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

If you get the opportunity, how will you solve the problem?
How will you be smarter and stronger if it works?
How will you learn from it if it doesn’t work?
Like Shelly Storbeck, Jean asks about a candidate’s setbacks and
shortcomings. She wants to hear how he discusses adversity or a particular
challenge that didn’t turn out perfectly. She wants to hear how he dealt with
disappointment or rallied when the team did not perform well. She asks the
question bluntly:
What’s been your worst failure?
“It’s amazing how many people want to hide from that question,” Jean tells

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me, explaining that she views failure, dealt with wisely and described sincerely,
as an asset. In the right context, failure represents a willingness to try something
new and untested. Every applicant, Jean believes, should come prepared to talk
about a failure.
What did you learn from it?
Fastball questions can be highly effective in job interviews, but they also
work in other contexts. As an interviewer, I ask this type of question a lot—
whether I’m speaking with a mayor, a mother, a CEO, or a teacher—because I
want to know how people think and handle crises. As Shelly Storbeck observed,
the right questions prompt candidates to provide lessons from their own
narrative.
Be Ready for the Curveball
Pitchers can’t live by fastballs alone, and the same applies in interviews and job
talks. When I interview candidates (for jobs or for politics) I like to throw
curveballs too, to shake things up and test the candidate’s spontaneity. Curveball
questions can come out of the blue—an unexpected topic or sudden shift.
Serious or funny, curveballs should be different from your run-of-the-mill
interview questions. They are looking for an unrehearsed response, a little
humor, or some humanizing insight into the candidate’s personality and thought
process.
In newsmaker interviews, I throw curveballs for similar effect. I remember
an interview I was doing at The George Washington University with Michael
Hayden, the former CIA director and retired four-star Air Force general. We
were talking about desperately serious things—terrorism, cyberattacks, and
rising threats from China and Russia. It was fascinating and it was important.
But I also wanted the audience to get to know Hayden as a human being, to have
a sense of how he thought, decided, and relaxed. I knew Hayden had a dry sense
of humor, so partway through the discussion I paused, turned to the audience,
and noted that even CIA directors get time off. He was the nation’s top spook. I
asked:
Spy movies … TV shows. What do you watch?

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Hayden lit up. “Homeland,” he replied with a smile. The show revolves
around a bipolar CIA operative, Carrie Mathison, alternately brilliant and
unhinged. Hayden knew people in the CIA just like that, he said. He worked
right alongside them. He went on to talk about life inside the CIA and how he
managed the pressures of that intense 24/7 job with the normal life that no one
much thought about. For just a few minutes, the conversation came back down
to earth. Hayden was funny and approachable. My question wasn’t brilliant, just
a little different, an intentional pause in the intense discussion we’d been having,
an effort to let the conversation—and the guest—breathe.
Curveball questions are often a part of job interviews. Jean Case told me she
throws curveballs to see how people react and whether they can answer
spontaneously and creatively. “We want to see how they respond when we ask
them very nonobvious and unexpected kinds of things,” she said. Since
originality and creativity are attributes she seeks in her applicants, she pays
special attention to the answers. One of her favorite questions is: