Appendix

Supplemental Exercises to Sharpen Questioning Skills

WHAT DO YOU KNOW THAT I DON’T KNOW THAT I WOULDN’T KNOW IF I DIDN’T ASK?

or

UNCOVERING EXPERTISE

After interrogation students complete the blocks of instruction in questioning, the first exercise I give them is to uncover expertise. The crazy question that serves as the title of this exercise is one way of asking someone, “What do you consider yourself an expert about?” If you ask me the question, I will respond with, “The Indy 500, Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles, and Merle Haggard.” It would then be up to you to see how much you could pull out of me on one of those three subjects by using interrogatives. It would also be your task to challenge my familiarity with the subject. My job is to give complete, narrative responses to any good questions, but not tell you more than you asked.

To do the exercise:

1. Get a partner (you could also do this with a group).

2. Have everyone list subjects about which they consider themselves deeply knowledgeable. If anyone lists more than three, that person may be the perfect target to hit first, because there aren’t many people who can claim to be a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer like Leonardo DaVinci.

3. Ask only discovery questions—that is, questions that begin with one of the six interrogatives—and see how much you can find out about the subject you’ve chosen in five minutes.

4. The “expert” may only answer the question asked. He or she may not volunteer any additional information.

5. Be curious. Ask follow-up questions in the four discovery areas.

At the end of the exercise, if you haven’t gained any great revelations about the subject—if, in fact, what you’ve been told by the supposed expert is either common knowledge or speculation—then you’ve successfully challenged the person’s familiarity with the subject. On the other hand, if you are exclaiming, “Really?” and “Wow” within five minutes, then you’ve succeeded in uncovering expertise.

After you do this with friends, family, and coworkers, then take your skill to the streets. Do the exercise with perfect strangers who have no idea why you are so curious about what they know.

This is a practical exercise with people who are trying to sell you something, by the way. How deep is their product knowledge? It’s also a great way to vet someone offering to provide you services—consulting, surgery, legal representation, or anything else in which you expect the provider to have a high level of expertise.

ONE-A-DAY CHALLENGE

In this exercise, your aim is to select a subject that you know nothing about and find out as much as possible in roughly five minutes using a human source. Do it every day. This is similar to the first exercise, but you are not laying any restrictions on the respondent in terms of whether or not the person answers your question precisely. Also, it’s not a team exercise; it’s a personal one designed to sharpen your questioning skills while you learn something new.

This exercise ties in well with the following one.

ADVANCED JOURNALING

In Chapters 7 and 8, I introduced the concept of journaling and provided descriptions of what journal entries to make to improve your questioning in both your professional and your personal list. Without reiterating the portion of the exercise that helps you start the journal—the list of items that require some reflection on your past—I want to add a few items to the list of what you could do going forward.

Here is the list as recommended in the chapters:

1. Record one question each day that made a difference in terms of getting something done at work or made a difference in terms of a personal relationship.

2. Record one question you wish you hadn’t posed. (If none, then congratulations.)

3. Record one question you think would have gotten a better answer if asked a different way. (If none, then you’re probably kidding yourself.)

How do you wish you would have stated the question?

How would restating the question have potentially changed the answer you got?

Here are items to add to do advanced journaling:

Record the best question of the day. It could have been something someone said to you directly, or something you heard on TV or read online. Why did you think it was the best?

Same thing for the worst question of the day.

It’s up to you if you want to be a bully with this jour-naling exercise. I have unpleasant visions of people whipping out their journals in the middle of a meeting and shouting, “That’s the worst question I’ve heard all day, and it’s going in my book!”

DIDN’T ASK, DON’T TELL!

For role-players in questioning scenarios for military Human Intelligence Collection, the watchwords for cooperation were “believable approach” and “good questioning technique.” The reward for abiding by them would be the information that the questioner asked for. On the other hand, if the student’s performance was less than believable and the questioning was not well structured and organized, the information he got was very limited, and we withheld it until we saw improved performance. I would instruct the role players—actors who took on the persona and operational activity of insurgents, terrorists, or individuals with specialized knowledge—to answer only if the question was well phrased, and not to offer more information than what was requested.

Put yourself in my role-player’s position and listen carefully to all questions posed to you; provide only the information requested. It’s probably best to do this at a trade-show reception or other event populated by strangers, because if you stick to the rules, you aggravate people. The learning experience will be tremendous, however. By providing only the information requested, you will have firsthand exposure to the degree to which most people depend on your offering more than what was asked in order to get the information they wanted.

I have a stance that I take seriously, and that is “They didn’t ask, so I don’t tell.”

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION

This is an exercise I’m adapting from one that Greg Hartley and Maryann described in How to Become an Expert on Anything in 2 Hours. The premise is that everyone on Earth is, by association, only six people away from everyone else. So the challenge here is to tie two seemingly unrelated topics together in six questions or fewer.

For example, the person you are talking with is focused on the shaky state of the U.S. economy. You want to talk about the singer/songwriter Taylor Swift. You start questioning:

Where are people suffering most from economic problems?

The respondent gives a sense of people in both rural and urban settings that are having difficulty finding work.

What cities have been hit hardest?

The respondent names some, including Detroit, Michigan, and Reading, Pennsylvania. The former had to declare bankruptcy and the latter has the highest recorded poverty rate in the nation according to the most recent census.

You can actually stop with two questions on this one: Taylor Swift was born in Reading.

You can make people aware of the exercise, or you can simply use your questioning skills to turn a conversation toward something you want to talk about.