Practical Eloquence Blog |

The Power of Questions

By Jack Malcolm / 10.30.2018 / No Comment

Why are questions such powerful tools for persuasion? They are the principal means of achieving and properly applying all four pillars of Practical Eloquence. Do you remember what they are? They are outside-in thinking, content is king, preparation, and being your best self.

Outside-in thinking requires you to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling, and that means you may have to ask a lot of questions because we overestimate our ability to read others. I’ve heard that veterinarians are the best physicians, because they can’t ask their patients where it hurts. Imagine diagnosing someone without asking questions! Yet, that’s what we do all the time when we give advice or try to persuade others. (I know, I did it last night when speaking with Mackenzie about her and Matthew’s dilemma about whether to move to California.)

The second part of OIT is that the other person should also feel it, or sense that you are at least trying to use it, the old “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” How better to show someone you care than by taking an active interest in them? A couple of years ago, I had dinner with an old friend I hadn’t seen since high school. After an excruciating hour in which he told me all about himself and his family, and never once asked a single question about me or my family, I knew immediately why I hadn’t seen him since high school—and another 40 years will be too soon. You know exactly what I mean, but ask yourself if you just may be guilty of the same thing yourself.

Second, content is king, and questions are essential for getting the answers you need to ensure that you have the right content. Contrary to what most people think, most of the world’s content is not stored in google-accessible databases—most of the knowledge that you need to succeed in the world is locked inside the minds of the people you live with, socialize with, and work with on a daily basis. Questions are the most important technology we have to tap into those crucial unique personal databases.

And questions go beyond simply extracting knowledge; the best ones create knowledge by getting others to think about issues in ways they have not before. The answers may be in our heads the entire time, but we may not know it until someone asks the questions that spark the necessary connections and combinations. The Socratic method is the oldest and best-known form of this, and closer to today’s time, Toyota’s 5-whys forces us to drill deeper into an issue to get at root causes.

Questions are also the building blocks of pillar three, preparation. Proper preparation and planning starts with situation analysis, which requires you to take inventory of everything you know or don’t know that’s relevant to your situation. Questions are all about resolving DKs and by methodically asking them we will probably encounter (DK)²s as well. If we have a mental template of required information, we’ll need questions to fill in the blanks.

Finally, questions help you be your best self by letting the other person see that you genuinely care about them, and you don’t arrogantly assume you know it all.

So, if questions are so powerful, why don’t we ask enough of them?

First, we’re too self-focused, more worried about what we want to achieve in the conversation than about helping the other person realize how our proposal helps them. We’re also too impatient, and in our rush to get our point across we may not realize that it did not stick in the other person’s mind. Some of us are reluctant to ask questions because we’re afraid of looking dumb. Finally, despite our best intentions, we may be simply unprepared to ask the best possible questions.

To become a better questioner, you must first be aware of your own questioning frequency and practices. What percentage of time do you actually talk during most conversations? Are you truly taking an interest in the other person? Do you probe to get a deeper understanding of where they’re coming from? Next, cultivate two attitudes of humility and curiosity. Remind yourself going into the conversation, that you don’t know it all, and strive to get beneath the surface of what the other person is thinking and why they’re thinking that way.

In subsequent podcasts, I will address specific questioning techniques and methods that apply in various persuasive communication situations.

Book reviews - Success Books

Book Recommendation: Atomic Habits

By Jack Malcolm / 10.29.2018 / No Comment

Did you brush your teeth this morning? I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb by guessing the answer is yes. I’m also guessing that you didn’t have to schedule a reminder for yourself in your calendar, and you didn’t procrastinate or muster up your willpower to get started. You probably did it without thinking about it at all, and maybe even let your mind wander or think about other things while you were doing it.

Depending on what time you’re reading this, you’ve probably also performed several other habits today; experts estimate that we spend about 40% of our time behaving out of habit. Quite simply, habits shape our lives and the results we produce—for better or for worse. The crucial question is: how many of our habits are the products of careful thought and intention, versus unproductive habits that have arisen without our even knowing?

Brushing your teeth regularly is a high ROI activity; it returns solid health and even social benefits and costs almost nothing to do—because it’s a habit. On the flip side, how many bad habits do you have, those that also cost almost nothing to do, but yield a negative return?

There’s a pretty simple equation here: you can become happier, healthier and more productive if you develop more good habits or kick bad ones.

We all know this, which is why we all strive to we all make New Year’s resolutions, and we all vow that “this time it will be different.” And most of us fail repeatedly.

Unfortunately, when we fail to get control of a habit, we tend to view it as a character flaw, some sort of deficiency in grit or willpower that keeps us from becoming the person we want to be.

Willpower may be part of it, but context matters far more. There are so many hidden or unconscious influences on our habits that willpower is simply outgunned, which is why we run out of it so quickly in most cases. The antidote is knowledge, and that’s exactly what James Clear provides in this excellent and important book: Atomic Habits.

Every habit, according to Clear (and supported by voluminous research), goes through four steps, or phases: our brains respond to a cue, which kicks in a craving and leads to a response that generates a reward.[1] At each step, there are things you can do, to make the habit more or less likely, and that establishes the framework for the book. There are four sections, each dealing with one phase of the habit, address ways to establish good habits and quit bad habits:

	Good habits	Bad habits
Cue	Make it obvious	Make it invisible
Craving	Make it attractive	Make it unattractive
Response	Make it easy	Make it difficult
Reward	Make it satisfying	Make it unsatisfying

In twenty fascinating and informative chapters, Clear lays out probably the most comprehensive and practical program for good habits that I’ve read. Regardless of how much you already know or do, there is something for everyone in here. In my own case, before reading Atomic Habits, I’d already been making good progress on establishing some new productive habits, but I also gleaned and have started applying some excellent ideas, for example habit stacking (chapter 5) and temptation bundling (chapter 8).

There’s so much more useful information in Atomic Habits than I can include in a short post, so give it my strongest possible recommendation. As Clear says, time magnifies the margin between success and failure, which is why good habits put time on your side and bad habits make time your enemy. So I suggest you waste no time and start reading this book immediately.

[1] This is one more step than Charles Duhigg writes about in his book, The Power of Habit, which I also highly recommend, but if you are going to read only one, I suggest Atomic Habits.

Mythbusters - Podcasts

Three Myths that May Be Hurting Your Persuasive Communication

By Jack Malcolm / 10.23.2018 / No Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Note: I have written about two of these topics before, and here are the links to those posts:

Time to Put the 7% Myth to Rest

Time to Put the Learning Styles Myth to Rest

The Only Time the AVK Myth Applies

In addition, two useful articles and one book about the Myers-Briggs myth can be found here:

Myers-Briggs: Does It Pay to Know Your Type?

Goodbye to MBTI: The Fad that Won’t Die

The Cult of Personality Testing, by Annie Murphy Paul

Clear thinking - Thinking Books

Book Recommendation: The Fifth Risk

By Jack Malcolm / 10.18.2018 / No Comment

Here’s a test: what single catastrophe killed more people worldwide than any other? It was the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed 50-100 million people, probably more people than the two world wars combined.[1] One contributor to the death toll was the fact that countries then at war suppressed information about it, which made it less likely to be contained. And one reason that we haven’t had a recurrence within several orders of magnitude of that is that governments around the world, especially the US government, gather and freely share huge amounts of data on diseases.

The average citizen is well aware of the dangers of nuclear war, terrorism and crime, so we accept and even embrace the institutions and people who protect us from them, such as the military, Homeland Security and first responders. When risks are vivid and potentially catastrophic, we don’t mind throwing vast sums at them, because we “get it”.

But it’s the less obvious risks that may threaten us the most in the long run, precisely because we don’t think enough about them and we begrudge every penny spent on preventing them. We don’t pay that much attention to weather, contaminated food, or insufficient health care and nutrition, but they have killed far more Americans than the more easily imagined risks.

It takes a gifted writer such as Lewis (Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short) to make us understand and care about the “fifth risk”: project management. This refers to the enormous array of projects that the Federal government runs to address these hidden systemic risks, and the vast amount of data that makes that possible. So many of those projects and data are under threat today.

The average citizen does not understand data in general and does not care about it, unless maybe it’s about their fantasy football team. More specifically, the average citizen does not know:

How much their safety and prosperity depend on national data—its collection, storage, analysis and application
Who does most of the collection, storage, analysis and application
Why that system is under threat today

The book is fascinating because Lewis is a master at telling the stories of interesting, dedicated individuals who work at all levels within the Federal government. Most of us think of them as grey, faceless bureaucrats, even “lazy or stupid” (I have to admit I’ve been guilty of that myself) but many of them are doing fascinating and even thrilling work. Lewis introduces us to unsung heroes who are smart enough to make far more money in the private sector but do what they do for reasons other than money: the mission, wanting to make a difference in people’s lives, a sense of being called to serve.

It also introduces us to the work that Federal agencies such as Commerce, Energy, and Agriculture do that save us from risks potentially as deadly or even worse than foreign enemies. Unfortunately, they’re like the offensive linemen of the Government, because they usually only get noticed when they fail. How many people are alive today because hurricane forecasts have become so much better? How many people are alive today because they did not die from the flu, or because the electricity grid has not succumbed to the half million cyber intrusion attempts it suffers per year? How many kids avoid malnutrition because of government programs, or how many more people avoided becoming victims of violent crime? You can thank government for that, because they are the only institutions who have the resources to collect the data to understand the problems and design and implement projects large enough to solve them.

The book is disturbing because many of those projects are at risk. They’ve always been at risk when politicians strive to cut budgets (and there’s no doubt a lot of fat and waste that needs cutting), but the present administration takes it to a whole different level. It’s a level that is not just oblivious to data, but openly hostile to it—willful ignorance, if you will. It’s the only administration that did not send large transitions teams to learn all about the agencies they were about to take over, to ensure a smooth handoff.

And as this administration took over, DJ Patil, the government’s Chief Data Scientist, “watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the Federal government,” such as links to climate change data, inspection reports of businesses accused of animal abuse, records of consumer complaints, even detailed crime data, and of course anything having to do with climate change. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Democrat or Republican, that’s data that you and I paid for, and they’re taking it away from us.

Why does this matter? The first answer is that the less data you have, the greater the chance that undetected risks will come to pass. The second answer is more fundamental: when government depends on the consent of the governed, how can making the governed less informed be a good thing?

This post is a little outside my usual persuasive communication content, but as a reader of this blog you probably care about clear thinking, supported by hard facts, so I strongly recommend you read The Fifth Risk.

[1] “A Deadly Touch of Flu”, The Economist, September 29, 2018, p.75.