Ask More

Ask More:  The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change, by Frank Sesno, AMACOM 2017, with Foreword by Wolf Blitzer

As a former White House Correspondent, Washington Bureau Chief, and talk show host for CNN, Sesno shares his approach to asking questions that reveal truths, encourage deeper thinking, and even lead to confrontations, and he supports his methodologies with stories from the field.  Included in his examples of differing approaches to questioning are encounters with General Colin Powell, Anderson Cooper and Jorge Ramos, as well as Nancy Pelosi, and Sesno's own life and career.  

Sesno calls this approach the skill of asking diagnostic questions, the kind of purposeful probing that gives us background, history, and details. The methodology may sound like journalism, but the questions must be well-constructed, and the process typically takes more than one try - think Deep Throat in All The Presidents' Men whose repeated meetings in a dark garage with Woodward and Bernstein handed them one small puzzle piece after another, until the reporters themselves were able to assemble a credible and salable puzzle. 

Key to the entire process is verification.  Research, collaborating other sources, actual untold events, and simply re-asking the same questions in a slightly different way, build the story.  In the case of Woodward and Bernstein, it meant knocking on doors and persistence in the face of witnesses' anxiety.  And finally, Sesno recommends that we practice listening.

Listening, in Sesno's world, is more than active engagement with the purpose of expressing sympathy or understanding.  Sesno wants us to learn how to use questioning and listening as the best method to key into details about where and when a problem occurs.  He advises us to listen for patterns, to hear word choices, and to repeat the process.  "If you can stay focused and keep asking," he says, "you will find it easier to extend your attention span and drill down to determine the cause of a problem."    Great management tools!

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,