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

What are you doing?
Who are your customers?
What are you known for?
What are you proudest of?
Ask about the future in the present tense. Once you have articulated it, work
to achieve it. There are no guarantees, but you can now ask what it will take to
hit your benchmarks, who needs to do what, against what odds, and at what cost.
You build a brick at a time. But it’s a lot easier when you’ve seen the place and
know where you want to go and why.
Cutting Strings
How can questions convey authorship and drive genuine collaboration? How can
they encourage people to take ownership of an idea or a concept and think
differently, be original, and strive for the truly creative, maybe even the off-the-
wall?
I wanted to explore those questions from a different perspective, far from the
high-stakes stuff of space travel, politics, and technology. So I decided to go to
where imagination exists for its own sake: Hollywood. Now, when you think of
Hollywood, deep thought may not be the first thing that comes to mind.
However, it is a place where creativity is an industry, where collaboration is a
high-voltage necessity and success is measured in numbers—ratings and
revenue.
I called my friend Tom Hoberman—a super-agent lawyer in LA who knew
just about everyone—and asked him to connect me with the most creative, most
inquisitive person he could think of. In a nanosecond, he recommended Ed

---

Bernero, an insanely creative guy whose unlikely trajectory drove a supersonic
career.
Ed is a big man with a big personality. His voice booms and stories spill out
of him. He is a show runner, director, writer, and producer. He’s been involved
with hit shows like Third Watch, Criminal Minds, and Crossing Lines. He mines
the talent of everyone around him by shoving them out of their comfort zones
and into their stories and their characters. He does it with questions that place
writers, actors, and others into the imagined reality of story.
Ed isn’t a central-casting kind of Hollywood player. He grew up rough in
Chicago, seeing his father beat his mother. As a young kid he called the cops
more than once. He saw the police as his protectors. After a stint in the military
and jobs working for security firms, he became a Chicago cop himself. He lasted
nearly ten years—until he quit to save his soul.
Being the good storyteller he is, Bernero describes the scene when he
realized he was in trouble, the protagonist confronting his discovered
vulnerability. Ed and his partner were two good cops on patrol in a rough
neighborhood. They stopped at the liquor store where they checked in every day
and where a big guy I’ll call Lee kept them up to speed on what was happening
on the streets. Lee sold them cigarettes for a quarter a pack. Cheap cigarettes,
street-smart cops, and everyone was happy.
One night, Ed stopped by as usual, only to find a stranger behind the counter.
“Where’s Lee?” he asked.
“They killed him this morning,” the woman said. “Shot in the face.” Ed was
stunned. He went back to his patrol car and sat there. His first thought: “Where
am I going to get cigarettes for 25 cents a pack?” Then he stopped. Lee was
dead, and Ed found himself thinking about cheap cigarettes? He shook his head
and looked down as he told me the story. It was the moment he knew he had to
get out. “That job is a complete erosion of your humanity.”
Ed didn’t get out for another five years. But he began writing screenplays in
his basement. “Not as a job,” he told me, “but as therapy.”
One day, a friend was picking up an NBC executive from the airport to speak
at Northwestern University. Ed’s wife had slipped her one of Ed’s scripts and
asked her to pass it on to the visiting exec. Within days, Ed got a call. Good
stuff, he was told, sit tight. More agents and producers called asking for
meetings—invoking some of the biggest names in Hollywood: Steven Bochco,
John Wells, David Milch.
Three weeks shy of his tenth anniversary with the Chicago police department

---

Ed Bernero pulled his money out of his home, cashed in his pension, and hauled
his family across the country. Within a month, he had his first freelance gig—
with super-producer Steven Bochco on the CBS police drama Brooklyn South.
Following that, he worked with John Wells on the NBC hit show Third Watch.
Ed ended up doing more than 130 episodes of New York cop dramas, many of
them drawn from his own experience.
But Ed found Hollywood a strange place—riddled with back-lot intrigue,
hypersensitive egos, and no shortage of pandering and posturing. Directors,
producers, show runners, and studio execs maneuver for recognition and
influence. Writers think every word is a gem. Actors take their craft, and
themselves, very seriously. Just about everyone is insecure or desperate to get
the big break and will say anything to ingratiate them with whoever is calling the
shots. Ed once wrote a deliberately terrible script and took it to a crew meeting
to see if anyone would call him on it. They didn’t. He realized that if he was
going to get genuinely creative work out of his team and not just his own ideas
thrown back at him, he needed to engage them differently. He couldn’t bark
orders—he had to ask.
You can’t treat people like puppets on a string, Ed told me.
The creativity Ed wants to inspire requires collaboration. “I want everyone to
be involved in the show,” he said. It starts in the writers’ room, where ideas
collide in mid-thought and mid-air. The room is dominated by a big table that is
bounded by whiteboards and littered with chips and pretzels and energy food.
This is where Ed’s writers “break the story.” They jot down an idea, kick around
plot points, story elements, twists and turns, and imagine how the whole thing
unfolds.
Ed wants his writers to construct original, bold, surprising stories—to “color
outside the lines.” But he knows that if he tells writers what he’s thinking about
a scene or a character, they will be tempted to run with it, play it safe, and give
him what they think he wants. So he uses questions to challenge the room.