Jorge 0:00

If you're looking to gain traction, you need to get good at this, because sometimes asking questions directly is not the best strategy.

Narrator 0:12

You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.

Harry 0:22

Jorge, it is lovely to see you again. I so appreciate you making time.

Jorge 0:28

No, thank you for making the time as well, Harry. It is always a highlight of my day when we record one of these.

Harry 0:37

Cool. I'm super excited to share with you a reading from a book that's no longer in print, but it is easily findable and procurable. So I know I've brought readings to our conversation before that aren't as easy to find. This is a book by a fellow by the name of John Nolan, and the title of the book is Confidential. And, I won't read subtitle. I think that might be better left for after I've done the reading. And I'm just gonna dive in unless you have any, any questions.

Jorge 1:10

No, let's do it. I'm super curious, because usually you save the name of the book till after.

Harry 1:14

Yeah.

Jorge 1:15

This one is not confidential, I guess.

Harry 1:17

Yeah, I wanted to frame the conversation in a slightly different way today. And this is a little bit of a long reading, I'm gonna have to filter through a couple of pages here. But let me start with, "We've been taught from childhood how to frame better and better questions to get that information. We've developed a pattern of questions and ways we ask them in order to get as much of the information we want as possible. Sometimes, we're successful and sometimes we're not based in large part on how offensively our question is asked and how defensive the other person becomes. If we stop to think about it, almost everyone has a need to get information in today's world. Often, that information is in the hands and minds of people who, for a variety of reasons, aren't always the most cooperative. Sometimes the people with the information are what the psychological and psychiatric community referred to as "resistant patients." The more, resistant the client or patient, and therefore, the less effective the intervention, the greater the chance that the response will be defensive, misleading, and untruthful. If we're limited to one or two sets of skills, our chances of collecting the information decreases significantly. The most common styles of obtaining information are interrogation and interviewing. Both styles are question based. The less elegant the question, the greater degree of suspicion, uncooperativeness, and downright dismissal. These are separate and distinct from elicitation. Interrogation is obtaining what you want from someone who possibly has it, who has not admitted having it, and who knows you are and why you want it. Most often, an interrogation session is adversarial in tone as well as in character. Indeed, it's often deliberately structured to appear that way." Continuing on. "Naturally, the subject's reaction to your interrogation style will have an impact on the quality of the information you get. Interviewing is the process of obtaining information from someone who probably has it, who has more or less admitted to having it, and who knows who you are and why you want it. Typically, interviewing is non adversarial in tone." And then, finally: "For our purposes, elicitation is the process that avoids direct questions and employs a conversational tone to help reduce concerns and suspicions both during the contact and in the days and weeks to follow. In the interest of maximizing the flow of information. Elicitation, then, is to obtain the information you want from someone who probably has it, has not necessarily admitted having it, and who may or may not be willing to part with it, and who may or may not know or even care who the elicitor is."

Jorge 4:33

What kind of misguided impulse led you to, bring this reading to our conversation? I'm just trying to think like, what's the most offensive way I could ask this question?

Harry 4:46

It is actually multifaceted. Before I answer that que question directly, let me tell you that the subtitle of the book is Uncover Your Competitor's Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly, and Protect Your Own.

Jorge 5:01

Wow. Okay.

Harry 5:02

Yeah. This book was written by a former intelligence agent who became a specialist in business intelligence, which I would like to for the purposes of this book, recharacterize as competitive intelligence. Now, before I answer your question, what I will tell you is that I had a role in a company or I was well paid to be a business intelligence person, that is competitive intelligence. And over time, I became uncomfortable with what I was being asked to do. This was a very well-funded company, the name of which will remain anonymous, and I was being asked to gather information legally and report back on the findings. And, over time, it eventually got to the point where I was being asked to go find my way to the corporate lunchroom in the competitor's company and just sit and listen. And I thought, "You know, that's probably the line for me." So anyway, I stopped doing that particular job. I drew a line. I managed to stay at that company but I no longer did that job. I just couldn't do it in integrity. And, then, fast forward many years, and I've met an amazing man named James E. Cates, and he was the co-author of a book called Climbing the Ladder of Business Intelligence, which is a brilliant and short book on how to think about the information ladder, like from data to intuition and how it applies to corporate information systems and organizational life. And as I was reading Confidential, I was like, "Wait a minute, this isn't business intelligence, this is competitive intelligence." He talks about it in terms of business intelligence, and I understand why, 'cause it's intelligence as in the intelligence community. But then comparing that to Climbing the Ladder of Business Intelligence from Cates, I realized that the distinction, it was only now becoming clear to me. And once I had that, it started to occur to me, "Ah, we spend most of our time, like even you and I, talking about listening and talking about asking questions and talking about how to gather information and how to organize it. And this book Confidential is really about elicitation. It is an entirely different category of information gathering. And there's nothing intrinsically or inherently wrong with it, but it is fundamentally a different skill. And this book outlines how to think about it as an information gathering vehicle that's likely to yield very high quality information in ways that is very disarming and in product design and development and like all the things that we do, we're trying to figure out how to show up as real pros, like wielding very powerful tools for change. And it occurred to me that I knew nothing formally about elicitation, about how to get information without asking questions, which according to Nolan, does a spectacular job depending on how graceful you are of putting people on the defensive and in all likelihood, distorting the kind of information and answers you're gonna get back. So I really wanted to bring that to our conversation because it is a different body of work for information gathering and organization.

Jorge 8:46

Yeah, absolutely. And when you were doing the reading, it completely took me by surprise, the subtitle of the book, right? Because that's not where I thought you were going with this. But as you were reading it, I I noted at least three factors to eliciting skillfully. One was the framing. So how the entire situation is framed in which you are having the interaction that leads to obtaining the information that you're looking to obtain. The second is the content, like what are you actually saying or doing that is going to generate that? And the third, I think you mentioned tone, which I would imagine is very important. It's like, how do you say that?

Harry 9:36

Yes.

Jorge 9:36

And where I thought you were going, and I'm gonna bring this to the table because I think it's relevant here, is that those of us who have done user experience design work and have participated in research initiatives, we quickly run into the reality that there are things that you cannot ask people because they either can't articulate their ideas in the way that you need them to, they are not aware of what they think about a thing, they might be looking to please you as an interviewer as opposed to telling you what they really feel. So this notion of elicitation is something that researchers in that space need to do. And, I remember a project that I worked on many years ago, and I'm not going to give you specifics about what this project was about, just talk in generalities as they apply here. But we were trying to learn the mental model of customers about a particular subject domain, right? So the thing that our client worked on, we wanted to learn how their clients thought about particular issues about that space, and it was an emergent technology. So it was the kind of thing where you couldn't really ask people what they thought about it, or rather, you could ask it, but the responses that you would get in return would not be very helpful. So rather than frame the experience as an interview, we framed it as a co-creation exercise. It's like we're going to design something together. And that was the framing. And what we are going to design together is the settings screen for this thing that we're making. So, the part of the system where you go in and tweak the settings. And then, as far as the tone goes, that's obviously related to the framing. If you're going to be co-creating rather than interviewing, you're in some ways flattening the hierarchy between interviewer and subject. It's like we're, both gonna be drawing here. I just wanna see what you come up with and then what I come up with. And the intent there wasn't... we weren't hoping to get designs. We weren't hoping that the person that we were working with was going to actually help us design the setting screen. That was not the goal. The goal was to get from them how they thought this thing was structured. Like, what's their mental model of how this thing is structured. A setting screen is where you often tweak the things that make the system work for you, right? So, this was a vehicle through which we would get at that information indirectly. And I don't know if that's what you mean by elicitation, but that's what came to mind, that example.

Harry 12:58

And that is a very specific strategy for elicitation. It isn't one that I read about in this particular book so far, but it absolutely fits the definition of an elicitation strategy, and it's one that uses an entirely different model rather than just interrogating or interviewing, right? It engages in a way to elicit information that you're looking for, that you can organize in a way that makes sense to you for the purposes that you have, rather than pursue that information in a way that's likely to activate a series of defenses and generate a bunch of lower quality. Information. This is one of the reasons that documentary filmmakers and news people will often run their camera, they'll run their videos all the time, right? Because the best stuff is likely to come out when you're not in a scripted moment. It's not about sitting down with somebody and saying, "Tell me about the, X, Y, and Z." It's about the before and the after, which in some of the communications work that I did early on, I learned is something that's characterized as out of band communication. The in-band communication is the stuff that's inside what people think they're talking about, and the out-of-band communication is the stuff that's off to the side. Like an out-of-band communication might be an off-handed comment as somebody who walks away, a hot mic situation is an out of band moment, right? And so, this book is really about how to think about elicitation techniques, and strategies for the purposes of any application. It's really framed here in the context of competitive intelligence and business intelligence, if you will. But I brought it to our conversation because it is so deeply relevant to the work we do. The executive coaching, consulting work that I do day in and day out, the design work, information architecture work, the AI work that you are doing with Greg now. You can't necessarily, interrogations just is not applicable. N slash a, right? But questioning, like I've spent my career getting better and better at questioning, to the point that I studied and then became certified in precision questioning and answering, right? Dennis Matthies and Monica Worline's, approach to what's now called precision Q plus A. He's retired and they've licensed that material to a company called Enliven, where they do this kind of training, and we can drop that in the show notes. But it just never occurred to me that elicitation was a thing, and you ought to think about it in a very structured, very intentional, and very methodical way.

Jorge 16:01

Maybe we take it for granted just because it's so innate to this kind of work. One of the occupational hazards of being language people is that we maybe overvalue the content at the expense some other things. Like the reason I'm bringing this up is, I've gotten a lot of information in communication situations from body language. It's who's paying attention here? Who's engaged, who is energized about this discussion? Who is clearly tuned out? And what does that tell me about the dynamics of this situation? And I suspect that is a skill where humans are going to have the upper hand over LLMs for a while.

Harry 16:58

Yeah.

Jorge 17:00

So I wanna circle back though, just because knowing that we have only a few minutes here, this sounds super relevant and it's, I think it's almost like self-evident why, if you're looking to gain traction, you need to get good at this because sometimes asking questions directly is not the best strategy. Can you think of one approach that you learned from this book that might help people do this?

Harry 17:31

Absolutely. The simplest example is just make a statement which is patently wrong and someone will correct you, and they'll correct you with the information that's relevant to you, not realizing necessarily that you've just prompted them for a bit of information.

Jorge 17:45

I'm smiling because my kids and I just watched three James Bond movies in sequence. And there's so much of that in the spy genre in general, right? But those movies have a lot of that where you're getting information by someone who unwittingly is reacting to something that clearly has been planted there, clearly to the audience, but not clear to the characters, right?

Harry 18:13

And John Nolan, the author of Confidential, uses Sherlock Holmes as an excellent example of this, and lays it out how, he does it. It's really quite brilliant.

Jorge 18:23

Yeah, that's really helpful. You said that this book is not available. It's been out of print, but is it available as an ebook?

Harry 18:32

Well, It's also available as a physical book. You can buy it, it's just, you're gonna find it used.

Jorge 18:37

Secondhand copies, yeah. All right. it sounds like it's worth checking out, particularly given the source. And again, I think that this is an area where humans might have an edge over ais just because of the, it requires a certain degree of...

Harry 19:01

Finesse.

Jorge 19:02

Yes, finesse, nuance, but also like this detachment from the situation. Like, you need to be in the conversation, but you also need to have this kind of meta awareness of the conversation as a conversation.

Harry 19:15

That's right.

Jorge 19:16

And you need to do it, I would imagine, and now I'm reading into it, but you would have to do it compassionately so that you are not manipulating people. Because that not only is it morally wrong, I would imagine that, too, could influence the information you're getting, right? Like, if you get good enough at these skills, I could imagine that you could get pretty good at getting the answers you want to hear from people. And, you don't want that, right?

Harry 19:47

And versa visa. I'll reread the subtitle: Uncover Your Competitors Top Business Secrets Legally and Quickly, and Protect Your Own. Because, once you understand these techniques, it puts you in a stronger position of having choice and selecting among options that are gonna be more beneficial to you.

Jorge 20:09

That sounds like an important life skill to develop. Thank you for bringing that to our conversations, Harry.

Harry 20:15

I love the conversation. Thank you so much. I was really excited about this one, and I'm glad it connected with you.

Narrator 20:23

Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.