Changing the Way You Think

I know you won't believe me but the highest form of human excellence is to question oneself and others.

— Socrates

What do you know that I don't know, that I wouldn't know if I didn't ask?

— Jim Pyle

"Changing the way you think" has a number of different meanings in the context of learning to excel in the art of questioning. The structure and flow of effective questions probably won't come naturally to you. You will rewire your brain a bit as you refine the art. The most important change is to make questioning a discovery, to see it as an expression of open-minded curiosity.

Some people hesitate to ask questions because they see it as probing or prying, an intrusive act that makes others uncomfortable. In reality, questioning should be the opposite. It is a way to show other people you are interested in them; it's more like a handshake than a poke in the ribs.

When I was 19 years old, I started Bible College and became a preacher. For seven years, I gave the congregation all kinds of answers to their problems and never asked them a single question. When I realized all I did for a living was push information at people — and get paid almost nothing for it — I decided to change professions. I got a job that involved as much questioning and listening as it did talking, and it turned out to be a dream come true: I sold cemetery plots. This was no ordinary cemetery, though. It was Forest Lawn Memorial Park, which at the time was the perpetual home of Humphrey Bogart, Nat King Cole, Walt Disney, W.C. Fields, and Clark Gable, among other celebrities. (Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson have since joined them.)

I went door to door and asked a lot of questions: How much is peace of mind worth to you? What would your wife do if you suddenly passed on? What is stopping you from making the decision right now? In answering questions like these, people invited me into their lives. I learned more about their family life, values, fears, health, and finances than I ever knew about most of the people I preached to in the years prior. Forest Lawn Memorial Park represented human connections to me, as well as a substantial increase in income. It turned out that asking the right questions was rewarding on at least two levels.

FOCUS ON DISCOVERY

As part of developing this book, I engaged in series of exchanges with a woman named Judith, whom I had just met. These conversations set the stage for learning the first rules of good questioning. They also spotlight why you need to change the way you think to hone your questioning skills.

Judith had no exposure to my questioning process prior to our exchanges. Going into the session, she didn't even know as much as you know now, which is the importance of focusing on only one thing at a time. In my first conversation with Judith I was trying to get driving directions to a place I'd never been. To make it more challenging, she does not drive a car, nor has she even tried to do so in the past 25 years because of a depth-perception problem. (At least she has a legitimate excuse for having had eight minor accidents during her driver's education class.)

Judith has a limited sense of cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), and relies on a combination of buses and light rail to get where she needs to go, so her awareness of street names between Point A and Point B is minimal. I wanted to see if my questioning could lead to my own understanding of how to drive from her home to a destination that was unknown to me. I asked questions such as, "What is the route you take to get from here to the bus stop?" and "How long does it take you to walk from your house to the bus stop?" I asked, "What do you see out the window of the bus?" and "What else do you see?" From these questions, I was able to piece together driving directions, segment by segment, up to the final segment of the journey. In that final segment, from the above-ground rail, Judith walks through a residential area to the location. It's a footpath, so it's not the way a driver would be able to go. Asking her what she would see in front her, to the left, right, and behind when she arrived at the destination did provide the necessary information to determine how a car would access the property. It wasn't perfect, but the 360-degree view gave me enough clues to find the location.

Questions such as "What do you see where you are now?" encourage the subject to envision key locations as though she were making the trip at the moment. In questioning for directions, you want to see what that person sees; you use that person's eyes.

Now imagine you're doing the same exercise with someone who doesn't know cardinal directions, speaks a different language (so you're relying on an interpreter), and walks wherever he needs to go — and what he knows could help you save lives. That's what a battlefield interrogator might face.

SOCRATES AND YOU

The point of an exchange such as the one I had with Judith-the-non-driver is to prove that it is possible for good questioning to yield the information you need from a source who doesn't even realize she has anything worthwhile to contribute. For example, good questioning of people in the vicinity of an accident or a crime sometimes turns passersby who think they know nothing into key witnesses.

Michael Dobson, author of the book Creative Project Management, blogged about just such a situation that had happened to him: Today, Tuesday, April 13, 2010, is the 35th anniversary of a killing spree in Wheaton, Maryland. My girlfriend and I were on our way home from Young Frankenstein when we drove right through the middle of it.

Michael Edward Pearch shot seven people, all African-American, killing two and wounding the rest. There were indications, police said, that the shooting was racially motivated. All the victims were black and the gunman was white. He passed up at least one car with whites, said police, as he walked down a highway looking for another target.

There were at least two such cars. One of them was mine.

Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland, left home about 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 13, 1975, and drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall. He was wearing his Army fatigues, a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and a machete strapped to his chest. He carried a .45 caliber [semi-]automatic pistol.

He walked to the traffic light at the entrance to the mall, where he shot and killed [one man, wounded his...