Ben Goldacre, who manages to be both smart and cute, posted the other day about his interview on Newsnight with a gentleman called Aric Sigman.
Goldacre was expressing his usual bemused irritation with the selective use of sources – in this case by Sigman – and Sigman was expressing concern that the internets haz stolen our brainz. Goldacre always talks sense, but what mesmerised me was Sigman’s definition of a friend as someone he has actually shaken hands with.
I don’t know about you, but the people I tend to shake hands with are people like lawyers and bank managers and doctors, people who are in no way my friends, and contrariwise many of my truest friendships were formed online, some of them almost a decade ago.
Sigman seems to be confusing the medium and the message. Surely the internet just lets you express yourself in your own way. If you are wordy and nerdy you put up blog posts like this one. If you are silly and giggly you throw sheep at your friends on FaceBook. The internet is just another medium, and in pre-internet days I’d have rather earnest conversations in pubs with other slightly geeky people (still do) while the sheep-throwers went clubbing, and good for them. We’ve just added the internet to our list of venues.
Sigman commented that ‘there is a difference between the virtual and the real’. But I don’t think there is. They blur and overlap and interweave. I use the internet as one of many channels for conducting my real life, and vice versa.
Surely it’s just that the internet has made people-watching easier. Academics like Sigman won’t now be arrested if they eavesdrop on the silly, fun, facile conversations that take place while teenage girls learn how to form friendships because the conversations take place on-line. Teenage girls giggle a lot, both online and in the mall. Who’d have thought?
Einstein famously arrived at the general theory of relativity by asking childlike questions with an adult mind. It’s telling that Kipling’s six serving men (what, why, when, how, where, who) come from a children’s rhyme. Lewis Carroll, another children’s author, also provides a great set of questions for thinking through actions, issues and risks.
You are considering a specific action and want to know the possible consequences. The questions are:
What would happen if you did?
(Theorem)
What would happen if you didn’t?
(Inverse)
What wouldn’t happen if you did?
(Converse)
What wouldn’t happen if you didn’t?
(Non-Mirror Image Reverse)
You can see that this grid sprang from mind of the man who wrote “Through the Looking-glass”, can’t you? Carroll was not just a writer of children’s stories, he was also a professional mathematician and the grid has a clear mathematical structure.
Exercise: Put Carroll through his paces – think of an action and work through Carroll’s grid to uncover possible outcomes.
Unfortunately Carroll’s grid and Kipling’s list aren’t comprehensive. They have gaps, and miss out good questions that are well worth asking. Take a look at the difference between:
How does it happen?
You’ll get a mechanical answer – it happens like this, it happens like that.
How much does it happen?
You’ll get a quantitative answer – a number of some sort which can be measured in some way.
How often does it happen?
Which is actually a time question and more closely related to when. If you like the jargon, it is a quantitative temporal question.
What we see here is that single ideas (how-much or how-often) cannot always be expressed in a single word. Long before Kipling was a journalist, Aristotle listed the questions he used in an investigation, and came up with eight which he used to discover what he called the “circumstances of an act”:
Cause
Why did it happen? What made it happen? Who made it happen? With what instruments?
Circumstances
When did it happen? Where did it happen? How did it happen – in what manner?
Result
What happened?
It’s a pity that Aristotle’s list is nowhere near as memorable as Kipling’s rhyme and Carroll’s grid, and it’s not comprehensive itself. When I created a list of generic questions I ended up with 21.5 of them. There’ll be more I’m sure.
Exercise: Create your own comprehensive list of generic questions, and then multiply them by four using Carroll’s matrix.
Trying it out: Pick a headline in Google News, or maybe a decision you have to make, and unpack it by running it through your list.
Do this to see what happens, so you get a better understanding of what questions are out there and how they work. Don’t use it as a checklist – that way madness lies! I know. I spent more time on this illustration than makes any kind of sense.
Question grid based on Kipling's honest serving men
It’s not always obvious how our tools can distort our methods.
A colleague who was co-ordinating a social event recently sent out an email asking us to say what kind of food we’d prefer by using the voting buttons in our reply. The choices were Indian, Chinese, Italian, No Preference. “Cool use of the tool” I thought.
It was only a few days later that another colleague said how disappointed she was that the most popular option was Indian, because she really doesn’t like Indian food. (How can anyone not like Indian food? – But that’s another bemusement for another day).
It was then that I realised that what was needed was not voting for buttons, but vetoing buttons, with the option for vetoing more than one choice.
I’d have made the same mistake, and it’s an interesting one.
Lambe is that rare mix, both a theoretician and a practitioner. The book is solidly based in theory and well-proven by practice. In the first half, Lambe takes you on a readable tour of how people have organised knowledge in the past and compare different approaches (hierarchies vs facets, for examples) and some of the implementations (the Dewey decimal system, and so on). While the second half gives you tools and strategies for defining and introducing taxonomies to an organisation. He doesn’t pretend it is easy, but the tactical tools and the methodological framework are workable. He’s clearly refined them by using them and some of the pain he has felt on the way comes through between the lines. I sympathise with him almost as much as I admire him.
The book has the benefit of being fairly short. I’ve noticed this with other books on the subject – perhaps books about online technologies need to get out so fast there’s no time to add padding, or else people dealing with knowledge management think too clearly to waffle. Either way, it’s pricey per page but benefits from its brevity.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough if you are working in this area or are responsible for information architecture, knowledge management, or pulling sense out of corporate folksonomies.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who. Rudyard Kipling
These are the ‘open-ended’ questions beloved of sales people and interviewers. Kipling earned his living as a journalist, so we should not be surprised that he turned the standard six questions of journalism into a rhyme.
They are powerful, not because of the brute force we discussed last time, but because the answer must be more than one word. It is impossible just to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. You end up with a story or an explanation, with something new that you didn’t have before. This makes them a useful basis for any investigation or analysis. However, it is important to to understand the mechanics of each of them first.
Let’s take a look at how the answers differ. If you ask me did I have lunch today (closed question) the answer is ‘yes’. Here are the answers to Kipling’s six questions about the same meal:
Mushroom stroganoff
I was hungry
1:30
With a plastic spoon
At my desk
On my own
So these questions are not interchangable but it is easy to use them as analytic noise. Let’s start with the biggie:
Why?
Why is immensely powerful. However it can be a slippery tool that leads you into recursive navel-gazing. It is particularly dangerous when asking about the motives for making changes, whether this is business change or therapeutic change. Repeated whys can take you in some very odd directions or just flip you back and forth, whereas repeated “what will that give you”s will help you uncover likely consequences.
Compare:
I want to spend less time online What will spending less time on line give you? - More time to spend on other things What will having more time give you? - I’ll be able to go to the gym What will going to the gym give you? - Well, I’ll be fitter and healthier What will being fitter and healthier give you? – I’ll feel better and more well What will feeling better and more well give you? - I’d be better at out-door activities What will being better at out-door activities give you? - I’d enjoy doing things with my partner
With:
I need to spend less time online Why do you need to spend less time online? - Because I spend too much time online
Which is entirely circular, and this which is not much better:
Well, why do you need to spend less time online? - Because I go to bed too late and don’t get enough sleep Why do you go to bed too late? - Because I get caught up in what I’m doing on line Why do you get caught up in what you are doing online? - Because I haven’t got anything else that’s interesting to do Why haven’t you got anything else that’s interesting to do - Because I spend too much time on line – Duh
It is easy to see that repeating the question what will that give you has let us uncover a solid benefit for the responder as well as motives for spending less time online and a positive activity to replace it with. Also, they have given much the same reason three times and, as Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you three times is true”. But repeated “whys” are just driving the conversation round in spiral. (We’ll have more from Carroll next time).
Why isn’t all bad. It is a ruthless tool for uncovering sloppy thinking. So much so you need to use it with care. Years ago small businesses would say ‘we need a website’ and the first professional question to ask them was why? The most frequent reason in those days was was ‘well, everyone says we should’, which was no reason at all. Asking why? exposed this lack of thought in a way which other questions didn’t. Asking what will a website give you? got the response: ‘more customers’ which at the time was an entirely groundless assumption, and the only way to challenge it was to ask how will it do that?
Asking Why? was a much quicker way to get a grip on the sloppy thinking, hold it up to the light and shake it until some cogency fell out.
Kipling’s six serving men are a always a good place to start, and next time we’ll discover that it is not a comprehensive list.
Practice: use Kipling’s verse as a checklist whenever you have a question to ask and see for yourself the different directions it takes you.
Tip: get good at doing this quickly so that you can select your questions at conversational speed, and see how much shorter and more effective your interviews become.
This is the third of these entries and you can find the others here.
Before we consider different kinds of questions let’s take a look at what a question actually is; at where questions get their raw power.
A question is a stimulus and it requires a response.
This means that, at a fundamental level, whoever asks the questions controls what the other person does next. Nothing else has quite the same power.
Once, in the Q&A session at a public lecture given by Physicist Paul Dirac the audience member preambled about how good the lecture had been and then said:
“There’s just one thing sir, I didn’t understand the equation at in the top right hand corner of the blackboard”.
Dirac was silent for a while, which was perfectly usual because he was a meticulous thinker. But he remained silent. And remained silent. Eventually the moderator said:
“Sir, what is the answer to the question about the equation on the top right of the black board?”
Dirac replied: “It wasn’t a question”.
Asking a question sets up a tension which is only relieved by answering it, a tension felt by the moderator and everyone else in the lecture theatre because they reacted based on the audience member’s intent. A tension not felt, it seems, by the literal-minded Dirac who responded to his words.
If an unananswered question sets up tension, asking the same question repeatedly can make the tension almost unbearable.
Are you ready to rock?
Paradise by the Dashboard Light shows us the power of the repeated question: the Boy is just about to make it when the song segues into Sections II and III and the Girl shrieks ”Stop right there, before we go any further!” and repeatedly asks the poor lad:
“Do you love me? Will you love me forever?”
You’ve got to feel sorry for him. She’s got the upper hand, and they both know it. The power of it lies, partly, in the fact it’s a simple yes/no question.
Here’s another example of the brute force of a repeated yes/no question:
This is the infamous Paxman / Howard interview where Paxman asks Howard the same question 12 times, making his reputation and destroying Howard’s. That Paxo ruthlessness wasn’t natural: the video for the next item was not ready and Paxman had run out of other questions to ask and in normal circumstances he’d have accepted Howard’s first prevarication.
Think of Twitter – would it have half its power if it was just a microblogging site? Think how much less compulsive twitter would be if it said: “Tweet here”
What are you doing?
So how to avoid answering a question?
Simple: ask another. That way you wrest control from the person who asked the first question.
Responding with a question can cause even the most determined interviewer to pause. Take a look at this exchange between Margaret Thatcher and a private citizen called Diana Gould who challenged her repeatedly about the sinking of the Belgrano. Mrs Gould was entirely unwilling to let up though she reworded her challenge several times, not always as a question. The only point wher she pauses is when Mrs Thatcher asked her her name (at 1.54) and an exchange or two later where Thatcher says “you accept that, do you?” (2.07).
Interestingly, this was another example of a hiccup in the studio – Mrs Thatcher could see Diana Gould on the screen, as can we, but Mrs Gould had no video image of Mrs Thatcher and she said later that she had no idea that Thatcher was rattled, which contributed to her determination. Something to remember as more and more of our meetings take place on conference calls.
That video hints that the way to take control is to answer a question with a question, even though the question was incidental and Thatcher was not using this as a technique, preferring assertion to dialogue. By contrast, consider the following exchange between an unknown interviewer and Harold Wilson, one of Britain’s slythier Prime Ministers of the 1960s and 1970s:
Interviewer: Why do you always answer a question with a question?
Wilson: Who told you that?
I suspect that Wilson was taking the opportunistic micky out of the interviewer, rather than responding on blind instinct. Sales trainers call this “the porcupine technique” because you catch it and throw it on. I’ll consider this and many other ways that questions are used to sell later in this series.
Questioning to relieve tension
Don’ t think it’s all about bullying though. This power of questions to keep things moving can be used for good: to relieve tension rather than create it. The gentle art of small-talk is built around small questions, from the hair-dresser’s standby of “are you going away this year?” to the generic British greeting of “how are you?”
Tip: An entertaining game for long car journeys, and a training exercise for sales people, is to conduct a conversation entirely in questions. Responses can be long or short, rambling or concise, but every person who speaks has to end their answer with a question.
Want some homework? Do you want to try it out, to see how good you really are?
I found these in Sainsbury’s the other day. Ironic, for a company which is so fussy about its own apostrophe.
Sainsbury's basics, now with missing apostrophes
I love this packaging because I think that using the apostrophe for the posessive is a 16th century affectation (as I’ve said elsewhere) and I like the look of the words without excess punctuation.
It’s also so refreshing to find missing apostrophes, instead of unecessary ones. Big sis sent me some of those which I’ll post later in the week.
The opinions I express here here are my own, and not attributable to any employer past or present. All details about other people and some details about products have been changed.
Often operating as Business analysts or Project managers, Bridgers are committed a philosophy that says "1+1>2" and going the extra yard to speak simple English, Spanish, French, German . . more
I thought I had put more book reviews up here than I have. Here’s one of the ones I thought I’d posted. At the moment I’m doing a lot on Knowledge Management so here is high praise for 
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Often operating as Business analysts or Project managers, Bridgers are committed a philosophy that says "1+1>2" and going the extra yard to speak simple English, Spanish, French, German . .