to his military post. At that moment, he broke eye-contact, looking down. His voice weakened when he said, “I’m not sure.”

If there’s one thing I learned in my 20 years as a soldier in the U.S. Army, it’s that every service member knows exactly when he has to return from leave, down to the minute, because everybody wants to take full advantage of leave time. With my interrogation hat on I asked, “What exactly do you mean, you are not sure?” I knew the answer before I heard it: He was Absent Without Leave (AWOL), and in this case, for more than three months. Personally I don’t agree with ever going AWOL, but keeping my personal bias out of the situation—and before he had much time to think about it—I painted a bleak picture of his predicament. The pressure was on for him to do the right thing. From the dark, overhanging dread, I offered a little light and said that even though I didn’t like the situation he was in, I believed I could help. That brought an immediate and positive response, and even though he eventually suffered embarrassment, loss of pay, loss of rank, and was eventually released from the Army, I am glad that I was able to help him and his situation before it could have gotten much worse.

All of the actions that ensued resulted from my asking a simple direct question, knowing some control information, observing as well as listening, and staying neutral in my personal response.

A common way to use control questions is to steer the conversation to a subject you know a lot about. Let’s say it’s Indy car racing, which is something I happen to know about because I’ve followed the sport for more than 50 years. The person I’m talking with shows great enthusiasm for the topic, “Oh, I love the Indy 500!” So I might ask a few “what do you think of this driver or that design” types of control questions to determine if the person really is an enthusiast or if he’s exaggerating his interest for some reason. If his knowledge doesn’t match his emotion, I might wonder if other information he’s told me about other subjects is a bit off the truth.

I want to draw a distinction between a control question and what I refer to as controlling questioning. Controlling questioning utilizes forms of control questions, but the whole flow of the exchange is designed to confirm or deny information that you believe you already have. For example, you are selling subscriptions to a pricey database with deep analysis of corporate performance, senior leadership, and growth prospects. You suspect that the prospect you are discussing the subscription plan with cannot afford it, but desperately wants access to the information to meet some short-term need. You ask, “What needs do you have for the information?”

“We have an ongoing need to provide clients with competitive information for their strategic planning purposes.”

What other needs do you have for the information?

“That’s it—that’s a lot!”

Why do you think this is the best database for you?

“Reputation. I think everyone knows this is the best database around.”

What other databases have you considered?

“None, really. We think yours is the best.”

That’s a great compliment, and, of course, I think we deserve it. How do you think our database would help you serve your clients? [This is a control question. The prospect already stated that clients need the information for strategic planning purposes.]

“It would help them, especially right now, in making some action plans for the next quarter.” [You detect an urgency that wasn’t there before. Instead of strategic planning, it now appears the prospect is focused on competitive information that primarily serves an immediate, rather than ongoing, need.]

When do you want to start the subscription?

“Right away, so if you could give us a 24-hour free trial, we can make a decision by tomorrow.”

How familiar are you with how to use the database?

“I know it well. I used to use it where I worked last year.”

At this point, red flags go up for you. The company does grant 24-hour trials to prospects who are unfamiliar with the product. In this case, the prospect already knows the database and could spend the next day simply extracting information with no intention of paying for ongoing access. You say to the prospect, “We would be happy to accommodate you, but we will need to keep your credit card information on file and bill you for the subscription at the end of the trial.” The prospect says, “Thank you, we’ll have to discuss it. I’ll get back to you.”

Repeat

You want to come at the same information in two different ways. For example, if I asked, “How many soldiers are in XYZ platoon?” the solider I’m speaking with might respond, “There are 22 soldiers in the First Platoon of Alpha Company.” Later on, when I’m talking with him about something different—weapons, for example—I might ask, “How many M-16s do you have?” He might respond, “22,” which is a way of confirming the number of personnel in the XYZ platoon. It’s not an absolute test, but it gives value and credence to what he said before. They are two different questions that crosscheck the information provided.

In using repeat questions, you may also uncover discrepancies. If my soldier in this example responds that there are 30 M-16s, I would want some clarification. Maybe there’s a perfectly good reason—the platoon normally has a complement of 30, but eight are currently training elsewhere—but the response does give rise to doubt, because there is a mismatch between the number of personnel and the number of weapons. That mismatch must lead to further questioning to resolve the issue.

Here’s another example. Deborah was making a pitch for public relations services to a startup technology company. She asked, “When do you expect to have the product ready for launch?” The CEO replied, “Three months.” They continued the conversation, focusing on a campaign timeline that centered on the specified launch date. A little while later, she turned to the CEO and asked how many units would be available to demonstrate at the big trade show, which happened to be coming up in exactly three months. “The product won’t be out of beta by show time,” he said. Deborah’s repeat question flagged a problem with the anticipated delivery date.

Persistent

In any exchange in which more than one answer might be given to a question, use persistent questioning to get a complete answer. Similar to repeat questions, persistent questions are useful if you suspect that the person is not being truthful.

“Where did you go on your vacation to California?” might elicit the answer, “Disneyland.” Although it’s possible that Disneyland is the only place your friend went, it’s logical to follow that question with, “Where else?” Bypassing that repeat question and going straight to questions about Disneyland means that you miss the opportunity to get a complete picture of your friend’s California trip unless that information happens to leak out at some other time.

Persistent questions also help you check out a person’s story. For example, F. Lee Bailey’s cross-examination of Sgt. David Rossi of the Los Angeles Police Department during the O.J. Simpson murder trial involves multiple variations of the same questions—a technique he used with such shrewdness that he destroyed Rossi as a witness. Without making any criticism of the structure of Bailey’s questions, I want to point out how skillfully he repeated concepts and keywords in a successful effort to make the witness seem illogical. For the most part, I’ve omitted Rossi’s responses—you can easily guess the substance of most of them—to focus on the content of Bailey’s questions.

To set the stage, Bailey begins with a statement: “Experience would teach that anytime you walk upon the ground you may affect what is already there.” In the minutes that followed, he asked questions that revolved around the notion of whether or not footprints were visible at the crime scene. Bailey’s first few questions (captured here nearly in their entirety) included this sequence:

Do you know what a footprint looks like?

Can it be seen with the naked eye?

Don’t you know that many footprints can’t be seen until they are dusted with powder?

Did you know that some footprints can’t be seen until shown with an oblique light?

Have you ever heard that in all of your training at the 300 homicides you’ve been at?

You also, I believe, told us that your only duty to preserve evidence was only to preserve that which is obvious. Was that your statement?

And if evidence is not obvious to you, it’s okay to obliterate it—is that correct? [Rossi denies this.]

Then why did you restrict your obligation to preserve obvious evidence?

What about evidence that’s not obvious, like fingerprints on glasses?

And if something significant can’t be seen, can you avoid stepping on it?²

Bailey kept hammering on the visibility—or non-visibility—of footprints until Sgt. Rossi came across as confused and possibly inept. One lesson we can learn from Bailey’s cross-examination is that repeat questions can be artfully constructed by weaving a common thread through multiple different questions. Asking a single, straightforward question such as, “Were there any bloody footprints at the crime scene?” would not have raised as many doubts in the minds of jurors, nor exposed the witness’s weak spots. But using a persistent/rephrase approach planted myriad doubts and made the witness seem unreliable.

Summary

Summary questions aren’t about determining veracity as much as feeding back to the source what she has said so she has the opportunity to think, “Did I actually say what I meant to say?”

For example, let’s say you sell cars of all kinds, from two-door hatchbacks to full-size luxury models. A young couple comes to the showroom and asks to test-drive one of the luxury models.

“What will you use the car for most of the time?” you ask.

“Commuting back and forth to work. We work in the same building,” she says.

“What else will you use the car for?”

“Trips on weekends to see my parents. Stuff like that.” She pauses and adds, “They live a hundred miles away.”

“Why you think the luxury car is the best choice?”

They exchange a glance. He says, “We like it better than the others.”

“What’s your favorite color?” you ask, looking straight at her.

“Red.”

“So let me see if I got this right. I hear you say you want a red, full-size car in the luxury class. How does this description fit what you want?” [You have framed your summary question with pertinent information in this case.]

They exchange another glance. He says, “We think a more subdued color might be better.”

“What about the luxury model makes you think it’s the best one for you?” [Again, this is a way of summarizing and verifying what you have heard. You want to find out if they are just so enamored with the look of the expensive car that they don’t want to consider anything else, or if the first answer was disguising a salient fact.]

“My dad says this is the safest car on the road.”

The answer to the summary question tells you they may, in fact, like it, but not because of how it looks. You read between the lines. They are just getting started in their life together. Her dad has probably sent them to the dealership to buy “the safest car on the road,” which he will help them buy. You decide to proceed with the sale, knowing that the down payment and loan application will probably give you the rest of the story.

Some people may not be comfortable asking a summary question such as those embedded in this sales encounter because they don’t want to look simple-minded or inattentive. If you ask the question exactly the same way you asked it the first time, then that might be a valid conclusion. You also don’t want to ask the same question two times in a row even if you do change the phrasing. By putting some distance between the first time you pose the question and the second, and rephrasing the question slightly, you should simply come across as someone who’s really interested in what the other person has to say.

Non-Pertinent

You might detect that the person answering your questions seems stressed out; a non-pertinent question could mitigate the tension. Or, maybe you need time to think or refer to your notes, so you use the question just to buy you a little space and time.

In his book, Business Confidential, former Central Intelligence Agency operative Peter Earnest discusses the importance to the CIA—and to companies—of doing behavioral interviewing. These would be interviews to probe the candidate’s decision-making style, strategic thinking, approach to difficult situations, and so on. Such interviewing is a complement to assessments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, for example. Behavioral interviewing can be a perfect situation in which to use non-pertinent questions.

In asking pointed questions such as, “What project did you undertake in the past that failed?” and “How did you try to fix the problem?” you can easily make a candidate feel as though he’s in the middle of a battle-field interrogation. The candidate might say, “I tried to address the problem by rallying the department around a common goal—the way I get my son’s little league team to focus on hitting the ball.” You can give the candidate a break by asking, “How long have you coached little league?” before you return to the discussion of his screw-up and how he attempted to fix it.

Before examining bad questions, let’s spotlight two ways to ruin questions that start off with all the requisite components and end up falling short of “good.”

1. Adding too many qualifiers or other words and phrases that distract from the question. For example, “What did you have for breakfast at the diner where the vinyl counter stools are cracked and covered with duct tape?”

2. Not waiting for an answer is also very common. You ask, “What’s your favorite meal?” The person thinks a moment rather than responding immediately. You chime in, “Roast beef?” Silence is an effective questioning tool. Don’t lose the discovery, the information, and the leads as a result of opening your mouth when you need to open your ears. As the Greek philosopher Epictetus is credited with saying, “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

BAD QUESTIONS

Even “bad” questions can sometimes be useful, depending on the circumstances, but it’s important to know the distinctions up front. There are four types of bad questions: leading, negative, vague, and compound. To describe them briefly:

Leading—Your question supplies an answer, and possibly prevents a truthful, accurate answer.

Negative—Use of a negative word such as never or not makes it unclear what you are asking.

Vague—The information sought is broad or nebulous.

Compound—You combine subjects in the same question; you’re essentially asking two questions at once.

Leading

Leading questions are bad because they either supply an answer or strongly direct someone’s thinking to a particular answer. Interestingly, the same characteristic that makes them bad questions can also make them good in certain contexts.

In most professional and personal exchanges, you ask a question for discovery purposes, and you often want a narrative response. But if you tell the person the answer you are looking for, the question can almost always be answered with a yes or no, so you are likely to find out very little.

Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington published a study in 1975, called “Leading questions and the eyewitness report” in the journal Cognitive Psychology. She had taken 490 subjects, and in the course of four experiments, showed them films of complex, fast-moving events, such as car accidents. Loftus wanted to see how the wording of questions asked immediately after an event might influence responses to questions asked later. She found that when the initial question either implied the existence of an object that did exist in the scene or suggested that something didn’t exist in the scene, the person’s memory of the scene was affected accordingly. Her results indicated how profoundly questions asked immediately after an event can introduce new, although not necessarily correct, information. It then becomes added to the mix of memories people have of the event.

Her work on the types of leading questions investigators ask and the way they influence the respondent is evergreen. It points squarely to the reasons why you want to avoid asking leading questions if your reason for questioning is discovery, as opposed to influence or entrapment.³ Here are the categories of leading questions as derived from Loftus’s work:

Embedded Assumptions

You are chatting with the sales representative at an online electronics store and ask, “How much will price go down on this model next year?” Your question assumes that the price will drop; the subject of the question is how much it will go down.

To avoid a leading question, you could rephrase it as, “What is the likely price of this model next year?’ Then again, you might want to lead the sales rep in the direction of a lower price, so a leading question may serve your purposes well—just know that you are using a question for influence and not discovery in this case.

Associated Ideas

You can create leading questions by linking ideas or facts you referenced before to the current question. Those thoughts linger in the mind of the person you are questioning, particularly if you put some emotion into the expression of the thought.

When ABC hired actress and author Jenny McCarthy to co-host the television show The View, critics of her anti-vaccination stance were outraged. Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, led the criticism, calling McCarthy a “homicidal maniac.”⁴ In asking someone what she thinks about Jenny McCarthy’s hiring, you would set up a leading question by stating, “The highly respected author of Denialism called her a homicidal maniac because of all the deaths related to her campaign against vaccinations! What do you think of ABC hiring her?”

Loftus suggests there is another way to construct a leading question through association. An example would be, “Would you prefer to live in the United States, where dental care is first-rate, or in England?” There’s no overt criticism of British dental care, but it is implied.

Cause and Effect

This is one that parent might use on a high-schooler wanting to go to a party on a school night. Mom says, “If you go to the party tonight, how will that impact your math test tomorrow?” Just by asking the question, mom plants the idea in her teenage son’s mind that there may be negative consequences to going to the party. A little reinforcement would make the idea sprout in his mind: “Remember what happened the last time you went to a party the night before a big exam.”

Agree With Me

These are the kinds of questions I previously criticized in the discussion of curiosity with prejudice. They unequivocally ask for agreement, and are set up to make it easy for the person to say yes or no, with a no leading straight to a confrontational situation. For example, “Do you agree we need to make sure those people keep their jobs?” or “If that were your job on the line, wouldn’t you want someone to speak up for you?”

Danglers

When you stick a question at the end of a sentence, that’s what I call a dangler. They disguise a statement, or maybe even a command, as a question. Always short, these questioning phrases often have a negative tinge. You might say, “That’s a great place to go for a vacation, isn’t it?” or “You want to take the lead on that project, don’t you?”

Bullying

When your boss says, “You are coming to the staff meeting, aren’t you?” that’s a bullying question. It would only be slightly more subtle if he asked, “What possible reason could you have for not coming to the staff meeting?”

Leading questions are a staple among lawyers and law enforcement professionals. Political talk-show hosts use it all the time: “Did you feel humiliated about being caught in that lie?” as opposed to “How did you feel about being caught in that lie?” In cases such as those, the use of a leading question tends to be intentional. The person asking the question may feign the intent of discovery, but the real motive is influence or entrapment.

In general, questions asked a witness during direct examination cannot be in a form that suggests an answer to the witness. In fact, courts have mostly barred leading questions on direct examination because they want to hear the witness’s testimony, not the lawyer’s. I say mostly because there are circumstances and jurisdictions in which lawyers are permitted to use leading questions in the direct examination; it has to do with how cooperative (actually, how uncooperative) the witness is. Leading questions are permitted on cross-examination, however, and the rationale is that the cross-examiner needs to probe the witness’s reliability and credibility, and one way to do that is to suggest answers.

In interrogation and debrief training there is only one situation in which leading questions are not only acceptable, but also encouraged: getting directions from someone who isn’t confident about giving directions. You attempt to make up the difference by following a proven, fundamental map-tracking formula of directives and questions that may involve leading questions to help establish common points of reference. For example, you are in New York City and have only the vaguest idea of where you’re going. You are chatting with someone who doesn’t give directions well, but knows the city. You might ask, “When you told me to take a left turn at the stop light, did you mean the corner where there’s an outdoor café?” That might be followed up with, “When I take that left turn, what would I see up ahead—a park or an office building?”

Negative

In this type of bad questioning you ask a question and then end with a form of “Is that not true?” Any answer here needs a follow-up question for clarification and is a waste of time. It also complicates clarity. This could be an endless game of verbal ping-pong:

“Is that not true?”

“No, it is true.”

“Do mean it’s true or it’s not true?”

If you do a Web search for “negative questions,” you will find a great many discussions of how to ask and answer negative questions—and many are aimed primarily at people who speak English as a second language. It seems as though English-speaking people have embraced the negative form of questions so tightly that rules about how to ask and answer this type of bad question are now taught to ESL students. For example, ProProfs.com, a Website providing online quizzes and assessment tools related to various skill areas, indicates that there are three occasions in English when the use of negative questions is appropriate:

1. To show surprise or doubt.

2. In an exclamation.

3. When you expect the listener to agree.⁵

Whereas this advice may reflect prevailing opinions of usage, I think people learning English—and this includes kids in English-speaking countries—should be taught not to use negative questions. To me, teaching the rules of negative questions is like teaching the rules of driving without a seatbelt. You don’t need any rules if you don’t do it.

Vague

In this type of questioning, you are not clear, concise, and to the point. If it’s done deliberately, it can cleverly elicit the truth; otherwise, it just confuses the person and may yield a worthless response. Here’s an example: “Given the general politics in Washington today, we all have opinions; what’s yours?”

One of the most succinct and interesting explanations of a what a vague question does—and can do—comes from my former colleague in interrogation instruction, Gregory Hartley, who wrote the Foreword for this book. In How to Spot a Liar, he explains that certain types of questions serve the purpose of antagonizing or confusing the subject. Among the types are vague questions. He writes, “Vague questions get you vague answers. They are useless if you’re trying to get information, but helpful if you want to take someone down a parallel path to disguise your main point: ‘When you went to the hotel, did it seem there were a lot of people just hanging out in the lobby?’ Fuzzy questions and answers might serve you best as a self-defense mechanism. When someone asks a direct question, ask an open-ended, confusing question in response. He thinks he’s getting information, but it’s only remotely related to the question: ‘How many people were in the lobby? Do you want me to count the people who work there, or the guests, or what?’”⁶

Compound

This is when you ask more than one question at a time. For example, “Did you see the sunset last night and enjoy that new James Bond movie?” Many journalists rely on this questioning form when time with their subject is limited—for example, at a White House press conference or in an interview with a celebrity. That sense of limited time and access might also drive someone to ask a compound question in a text message, such as “WWY & wuz4dina” (“Where were you and what’s for dinner?”).

Returning to the presidential press conference cited in the Introduction, we can see that one compound question also contained a leading question. The journalist asked, “Are you getting all the intelligence and information you need from the Russians?” and at the same time asked, “And should Americans be worried when they go to big, public events now?” The leading aspect of the second part of the question is linked to the verb worried, which carries emotion and sends a listener in a particular direction related to the subject.

EXERCISES

It’s important to note that the process of questioning is not always going to be the same, and depends on factors such as context and your personality.

Following are some questioning exercises to help you use the information and skills I’ve given you in different situations, and also to help shape your own questioning style. These exercises bear no resemblance to the game “20 Questions,” which is not something you want to play if your aim is to become a good questioner. In the game, one person thinks of a subject, or object, and everyone else in the room asks questions to try to find out what it is. They are all yes-or-no questions, like, “Is it bigger than a soccer ball?” If no one in the room can guess the object in 20 questions, then the non-questioner wins. A better game, in which the rules do more to encourage the use of interrogatives, is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Of course, the answers are multiple-choice, so there still is no room for a narrative response.

To Tell the Truth

The best questioning game I can think of is the classic show To Tell the Truth, which first aired in 1956 and ran off and on until the early part of the 21st century. In the show, three people would come on stage. Two of them would pretend to be a noteworthy person, and the third actually was the noteworthy person. Celebrity panelists would ask all three people questions to determine who the imposters were and who the actual personality was. The moderator began by asking each of the three people, “What is your name?” For this exercise I suggest watching a few excerpts on YouTube and evaluating the quality of the questions; I think you’ll find that the well-structured questions are the ones that tended to trap the imposters—then again, there were often surprises. For rounds of good questions and a surprise ending, I recommend the broadcast of February 18, 1963, which features the story of Polish spy Pawel Monat, who defected to the United States in 1958.⁷ For the most part, the panelists asked simple questions (paraphrased):

Who is the premiere of Poland?

What’s kielbasa?

What is the worth of a zloty in the United States?

What are some of the countries that encircle Poland?

What province of the Soviet Union touches on the Eastern border of Poland?

With this format in mind, the first exercise I recommend is a game of To Tell the Truth. You might follow the format Maryann uses for the game in her body language workshops. She opens the section on lie-detection by tapping three volunteers. Without the audience hearing, she tells each of them that they will be asked to name a place where they went on vacation and then answer questions from the audience about the vacation. She tells one of the volunteers that he or she needs to lie about the details of the vacation. This simple model nearly always evokes clean, well-structured questions related to people, places, things, and events in time. For example, “Who went on the trip with you?” and “What did you do when you got there?” The fun, of course, is trying to read the contestants well enough to determine the liar.

What Can You Find Out in Five Floors?

Using only good questions for rapport-building and discovery, find out at least one personal thing about someone in an elevator in the amount of time it takes to travel up or down about five floors.

For example, not long ago I was in an elevator with someone wearing a sling. I blurted out, “What, tennis elbow?” For the next five floors, he told me how he had fallen off a ladder while painting his house. I knew where he lived, what color his house was, and how long his doctor said he’d have to wear the sling.

Maryann did this experiment in New York on a muggy June day. She asked the three other women on the elevator, “What deodorant works in this weather?” They chuckled, and then one made a recommendation because she had tried it and was wearing it; another said nothing worked for her, including that one; and a third said that she’d love to know what worked too. I think knowing what deodorant someone is or is not wearing constitutes “personal knowledge”!

In summary, there are more ways to ask a bad question than there are to ask a good one. Keep your questions simple, short, and to the point, and you will most likely avoid the pitfalls of bad questioning and poor information collection and exchange.

Non-Discovery Questions

Non-discovery questions often do not fit the profiles of “good” or “bad” questions as described earlier in this chapter. For the most part, these questions require only monosyllabic answers—mostly yes or no—and sometimes they require no answer at all. I’ve sorted non-discovery questions into five categories:

1. Requestions.

2. Pre-questions.

3. Polite questions.

4. Corrective questions.

5. Rhetorical questions.

Requestions

As the name suggests, these are questions that make a request.

Will you marry me?

Do you want to dance?

Will you let me help you?

The person asking the question wants a yes in response; that’s the nature of a requestion. In cases in which the person is uncertain that a yes is forthcoming, the action requested—for example, “marry me”—will be modified with another, less concrete action to make it easier to say yes.

Will you consider marrying me?

When the band plays a song you like, will you dance with me?

Will you let me help you if the suitcase is heavy?

Pre-questions

It’s not always appropriate to jump into an interrogative. Sometimes as part of rapport-building you want to use what I call a pre-question, which technically may be badly structured, but serves the function of setting you up to use well-structured questions inviting a narrative response. The person gives you a yes or no to the pre-question, and you follow up accordingly. Here’s an example:

I have a question that I’d like to ask you. Let me see if I understand correctly—you want to leave your job as an accountant and go to art school to study iconography?

The follow-up questions might be:

What is iconography?

How did you get interested in it?

Where do you study it?

When do you hope to graduate?

What jobs are available?

What other jobs are available?

What makes it more appealing than accounting?

A poorly structured pre-question will send the person you’re talking with into a state of confusion. Just as a vague question could lead into unknown and undesired territory, so could a bad pre-question. For example, there are multiple ways to understand what’s being asked here:

It sounds as though you’re serious about pursuing iconography and quitting your accounting job in the next year—right?

The person might say yes, meaning, “Yes, I’m serious,” or “Yes, I’m pursuing iconography and quitting my job.” Or the person might say no, meaning, “No, I don’t intend to do it in the next year.”

Pre-questions that waste everyone’s time are this kind:

May I ask you a question?

Do you mind if I ask you a question?

If you are not comfortable with just asking the question, use a set-up such as the “let me see if I understand you correctly” one I suggested, but don’t bother with permission questions.

Polite questions

These are questions we use primarily as greetings or ice-breakers. We may not even expect an answer, or at least not a thoughtful answer. In fact, when the person addressed provides a narrative response, it’s often a surprise and may even be viewed as an inconvenience.

How are you?

May I help you?

How was the traffic this morning?

Did you find everything okay?

Corrective questions

Many managers, parents, and elementary school teachers use corrective questions with regularity. The only right answer—ever—is yes or no, depending on how it’s phrased:

Can you try to do better than that?

Are you always this lazy?

Can’t you do better than that?

Can you please behave?

Can’t you act your age?

Are you intent on driving me crazy?

I don’t necessarily recommend using corrective questions. However, because this is neither a parenting nor a management book per se, I’ve only defined it rather than making a judgment about its utility.

Rhetorical questions

These are questions not intended to provoke an answer, but rather a thought. Shakespeare’s introspective Hamlet asks a lot of rhetorical questions, aiming them at himself, his mother, and anyone else who will listen. He asks himself, “To be or not be?” He asks his mother, “Have you eyes?” Rhetorical questions are a legitimate and potentially powerful way to focus your listener on a key point. Because they sometimes convey sarcasm, though, as in Hamlet’s question to his mother, using them in the heat of an argument is probably not a good idea.

Sorting questions in this manner has become habitual for me. To some extent, a shift in thinking about questions will probably happen for you too, as you make conscious efforts to use good discovery questions. You will start to open your mouth with a “Do you” or “Would you,” and then stop yourself. If anyone around you notices, just hand them a copy of this book.