Whole words, whole sight

I was a reporter for many years, and I have to confess I wasn’t the best. I was a far better writer than nearly all of my colleagues, but the goal of journalism is news - and for all my pretty words I wasn’t hard-nosed or streetwise enough to get the best and toughest stories. I was a decent feature writer and a decent depth reporter - but even there, no more than decent. And one of the reasons for this was that I was not as good at interviewing as I should have been.

My faults as an interviewer were not mine alone; many reporters have them. One was talking too much, filling in the silences rather than letting them stretch out to see what the other person would finally say. The other was asking too many leading questions.

Leading questions

As a daily journalist you’ve got to ask these, for you have a deadline to make and no time to waste. Indeed, even for much of the non-journalistic writing I do today (marketing pieces, mostly) I still make up a fairly lengthy list of highly targeted questions before tackling an interview. I know what I need to get answered, and the question list helps me achieve this as efficiently as possible. Usually toward the end of such a list I include a few open-ended questions, to try and capture any thoughts the person has that I didn’t ask about directly - but that’s an afterthought with little emphasis and thus, usually very little discovery.

Yet what if you have more time - if, for example, you’re writing a nonfiction book on some subject or other, a subject you know a little about but not nearly as much as the experts you’ll be interviewing?

At that point you may find it’s better not to make a list of tidy questions at all. As we hear fairly often in “Law and Order,” the point of a leading question is to get the answer you expect, not the answer you don’t expect. And when you’re writing a book (as opposed to trying a case), it’s really the answers you don’t expect that are going to create your book for you.

Alternatives to the “list of questions” approach include following your subject around for days, being the easy audience for whatever it is they want to talk about, etc. You can find these approaches in any instructional book on depth journalism. They’re good if you’re writing a profile, or if you want to sketch scenes. But what if your goal is to uncover expert knowledge? Say you’re interviewing a scientist, or a top poker player. How do you get beyond the boring and into the fascinating?

Most of us, I suspect, would fall back on our tidy list of questions. But there’s another method I hadn’t heard of till recently.

The critical decision method

The source for this is a consultant named Gary Klein. He runs a small company which specializes in codifying expert decision-making - the kind of decision-making that is so often labelled “intuitive,” both by the people who practice it and by onlookers. He and his staff have interviewed countless firefighters, military officers, cops, business executives, and so on. And what they’ve found is that you get the worst results when you ask the experts to summarize what they think they know (e.g. by answering a “list of questions”), and the best results when you ask them to elaborate on specific incidents - not war stories, but walk-throughs of tough decisions they’ve had to make. As he explains in one of his books, Sources of Power:

The method we have found most powerful for eliciting knowledge is to use stories. If you ask experts what makes them so good, they are likely to give general answers that do not reveal much. But if you can get them to tell you about tough cases, nonroutine events where their skills made the difference, then you have a pathway into their perspective, into the way they are seeing the world. We call this the critical decision method, because it focuses attention on the key judgments and decisions that were made during the incident being described.

Klein then explains that his interviewers are trained to ask for not just one telling of a story, but at least three tellings. First they ask for a brief version, to assess whether the story will be a good one: they’re not looking for drama, but instructive potential. Next they ask for the full telling of the story, out of which they build a timeline and perhaps a model of how the expert’s view of the situation changed as events progressed.

But it’s in the third telling that things get most interesting. In the words of Klein,

The third pass is to probe the thought processes. We usually ask what a person noticed when changing an assessment of the situation and what alternate goals might have existed at a certain point. If a course of action was selected, we ask what other actions were possible, whether the person considered any of them, and if so, what were some factors that favored the option chosen. We like to ask about hypotheticals. For instance, if a piece of information had not arrived, what would the person have most likely done? If that option was blocked, what would the reaction be? [The goal is to] uncover some of the hidden assumptions that experts make without thinking and without letting others know about them.

I’ve already suggest to a friend putting together a book proposal on expert poker players that he try this approach and see how it works. I’m going to try it myself next time I have the chance (which unfortunately is seldom these days).

What’s your take?

I’d be curious to hear thoughts from other writers on this. For example, many crime or mystery novelists do extensive background research. The usual approach is to ask questions machine-gun style - but will that tap the “intuitive” expertise that you would likely value most, but that - as Klein says - an expert is least likely to even know they know?