Time to go to the dance. Extracting information is the interrogation phase. The average person has consumed so much television and print representation of this process that he has a picture in mind of bright lights and dark rooms. That can work, but any room can be an “interrogation room.”

All of your planning, deciding what information you want, how you will question, who you will be, and which rapport posture come together at this point. You are now a duck gliding on the water with your invisible legs paddling like hell. To breeze through the process:

An approach is a concept of what will work on a specific kind of person in certain situations. It is a style of manipulation based on the target’s desires, whether stated outright or suggested. The keywords that Kiersey designated for the four intellectual types will serve you well in shaping an approach. You want to take words such as “the guardian’s”—good, reliable, respectable—and prey on that person’s need for security.

Mental state plays a part as well. Assuming I know that a prisoner feels insecure and incompetent because of capture, I can play to that weakness, either by putting him deeper into his depression or convincing him that it wasn’t his fault. My approach would involve telling him he had done the best he could. Whichever action I choose is intended to bring the role I want to the forefront. This is all determined by his behavior in the initial stage of the interrogation. Most approaches are not used alone but as an orchestration to better manipulate the feelings of the source.

In the planning stage, your approach strategy is based on personality—the background information you’ve collected, as well as your direct perceptions. The initial take on approach is based on external data. The refinement of approach(es) reflects baselining information collected after interaction with the source.

The U.S. Department of the Army lists 14 different interrogation approaches in Appendix H of its handbook “FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation.” I take them down to a dozen because I think two are simply combinations of the others. The 12 are:

I’ve cited scenes from a few James Bond movies, namely Goldfinger (United Artists, 1964), Goldeneye (MGM, 1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (MGM, 1997), and Die Another Day (MGM, 2002) to illustrate most of the approaches. James Bond serves as an inspiring example because he not only seeks the truth, but he also embodies the “Fleming flair,” the kind of ingenious and offbeat tricks that distinguished his creator, writer and spy Ian Fleming.

A bit of foreshadowing: Approaches are not only the tool of the interrogator, but also a self-defense tool. I’ll give you more on that in Chapter 14, but the movie examples illustrate how Bond uses approaches to his advantage whether he is the interrogator or the captive.

You just ask questions. There is no emphasis on role-playing or driving the source into an emotional state. The Army considers this the most effective of all approaches (or at least it was when the handbook was issued in 1987), primarily because most prisoners subjected to it were enlisted personnel with no resistance training and no vital information.

From Goldeneye:

Natalya Fyodorovna Simonova: Who are you?

James Bond: I work for the British government. The more you tell me, the more I can help you.

Simonova: I don’t know anything.

Bond: Let’s start with what you do know.

Starting with her name and job, the computer programmer begins to talk.

Offer your source something he or she really, really wants, whether it’s realistic or not. Food works well on highly stressed people because it is part of a stabilizing ritual. And then there are sleep and sex.

We can only conclude that Bond used the incentive approach with Pussy Galore behind the scenes. In a convenient plot twist—after having some private time with Bond—she switched the gas disbursed by the planes from toxic to harmless and alerted Washington of the imminent attack on Fort Knox, thereby saving about 60,000 lives.

Using “love of (comrades, country, family, God, et al.)” or “hate of (again, fill in the blank)” can sap the logic out of a source very quickly. You use his strong emotions against him. Interrogators often use a hate approach when the source is a minority who may be oppressed and mistreated in his own country. This works well on some disaffected youth, too, if you can churn up their resentment toward older people having money and when they don’t. Love primarily works with an incentive or a fear orchestration. The orchestration is to have contact, or protect the loved thing or person.

At a party, Bond chats with his old flame, Paris, who is now married to diabolical media mogul Elliot Carver.

Bond: Your husband may be in trouble.

Paris: If you think you’re going after him, you’re the one who’s in trouble.

Bond: It’s either him or someone in his organization.

Paris: And you figured you could charm the dirt out of me.

Bond: No, that wasn’t my plan.

Paris: If it comes to a choice between you and Elliot, I’ve made my bed. You don’t sleep in it anymore.

But after the party, at his hotel suite...

Paris: He’s on to you.

Bond: Well we know where you stand. You made your bed.

Paris: I’m standing in your doorway.

Bond: Then turn around and go home. You can tell him you didn’t get anything out of me.

Paris: That’s it? Go home?

Her feelings hurt once again, Paris does the one thing (or one other thing) she knows will get Bond’s attention: She gives him information.

Paris: He has a secret lab on the top floor even I’m not supposed to know about. It has an emergency hatch in the roof. It’s the easiest way to get in.

This can take on two forms, either fear-up harsh or fear-up mild. What you generally see in TV shows and films is fear-up harsh: yelling, intimidation, flailing arms, in-your-face nasty—everything but beating. I primarily use fear-up harsh to raise the stress level and hide something else I am using. I equate it to pushing someone verbally backwards into a trap I am setting (the real approach). A fear-up harsh approach has no place in your daily life unless you want nothing more than a confession of guilt and you intend to end the relationship. My use of fear-up mild with a prisoner in the first Gulf War would have been a simple question: Would you rather talk to the Kuwaitis or to me (for example, the benevolent American soldier who will not torture you)? Sometimes, even a parent will do a fear-up mild approach: Would you rather discuss this with your father (in other words, the guy with the big fist), or do what I’m asking you to do?

From Goldfinger (fear-up harsh):

While Bond is strapped to what appears to be a steel gurney, Goldfinger explains that he will now show the power of his industrial laser that can cut through solid metal. Bond, in his calculated effort to establish rapport, thanks Goldfinger for the demonstration as the laser beam moves through the metal toward his crotch.

Goldfinger: Choose your next witticism carefully, Mr. Bond. It may be your last.

Your source is terrified, so you pat and console. You lower her fear though tactile contact and soothing. Once, I rear-ended a middle aged woman with my one-ton pickup truck and crushed the rear end of her sedan. She jumped out crying and screaming. I hugged her and apologized; she calmed down immediately. She was under high stress at home and her reaction to me was displacement of emotion, which made her a perfect candidate for fear down.

This can take two forms, either pride-and-ego up or pride-and-ego down. In a pride-and-ego-up approach, you stroke the person’s ego, saying things such as, “I can’t believe someone as smart as you is only a private—your Army doesn’t know what they have.” This approach often works well on intelligent people. Pride-and-ego down can work on them as well, if you know their soft spots. For example, a colleague of mine tried to tear down a beautiful woman by mocking her figure. She knew she was beautiful so that didn’t work. My pride-and-ego down approach had more bite because I knew she has less confidence in her brain than her body: I told her (as I leered at her) that I could see how she’d gotten into Oxford. Generally, the pride-and-ego down approach doesn’t work with people who lack smarts or looks, by the way. They already know what they don’t have.

From Goldfinger (pride-and-ego up):

Bond: Fifteen million dollars in gold bullion weighs 10,500 tons. Sixty men would take twelve days to load it into 200 trucks. Now at the most, you’re going to have two hours before the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines move in and make you put it back.

Goldfinger: Who mentioned anything about moving it?

Bond: I apologize, Goldfinger. It’s an inspired deal! They get what they want—economic chaos in the West—and the value of your gold increases many times.

Goldfinger: I conservatively estimate ten times.

Bond: Brilliant! But the atomic device, as you call it, is obviously already in this country.

Goldfinger: Obviously.

Bond: But bringing it undetected to Fort Know could be very risky. Very risky.

Goldfinger: On the contrary, Mr. Bond.

From Goldeneye (pride-and-ego up, and then down): Bond: You break into the Bank of England and then transfer the money electronically. Just seconds before, you set off the Goldeneye, which erases any record of the transactions. Ingenious.

Alec Trevelyan: Thank you, James.

Bond: But it still boils down to petty theft. In the end, you’re just a bank robber. Nothing more than a common thief.

Alec’s ego didn’t see this coming any more than he saw what was coming next.

Star Trek devotees know the catchphrase “resistance is futile.” It’s what the Borg always said as they attempted to assimilate species into their collective. I told trainees that if they ever used that line, they had to look for a new job. The futility approach is used to convince the prisoner that resistance is futile, but not necessarily because of superior strength. The approach involves preying on a person’s doubts, cultivating more doubts, and cashing in on your prisoner’s growing belief that there isn’t anything he could have done to prevent his capture or improve the situation.

From Die Another Day:

General Moon (to a Bond who had been tortured for fourteen months): Defiant to the last! Your people have abandoned you. Your very existence, denied. Why stay silent? It doesn’t matter anymore. Things are out of my hands…. My son had an ally in the West. For the last time, who was it? Who made him betray his country and his name? 8. We Know All.

You go into the interrogation with as much background information as possible. Even if you know very little, you make it appear that you know everything. I also call this the “file and dossier” approach because I would commonly use a manila file as a prop. I’d hold it open and pretend to read from it and I’d question the prisoner. “We Know All” pairs well with “Futility.”

From Goldfinger:

Here’s an interesting reversal with the prisoner taking charge by tapping into the power of an approach. Keep in mind that Goldfinger’s laser is creeping closer to a splayed Bond with every second.

Bond: Do you expect me to talk?

Goldfinger: No, Mister Bond, I expect you to die. There is nothing you can talk to me about that I don’t already know.

Bond: You’re forgetting one thing. If I fail to report, 008 replaces me.

Goldfinger: I trust he will be more successful.

Bond: He knows what I know.

Goldfinger: You know nothing, Mr. Bond.

Bond: Operation Grand Slam, for instance.

Goldfinger: Two words you may have overheard which could not possibly have any significance to you or anyone in your organization.

Bond: Can you afford to take the chance?

Suddenly, the laser stops progressing toward Bond.

Goldfinger: You are quite right, Mister Bond. You are worth more to me alive.

American interrogators rarely use this one. You just ask the same questions over and over in the hope that the source gets so tired of the monotony that he’ll tell you what you want to know just to make it stop. Of course, it’s dreary for the interrogator as well, so you want to take turns with a few colleagues or recruit a tape recorder for the duty. I’ve heard Brits use a well-orchestrated version of this one by getting the prisoner cold, miserable, and exhausted. The interrogator cranks up the heat in the room to shift the body’s circadian rhythm—the prisoner’s body automatically feels it’s time to sleep—and starts out, “What’s your name? What’s your name? What’s your name?” and on and on. When the prisoner starts to nod off, the interrogator will say, “Okay, Mister Smith, what’s your number? What’s your number? What’s your number?” and, again, have the source keep answering until he starts to nod off. After that, he might ask, “What’s your unit?” which is information the prisoner should not divulge, so he won’t. But he keeps hearing the question over and over until he starts to nod off again. At this point, the interrogator says, “Thank you for telling me that your unit is the 43rd Infantry Division. Since you’ve told me that, let’s move on to what your mission was.” The source then thinks, “Did I tell him?” and may well start to talk because he presumes he’s already spilled secret information.

If you have little or no background information, this can help pry it out of the source himself. You tell him he looks like someone else, a notorious criminal perhaps, who faces serious charges and doesn’t even deserve treatment as a human being. In order to clear himself of that allegation, he’ll probably say something that gives you a clue about his real identity and mission. I might open with, “I have a photo of you right here in front of me that looks enough like you that I could convict you of (name the crime) that happened last night.” He might respond, “No, no! I was at a bar with my friends last night!” At that point, all I’d have to do is ask, “Which bar? Which friends?”

You slam the source with constant questions that he has no time to answer. He gets frustrated with the process and finally tries to shout out an answer just to get you to listen to him. You trample on his answer with a criticism that he didn’t make sense or didn’t answer the question completely and continue the rapid-fire questioning until he can’t stand it anymore. He tries to interrupt you by yelling out some information. I have found that this approach works well with more than one interrogator; the one whose question gets the useful answer then takes over and begins to speak in a reasonable pace. This approach preys on a human need to be heard and it requires a lot of the interrogators. You have to have a long list of questions in your head to carry this off.

From Goldeneye:

Defense Minister Dmititri Mishkin: Sit. I’m Defense Minister Mishkin…. By what means shall we execute you, Commander Bond?

Bond: What? No small talk? No chit chat? That’s the trouble with the world today. No one takes the time to do a really sinister interrogation anymore. It’s a lost art.

Defense Minister Mishkin: …Where’s the Goldeneye?

Bond: I assumed you had it.

This comment provokes an escalating, rapid-fire exchange of questions and accusations, which Natalya Simonova interrupts:

Simonova: Stop it! Both of you! You’re little boys with toys.

She then divulges the name of the true perpetrator and the fact that there is another Goldeneye.

Defense Minister Mishkin: Thank you. (Turning to Bond.) You were saying something about the lost art of interrogation, Mister Bond.

There’s a strong element of “fear up” in this example, too, since armed Russian guards surround the interrogation.

Silence is power. “Where were you this morning?” followed by dead silence will eventually elicit a response. Most people find silence extremely uncomfortable. The mouth starts leaking to break the tension, or the body may adjust in dramatic ways.

From Goldfinger:

Bond says absolutely nothing to the man guarding his tiny cell. He waves through the bars and then walks away. He comes back to the door and waves again, and then walks away. The third time, he winks at the guard and walks away. The guard looks confused, goes to the door with his gun drawn, doesn’t see Bond, and opens the door. Bond jumps down from above the door and escapes.

The Army handbook names “File and Dossier” as a separate approach from “We Know All,” but I see them as essentially the same. It also lists an approach called “Mutt and Jeff” or “friend and foe.” This is one you probably know as “good cop/bad cop,” and it’s just an orchestration of two approaches to accomplish a pressure-release sequence. It might involve fear-up harsh and fear down, or a pride-and-ego down approach with pride-and-ego up. You can see this used for both dramatic and comic effect in lots of movies and TV shows with cop teams.

You want to match the style of questioning to the source and circumstances. The types of questions could be sorted in this way: control, direct, repeat, leading, compound, and conjecture. In any given session, you’ll probably use more than one type, whether you are relying on canned questions or a more interactive questioning approach in extracting information.

A control question is one you know the answer to. You definitely use control questions as part of your baselining process. You might also throw them into the extracting-information phase, though, to keep the conversation natural: “Really? How can that be?”

People ask control questions all the time to be polite, so this isn’t a strange thing to do. For example, you know your friend’s mother is extremely ill, yet you ask, “How’s your mother?” When your friend’s eyes go down right, then you can conclude that a down-right glance means deep emotion.

A direct question is a straightforward request for information that you don’t have. In baselining, remember that you want to ask questions that elicit a narrative response, rather than “yes” or “no.” In the process of extracting information, however, a direct question requiring a “yes” or “no” may be precisely what you should ask to get the information you want. Direct yes or no questions are very useful in controlling the conversation.

A repeat question is one you’re not sure the source has answered truthfully, so you ask it again in different words. The more times you ask and in different forms, the more likely you are to detect deception and get the truth. Each time, it allows you to check the person’s story and body language. Her use of precisely the same words to answer a question that’s phrased differently can alert you that she’s rehearsed that speech. A change in body language can tell you that she feels uncomfortable telling her lie again.

Leading questions are part of a classic questioning technique of journalists with an agenda. For example, “Do you think it’s wrong that George Bush didn’t show up for National Guard duty?” The direct way of doing this would be two questions: “Do you think George Bush didn’t show up for National Guard duty?” And then, if the answer were “yes,” the following question would address whether or not that was wrong. Leading questions have value in trying to control the conversation. You are trying to get past a logic point that you think your source will have an issue with, so you ask the leading question to change his perspective.

A compound question asks two or more questions at once: “Are you going to the store or the airport?” You can use it to trap your source, or at least catch him off-guard so that you generate emotion—that is, push him toward limbic mode: “Did you go to the party with her or put her in a cab and send her home?” We teach interrogators never to use this type of question because it creates confusion. When used intelligently and intentionally, however, it is a powerful tool.

Canned questions, rather than being a style, are simply prepackaged questions of any style. They have the greatest value in matters that are complex or outside your area of knowledge. For that reason, canned questions seem more natural in a business setting than they do in a personal one.

As an interrogator, you ask questions that move down a path of complexity. You want to lead the source into an in-depth discussion that ultimately taxes his expertise to the limits. To do this, you need to do thorough research and ask questions that elicit a narrative response. Questions requiring a simple “yes” or “no” don’t accomplish what you want.

Whether the person handles artillery, is part of an airborne division, or operates the radio, you have to be able to ask questions that stretch his knowledge to the limits—and then you keep going. You want to get to the point where you can say, “I can ask questions you can’t answer and you’re one of the best?” You keep doing this and your source will start to feel as though he’s a failure, unless he’s bluffing. And if he is bluffing, you can use your arsenal of detection tools to figure that out from the look on his face, his body language, and other indicators covered in Chapter 5.

You don’t actually have to memorize a lot of facts to pull this off. If I’m interrogating a source about a nuclear submarine, I’m not going to know much about nuclear submarines after an hour of reading. But I can read enough so that I can ask some very intelligent questions about hull thickness, resonance of the metal, and more. Listen to interview programs with Cabinet members, scientists, and other experts. Journalists often rely on this tactic of developing canned questions to extract interesting details from the subject. Do you think most of them, who jump agilely from questions about biological weapons to a rise in interest rates, actually have a deep knowledge about all those topics?

In business, canned questions relate to profit margins, or hiring practices, or some other specific thing that requires you to remember details and to phrase a question exactly right. White House reporters come into press conferences with canned questions, and they sometimes use each other’s canned questions as repeat questions. They will invariably do this if they feel the president has side-stepped a key question or given an answer that doesn’t sound truthful.

In moving a conversation toward the outcome of uncovering the truth or trumping a business associate in a negotiation, good questions should be, first, clear and concise. The questions not only have to make sense to you, but to your source, so he can access the responses easily. Secondly, they need to elicit a narrative response. A question requiring “yes” or “no” only serves your purposes when you want to change the direction of the conversation, as in, “Do you know more than Einstein about this subject?” Use the seven basic interrogatives—who, what, when, where, why, how, and huh—to stage your questions. “Huh?” is the polite version of “What the hell do you mean by that?”

Other tips for questioning include:

Certain other types of questions serve the purpose of antagonizing and/or confusing. If that’s the direction you want to go, then here’s some guidance:

Questioning Chart: The response to the question provides either informationor a lead. The lead meets a priority need, information requirement, or it dead ends. Follow the lead; determine whether or not it yields something of higher importance than the initial question. If lower, make a note and go back to follow-up on the original question. If higher, follow that line of questioning. At some point, you have followed-up on all leads and information; terminate the questioning. If you haven’t fully exploited what the person knows, return to the beginning.

Refer again to Chapter 2 about the types of lies and the people who are most likely to succeed with them. Fundamentally, the breakdown is between people who store information with a lot of sequential or chronological detail and those who do not—big picture versus detail. The steps to using questioning to break a liar, then, could be summarized in this way:

Minimizing works in two ways:

Media coverage of the 2004 arrest of an intelligence officer—a 15 year veteran of the Army Reserve—indicated that minimizing probably played a key role. The accused should have understood its value from his own interrogation experience; ironically, it may have been the technique police used effectively to ensnare him. The self-described human intelligence collector, who was called to active duty after the September 11th terrorist attacks, allegedly sent pornographic pictures to an FBI agent posing as a 15-year-old boy. Upon getting caught, he declared he wasn’t a homosexual, just curious about same-sex relationships. He also said he didn’t trade the pornographic photos while he was on active duty, and that he used his home computer, not military equipment.

I can imagine the style of interrogation that may have led to these assertions, and that is a series of questions and comments designed to play down the offense so he would admit his guilt. Something such as: “At least you didn’t do this with the Army’s equipment. That could mean life in prison because the military is very strict on that. Help me establish a time line to show you did this from home on your own time, with your own computer.” And, “Nothing in your background tells me you’re a homosexual. The Army doesn’t think you’re a homosexual. I’m just wondering why you sent those pictures?”

In interrogation situations, I’ve also used minimizing to provoke a specific action, not just to get a verbal admission of something. In a video for The History Channel titled We Can Make You Talk, my objective was to get a copy of a “prisoner’s” signature. We Can Make You Talk simulated the experience of capture and interrogation with volunteers, who had information about covert activities related to a fictional operative. One of the things these volunteers had been told absolutely is “don’t sign anything they give you.” So after a few hours of exposure to white noise, variations in temperature, and stress positions—kneeling with hands in the air, leaning against a wall with the legs in a bent position—I eased into getting a signature this way:

“Are you willing to prove to me that you’re really telling the truth? That you’re not lying?

“Yes.”

“I need to verify what you’re saying. Are you willing to sign a statement that you write that just says you’re telling the truth?” She wrote down the details of her cover story and said nothing about her mission.

“Put your initials on this. Right here.” I told her. I was starting to train her. “And here.” Every time she initialed anything, it was a sign she was becoming compliant. Soon, I got a copy of her signature as well as other samples of her handwriting. In this example, minimizing involved asking her to perform an action that was not in violation of what she’d been told—it was “less than.” I didn’t hand her a statement to sign; she wrote a few sentences and initialed them. That done, I had no problem getting her to write more and more.

When I create a chain of logic to convince the source that my answer is the right one, I take into account the way the person thinks—and feels. If I am arguing with someone who doesn’t have a logical mind, I may have an easier time slipping logic past him. Anything that violates his feeling of right and wrong, however, is another issue, because he’s probably a person who follows his heart. Myers-Briggs is useful here in determining the basics for how the person collects data and makes decisions as well as his general bent on life.

Assuming I have chain of logic that is flawless with the exception of one piece, I simply walk through the flawless pieces one at a time. Just before I get to the flawed step, I raise the person’s anxiety to get him out of a logical mind. In the interrogation world, I do this through high limbic arousal, possibly by yelling. In business, this is not acceptable, so I would probe the pain of the person, bring that to the front, and tie the outcome of my flawed logic to easing his or her pain. This is the daily-life equivalent of taking a prisoner down to two choices: “mine and yours” or “bad,” a technique called paring the options.

In the reactionary mode of high stress, people lead with their weakest Myers-Briggs style, not their strongest. You can therefore force a person into high stress, and then use the words of their true style (for example, good, reliable, respectable) against them. You remind them of how they think to box them into a corner. For example, my target is a sensor/judger personality type who is under high stress to get something completed by a deadline; his career is on the line. Because of his stress level, he relies on a flip side—intuiting—and starts calling on his gut feelings to make the deadline. I simply point out the facts and say, “To reach a reliable conclusion, we must take the facts into account and do the right thing.” These words are his mantra, so he agrees. After I gloss over the ugly duckling, I take him through my next few logical steps and voilá: He agrees with something he normally would find objectionable.

The six phases of interrogation weave in your base lining skills, as well as what you explored in this chapter on approaches, questioning, and minimizing. When you begin the process of extracting information, all of your ghosts come with you: the red-haired boy with big ears, the child of poverty, the studious teenager, the flirt. These parts of you filter your images, your listening, the way you deal with you. You have to think past them in evaluating both the information and the person in front of you.

In real life, you don’t get to make up all the rules of engagement about where your source sits and whether or not he’s allowed to finish sentences. Nevertheless, you have ample opportunity to establish control by taking steps up front to influence environment and conversation.

First, handle all the elements of planning and preparation: rituals, roles, background information, costumes, scenery. Regarding the latter, make sure you know where the meeting will be. When important information is at stake don’t choose a spot randomly, as in, “Let’s meet for coffee somewhere on 42nd Street.” Your potential to take control drops if you don’t know anything about seating arrangements and ambiance.

Your second step is to come into the interaction without emotion. Whether in business or love, you don’t want the emotional party in charge.

A friend of mine did this effectively with a client with whom she’d had an uneven relationship. The client seemed strained during a conversation and followed up shortly after that with a terse e-mail: “I want to talk about the invoice.” She phoned the client promptly and began with, “Here’s a bit of good news,” and then told him about progress on a key project. That said, she flowed into, “I know you want to talk about the work.” By doing that, she put herself in charge of the conversation and in a position to address the client’s pain and what she could continue to do to eliminate it. The client paid the invoice on schedule.

Sometimes you want to use the other person’s words, and sometimes you want to avoid them completely, as in the previous scenario. It depends on what puts you in the driver’s seat. Flip the scenario around, with the client’s e-mail saying, “I want to talk about the project.” You would want to set up the conversation by saying, “I’d like to report on project results, how the project has evolved, and what results will come in the next phase of the project.” Avoid the subject and you might as well shred the contract.

In general, people are conditioned to respond to that kind of leadership by jumping into your conversational stream.

In Chapter 2, I noted the ingredients of rapport (namely access sense and information sorting styles). In an interrogation, I’m as likely to want to establish a negative rapport as I am a positive one—but it’s still rapport. In other words, I’ll work with what I’ve determined are his access sense and sorting style so that I can talk to him in his own terms, even if it is in a negative way. In your efforts to extract information from someone you know or from a business associate, the rapport you want is most likely positive.

Lots of signals can let you know if a person is visual. The fact that she dresses meticulously and accessorizes well. The fact that his office reflects an appreciation for art and a sense of color. It’s a little harder to detect an auditory person; I’m one of them. One possible indication is that the person tends to look sideways—toward the ears—in processing information. I have another theory: big ears. I’m not the only big-eared guy I know who falls in the auditory category. Another hint is a decided love of music. If your source has woofers and tweeters perfectly positioned in his office, then he may well be auditory. The hardest type of all to peg is kinesthetic. You might conclude that a person is kinesthetic if she has athletic hobbies, wears comfortable clothes, and says things such as, “I feel good about that” when a visual person might say, “I see how that could work well.”

Pay close attention to the sorting styles, too. I know of many cases in which a contract was derailed by the conflict between a detail-oriented client and a big-picture consultant, or a sequential boss and a random employee. I am friends with a couple that has contrasting styles, almost from the beginning of the list to the end. But they know it and so they can often avoid misunderstandings. For example, when he calls from the road and asks, “What’s new?” she knows that he expects not only highlights, but also details. If she asks the same question, he knows she only has the patience for the top one or two events of the day.

Enhance the rapport you build by matching your source’s natural breathing cadence. When a person is not relaxed and comfortable, the pace and the depth of her breathing will differ from that natural style. If you mirror the cadence of her breathing in an easy state, she will feel comfortable with you and not know why.

What will make your source talk? The approaches I described earlier in this chapter should not pop up by accident. You know that in trying to close a big deal with a senior executive that a pride-and-ego down or fear-up mild approach is a mistake. Whittle down your options before the encounter, and then rank the merit of the remaining ones. This process gets faster and faster the more you go through it until it becomes almost automatic.

Emotion and logic have to blend: You have to be logical with the questioning sequence while, at the same time, reinforcing your approach to keep the source in an emotional state.

For a business result, it may sound odd that I’m emphasizing the utility of emotion. But if you’re selling a computer, trying to win a marketing contract, or asking your boss for a raise, what do you need to do? Keep reminding your target that you can ease her pain and increase her pleasure—these are emotional responses. The pain could be office inefficiency, bad public image, or the possibility of losing a senior staff member. The pleasure could be cost reductions, a higher profit margin, and stronger company loyalty. With practice, you’ll know when to use direct, control, leading, and compound questions, and in the upcoming sections I’ll give you specific guidance on using them.

As a practical matter, interrogators keep lead sheets to jot down points in a conversation that merit scrutiny, but not at the moment. The same tactic for following up source leads works fine if you are in a meeting with several people and don’t want to lose an idea worth pursuing. It would be odd, though, to use it in a conversation with your spouse that you hope will extract information, so I hope you have a short-term memory.

Looping back to a point is one of two ways to follow up source leads. The other is to exploit the information immediately and then move on to the next topic. The nature of the source lead will probably dictate which course to take.

Part of how you proceed depends on the person, too. If the person is sequence-driven, my immediate pursuit of a source lead might prove disconcerting to him. He has in his mind a series of events or concepts, and I could confuse him by asking a question that takes him off course. If, however, it’s a person who’s driven by the importance of an event, I’ll probably want to follow up on the source lead immediately.

When you go headlong down a path for more facts, you do telegraph the value of that information. Ask yourself: Will it jeopardize the outcome of this encounter if he knows that piece is important to me? Looping back allows you to feign interest in various bits while your orchestrate your return to the key point.

In a business meeting, it’s the close: “Thanks for your time. I appreciate what we’ve accomplished.” And then you review: “You’ve accomplished three of your objectives, I’ve accomplished three of mine….” In an interrogation, I’m likely to say, “I’m going to check what you told me for truth.” I might even give the prisoner homework before I send him to his cell: “When I talk with you again, I want you to remember more about the number of weapons stockpiled.”

Key points to remember throughout the process are:

Now, get ready to put the tools and the process together to get what you want in love and business relationships.