Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change pdfdrive com

Why do you do this?
How is this moral?
He challenged the priest directly, telling him “It wasn’t right for an old man
to hit a small child.”
As Ramos grew older, he became acutely aware of another abuse of power:
his country’s corrupt politics. Again, he felt a duty to question it and expose
those responsible. But, again, he collided with a culture that considered itself
above challenge and certainly not accountable to a young reporter. In his first job
in Mexican television, Ramos clashed with his bosses and with the censors who
wanted the stories told their way. At age 24, Ramos moved to Los Angeles to
study journalism at UCLA and pursue a career in the United States. He has been
asking his questions ever since. He asked Fidel Castro why there was no
democracy in Cuba. He asked Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez about his
abuses of power and broken promises. He grilled former Mexican president
Carlos Salinas about his role in the assassination of a political rival. He asked
Colombian president Ernesto Samper about allegations that he was on the take
from Colombian drug lords.
He did not make many friends. After one assignment, Ramos returned to the
office to find a chilling gift—a funeral spray of flowers. They had been delivered
anonymously shortly after he received a death threat. But Ramos wants to make
people in power feel the heat, to challenge them directly on their broken
promises, flagrant contradictions, and outright lies.
Ramos counsels that confrontational questioning must be approached from a
position of strength. “Questions can be used as weapons. If you’re going to
confront someone in power, there has to be an element of aggressiveness.” You
must have the courage of your convictions and realize this isn’t a popularity

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contest. “Whenever I go into an interview I assume two things: If I don’t ask the
question no one else will, and I’m always assuming this may be my last
exchange.”
Ramos believes we should be asking for much more accountability. We
should demand it at every level of our lives. “We all have the right—the
responsibility—to challenge and question powerful people.”
An Audience Helps
You don’t need a television show to be effective when asking for accountability.
If you have the basics—solid information, a clear objective to your questioning,
and enough spine and moral indignation to stand up to authority—you can have
impact, especially if you understand your platform and know your audience.
Invoking community is one of the surest ways to give more heft to your case and
more edge to your questions.
Thomas Wilson’s questions were powerful. But it was the audience around
him that made his appeal impossible to ignore. Wilson was a specialist with the
Tennessee National Guard. He was serving in Iraq at a time when large numbers
of U.S. service members were dying as a result of improvised explosive devices
—IEDs—that regularly ripped through poorly protected Humvees and other
vehicles. At a gathering that was supposed to be a pep rally—the New York
Times described it as a “morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound
troops”—Wilson raised his hand and asked the visiting secretary of defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, a pair of right-between-the-eyes questions.
Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of
scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our
vehicles?
Why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?
The place burst into applause. Wilson was asking what everyone in the room
was thinking. Rumsfeld was caught off guard and, uncharacteristically, at a loss
for words.
“Now, settle down, settle down,” he told the crowd. “Hell, I’m an old man,
it’s early in the morning, and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”
“It was highly unusual for soldiers to dare to confront Mr. Rumsfeld
directly,” the Times pointed out. But Wilson’s questions were poignant and

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accurate and brilliantly framed. They drew attention to the problem of under-
armored vehicles and increased the pressure to fix the problem. Wilson’s
platform—a troop town hall in Kuwait—was compelling. His community was
reinforcing. He invoked the crowd and painted a vivid word picture of the
problem. He gave it a moral undertone and framed it as a shameful betrayal of
those who were doing the fighting and dying. And it wasn’t a speech; it was a
question.
The Pentagon felt the heat and amped up efforts to provide the armor the
vehicles needed.
Whether at a town hall or a staff meeting, confronting a powerful person is
not easy. But having a community on your side creates an alliance. Your
questions become the group’s questions, harder to dismiss as the ranting of a
malcontent and easier to amplify because of the implied voices ready to join you.
If you’ve done your homework, are prepared to stand up to the pressure of the
encounter, and have crafted your questions so that you succinctly express the
problem and the challenge, you can take the high ground and demand answers.
No Way Out
The situations, personalities, and dynamics of this line of inquiry vary widely.
But whether you are confronting a politician who has broken a promise or a
salesman who has ripped you off, a student who has cheated on an exam or an
employee who has padded an expense report, you should prepare for an evasive
or confrontational response.
Effective confrontational questioners have to be fast and uncompromising
listeners. It’s what good lawyers do in a courtroom and what good interviewers
do in front of a camera. They pick up on voice tone and swoop in on hesitation.
They shut down attempts to filibuster or self-aggrandize. They keep the laser
aimed at the core issue they’re after.
I’ve talked a lot about open-ended questions, those broad, nonthreatening
inquiries that invite people to answer as they wish and go where they want.
Accountability questioning is different. You want precision. You want to pin
someone down. You don’t want to ask a question that lets someone off the hook
or invites a speech she can use to obscure the argument or change the subject.
Often, questions that elicit one-word answers can be the most effective crowbars
to the truth. Yes-no questions.

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