The Art of Answering Questions

Because I’ve been a university researcher, spy and consultant, I’ve answered a lot of questions.

Some of the questions have been factual (“What is . . . ?”). Some have been procedural (“How should . . . ?”). Others have been strategic (“What if . . . ?”).

To answer those questions, I used data and analysis. In my book A Spy’s Guide To Thinking, there’s a simple model that puts data and analysis together with decision and action. It looks like this:

But answering questions doesn’t start with data. Answering questions starts with a decision-maker asking a question:

The decision-maker could be a general or a NSC staffer or the president. The question they ask could be, “What’s the troop strength on that border?” or “What’s the latest technology in their weapons program?” or “Who’s the real decision-maker on the other side?”

Unanswered questions keep us awake at night. Unanswered questions drive us to spend money and time and blood and sweat and tears. When you’re a spy, unanswered questions take you to dangerous places.

Nobody likes an unanswered question. Nobody.

Which is why people guess.

When someone asks you a question, chances are they’ve already guessed at an answer. To get that answer, they extrapolated from a small amount of data. Or they mapped a past experience on to the current situation. Or they heard something from somebody somewhere that might be the answer.

Which means the first rule of answering every question is:

YOUR ANSWER IS COMPETING AGAINST THE ANSWER ALREADY IN THE QUESTIONER’S HEAD.

Which means your answer is already behind. Your answer is losing. Your answer is in second place in the race to be accepted. Because the answer that’s in their head is already in their head.

Which is why answering question is an art. It’s an art because you’re not just placing your answer in their head; you’re also displacing the answer that’s already there.

There are several ways you can do this. One is through authority.

When you’re a recognized authority, people relax. People let you take over. People let you operate on them. Which is important, because to put your answer in place of theirs, you’re going to do something like brain surgery.

Brain surgeons use drugs to relax their patient. They knock them out. So they can remove the tumor or relieve pressure or correct a defect without any resistance.

But when you’re answering a question, your patient is awake. Often, staring at you. And they’re resisting you because they’ve already got an answer in their head. Answering questions is like doing brain surgery with the patient awake and fighting everything you do.

You can see it in their faces. There’s hardness. There’s clenching. They’re holding on to the answer that’s already there (In the language of my books, the competition against the idea in the other person’s head is a zero-sum game you must win to get into the positive-sum game of cooperation).

If you can’t establish authority, the next step is to create distance between the questioner and the answer in their head.

To do that, you need to know the answer in their head.

To find out what answer is in their head, you can ask them. But that has a downside: By stating the answer, they’ll justify it. They’ll get more attached to it. They may even feel the need to stick to it after you present a better answer.

Which is why you use metaphors, stories and case studies.

Consultants have an arsenal of case studies. And the best university researchers are good at telling stories. People who know how to convince other people of their answer know how to frame questions, develop characters, create suspense and deliver payoffs. They know how to tell stories.

But even more important are the stories from the questioner. You should encourage stories. You should ask for stories. And when they tell you stories, you should listen. Because their stories will tell you the answers that are already in their head.

Plus, telling stories creates distance. When the questioner puts their answer in the context of a story, it becomes less personal. Less attached. And easier to displace.

If you create enough distance, they lose their attachment to their answer. They might even forget it was theirs.

But you can’t do that in a book, unfortunately. Books are a one-way storytelling device.

When I’m writing books, I can’t listen to the readers’ stories in order to understand their answers. In my books, I create distance from their answers another way.

I do it by putting them in my head. In my books, the reader is in my head as I face a new enemy on a subway car, build a strategy for a dangerous source and look for surveillance on my first day in alias.

With those stories, if I did it well, the reader gets out of their head and into mine. The reader gets distance from their answers, which makes it easier for them to accept my answers. I can give the reader a better way to think about thinking. A better way to build a strategy. A better way to manage risks.

Those answers might be rejected, still. Which means they’ll probably go back to their old answer. Because nobody likes an unanswered question. Nobody.

Two things might have happened when you read the subject line. The first thing was you reformulated it into a question like: “How do I answer questions?”

Because nobody likes unanswered questions, you probably answered it with: “Straightforwardly” or “With data” or “With insights.”

To displace those answers, I started with authority (“university researcher, spy and consultant”). But that probably wasn’t enough. So I gave you a diagram that objectified the question, which created more distance.

But that probably wasn’t enough, either. So I gave you the metaphor of brain surgery, which created a little more distance. But that probably wasn’t enough either, so I put you in my head as I write books. With a little bit of rhetorical jiu jitsu, the fact that you already had an answer in your head proved my point. Which made you step back and think about it more. Which put distance between you and the answer that was already in your head.

With all those ways of creating distance between you and the answer in your head, your answer became easier to displace.

If your answer was displaced, you’re ready for the answer to the question of how to answer questions: To answer questions, you first need to displace the answer that’s already in the questioner’s head.

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To read more about DADA, you can get A Spy’s Guide To Thinking at Amazon, or you can download the free PDF 6 Ways To Use The DADA Process In Leadership, When You See Instability and For What You Do Next.