The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life by Jeff Wetzler

Episode Date: February 28, 2024

Ask: Tap Into the Hidden Wisdom of People Around You for Unexpected Breakthroughs In Leadership and Life by Jeff Wetzler https://amzn.to/3UWL5cT Globally recognized expert on learning and leadership, Jeff Wetzler offers a hands-on, surprisingly effective way to find out what others really think, know, and feel. Ask leads to smarter decisions, more creative solutions, and deeper relationships. Too often, we don’t find out what’s truly on others’ hearts and minds because we don’t know how to ask the right questions in the right ways. Co-founder of Transcend and former international business consultant and Teach for America executive Jeff Wetzler wants to show you how to fix that. In Ask, he brings you a powerful method called The Ask Approach™, based on a simple premise: that tapping into what other people truly think, know, and feel is a game-changing superpower. In Section I, Wetzler reveals the most common things that people think and feel but often keep to themselves, as well as the key reasons why they choose to withhold information that could be valuable to you and your organization. Section II delves into the five steps of the Ask Approach, each answering an essential question: Choose Curiosity: How can you awaken your curiosity to make new discoveries and unexpected connections? Make it Safe: How do you make it easier for people to tell you hard things? Pose Quality Questions: What questions will best tap into the wisdom of anyone you ask? Listen to Learn: How can you hear what someone is really trying to tell you? Reflect & Reconnect: How do you turn talk into action? Section III helps you make asking an everyday superpower – not only for yourself but also for your team and organization, as well as for the next generation and society at large. The skills and messages of Ask could not be more timely. In a fast-changing world where AI is supplanting an increasing range of skills, the ability to learn from and connect with other people is one of the most important, fulfilling and uniquely human capabilities to master.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings, and that makes it official. Welcome to the big show.

We certainly appreciate you guys having you here and being a part of the show. Refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrissfoss, linkedin.com, 4chesschrissfoss, youtube.com, 4chesschrissfoss, all those crazy places that we are on the internet. We have an amazing gentleman on the show. He is coming to us with his latest book that's just going to be coming out here May 7th, 2024. It's called Ask. Tap into the hidden wisdom of people around you for unexpected breakthroughs in leadership and life. Jeff Wetzler joins us on the show today. He's going to be talking about his amazing book. He is the co-CEO of Transcend,

a nationally recognized innovative organization, and he's an expert in learning and human potential with more than 25 years of experience. He combines unique leadership experiences in business and education as a management consultant to the world's top corporations, a learning facilitator for leaders around the world, and as a Chief Learning Officer at Teach for America. He earned a doctorate in adult learning and leadership from Columbia University and a bachelor's in psychology from Brown University. Based in New York, he is a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network and is an Edmund Hillary Fellow. Welcome to the show, Jeff. How are you? I'm good. It's great to be here with you, Chris. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs.

Askapproach.com. Great temple. There you go. That's also my pickup strategy at bars. There you go. So is this your first book? This is the first book. Absolutely. Congratulations. Congratulations. These are always fun to do. So give us a 30,000 overview of your book. Ask tasks, tap into the hidden wisdom of people around you. Great. So the problem that the book is trying to tackle is the fact that all of us as individuals, leaders, people, family members, friends, we are surrounded by others in our lives. Those could be our bosses, our clients, our customers, our brothers, sisters, spouses, et cetera, who are holding inside their heads tremendously valuable thoughts, insights, perspectives, ideas, feedback for us that too

often they just don't tell us and we never find out. We remain kind of in the dark with that. And are they hiding it from us because they have an evil agenda or? No, we can't rule out the possibility that they have an evil agenda. But in my experience, there's a lot that you can do to actually coax it out of them in ways that are good, not only for ourselves, but for them and for our relationships as well. And that's really what the book focuses on, how to do that. There you go. So an example of this could be, so years ago, I had my career company. We had been running for several years.

It was doing well, but we were making a lot of money with mortgage companies. And I remember wanting to get into the white-collar business because we were in the blue-collar business of that. And my father worked at a mortgage company as a loan officer. And so I had asked him several times, I'm like, so how does a mortgage company work? What is the model, the business model? And he's like, I don't know. I just do loans.

And I'm like, what do you see at your office? What do you see? What goes on? And there's a certain, when you're an entrepreneur, you kind of understand business models. There's a certain when you're an entrepreneur you kind of understand business models there's a certain way it has to work i mean there's a certain i mean there's kind of a blueprint to a model but you know there's there's details but you have to fill those in and so one day i was just like i'm gonna freaking find out how a mortgage company works for him and i'm gonna dig it out of him and so i started peppering him with questions about,

okay, so what departments are there in your office? Oh, there's the processing department. There's an engineering department. There's this department. Okay, so what do they do? Oh, they do this. And within about 10 to 15 minutes, I knew how a mortgage company worked, even though he technically did not and kept claiming he didn't know.

It wasn't that he was hiding anything from me. It was just that, I don't know, he hadn't really thought about or didn't know how to assimilate, and he needed someone to guide him through the things. So is that an example of where you're talking about? That is a beautiful example. Yeah, and in fact, the book focuses on a method for overcoming the problem that I was describing

called the ask approach. And the ask approach has five steps to it. The first of which is choose curiosity. And I think what you were just illustrating with your story was unrelenting curiosity that you had. It was either unrelenting curiosity I was going to choke it out of him.

One of the two. Exactly, exactly. But you knew that there was something that you could learn from him. You weren't taking it as a given when he said, I don't really know. You just continued to remain curious. And that's the first step. I'll tell you just to go through the other ones.

The second step is to make it safe for other people to tell us. Because a lot of the reasons why people don't share things with us is they actually don't feel, you know, they're worried about the impact. They're worried it's going to hurt the relationship. They, that we're going to judge them, et cetera. I don't know if that was a play in your situation, but in a lot of situations, including my own as a leader, I have discovered the hard way people don't actually feel safe sometimes to speak the truth, especially if they think it's going to, you know, make me not happy or that kind of thing. There's a whole set of things we can do to make it safe.

I've got another example for you. So one of the things we had in our company was in the culture that I was trying to cultivate, we had this saying that was called the only stupid question is the unasked question. Yes. And the format of it was what you're talking about was to try to provide a safe environment that if you don't understand something, if you need to answer a question we're not going to treat you like you're stupid because you didn't pay attention in training we're going to treat you like okay that's great thanks for asking let's make sure you're clear on that and to make it safe and

there's some environments of business that they don't make it safe to you know be transparent ask questions because people are like, are you an idiot? And that's not safe. I had a situation with my very first job out of college decades ago where one of the senior leaders said, you can ask any question you want in the first six months of the job. And after that, forget it. You better know what you know. I asked him a question at like month five and a half. And he chewed my head off. And I think he forgot we were still in the six-month period. But at that point, I was not going to be asking him more questions. In the contract.

Give us the other three, if you would. Absolutely. So the third is what I call pose quality questions. A lot of us think we know how to ask questions. But the truth is we never really get taught what's a good question versus what's a crummy question. And I think the story that you started with illustrates sometimes when you say to someone, in this case, your dad, how does it work? And they don't know. That's not a question that's going to actually get it out of them. You actually have to do what you're saying,

which is break it down or let me see what you see or tell me a story or walk these through. And so the third step is really distinguishing between crummy questions and quality questions. And crummy questions can be anything like attack questions or sneaky questions or questions that really are hard for people to answer. But quality questions are questions that really help us learn something from the other person. And probably encourage that safety sort of thing. Absolutely. Like, hey, if you don't, I mean, it okay you don't understand but let's try and figure it out and we we promise not to shock you with the battery until you tell us what we're looking that's right that's right yeah that's number three there you go number four

number four is you know once you ask the question everything depends on what you hear how well you listened so step four is listen to learn and no I'm just kidding. I love it. And you know, it's amazing if we, you know, if we were, it's amazing how much we don't hear. If, if, if we were to watch the recording of this podcast and go back several times, I guarantee that each time we would hear things that we didn't hear before. You hear that people, you need to listen damn podcast over and over and over again at least three times and i think three times because it turns out that there's actually three channels to be listening through really one one channel is the you know is the content of what someone's saying the actual words the meanings

that you know the data etc the second channel is the emotion what are the actual feelings that are being conveyed and the third channel is the actions. What are the actual feelings that are being conveyed? And the third channel is the actions. What is someone actually doing in the conversation? Most of us are kind of gravitate towards one or another. For me, I've historically gravitated towards the content of the conversation. But what's being conveyed is actually equally important in all three of those channels. And so part of this step is training ourselves to kind of triple the amount of information we take in if we can learn to listen through all three channels oh there you go so you need to listen to the podcast every time at least three times people three times once for content

once for emotion once for action yeah and then do it a fourth just just to make sure you got it all just exactly i would you know i would talk to like leading doing the research for the book i would talk to leading journalists and they would say that i would talk to like leading doing the research for the book i would talk to leading journalists and they would say that they would they would they often record their interviews with with people and they will go back and say like 50 more they hear every single time they hear that they hadn't before and i'm i'm like if these are what professional listeners do journalists and they miss 50 of it every single time imagine how much we're missing yeah sometimes it's that little nuance too that's the really the kernel of of whatever and then number five is

reflect and connect exactly so basically this is to say once someone actually tells you what's you know what they have to say and you and you ask the right question you listen to it then how do you turn that into action and the kind of magic ingredient for turning it into action is reflection. And reflection is kind of a lost art. A lot of people think of me, reflection means you're like a monk on a mountain, you know, on a monastery. But in the book, I talk about very simple steps. You know, how do you, first of all, just kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, because not everything someone's telling you is necessary or useful, or you have to take it in. And then there's some steps to say, all right, how does it enrich my understanding of this person and the understanding of the situation?

What am I going to do about this? What's the deeper meaning that I should be taking from this as well? And so we can break reflection down into a series of actionable steps. And then once we actually say, all right, here's what I'm taking away. It's really helpful to go back to the person who shared with you and say, first of all, thanks for sharing that. Second of all, here's what I'm going to do with what you said. And third of all, did I get it right? Because maybe there's something I got wrong.

I don't know if you did that in the example with your dad and you sort of said, here's what I got from it or not. There might've been a fallout. We ended up hiring him. But to show you how powerful that 10 minute to 15 minute conversation was, where I just walked him through what you know the procedures were and what are the departments and so what is the licensing like that you have to do and how do you you know do you do you know what the you know is there government licensing you have

to get or how does it work just that 10 to 15 minute conversation we built a multi-million dollar company at a four thousand dollars investment in brick and mortar times to a company that lasted for almost 20 years and incredible. I mean, that's a billion dollars in mortgages. Yeah. All that from a 10 minute conversation. All that from questions that you asked him and, and, and, and at the end, he still didn't even know.

And you, I sat there just going, I've, I've opened up the whole way it works to you and talking to you and you still don't know how it works. Okay. Yeah. The fancy, the fancy term for that is tacit knowledge. It's knowledge that people have that they don't even realize they have. If you were to go to a great athlete and you're sort of saying like, how do you actually shoot baskets? How do you hit a tennis ball, et cetera? They may not be able to describe it to you, even though it's kind of deep in them. And my sense is that your dad had that knowledge that was completely tacit. And what you did is made that tacit knowledge explicit so that you can actually access it yourself. Yeah. And so we put together the mortgage company and ran off,

but that's a good example. I've heard this many times, sorry, on the show many times. I learned a long time ago, early on with our companies that I was not the corner purveyor of all the greatest ideas in the world. In fact, for a while, I was hitting some home runs, but then the home runs kind of ended, kind of like Elon Musk's run out of home runs. And I started to realize that I was not the purveyor of all the great ideas and I needed people with ideas. And I learned very early on part of the culture that we built, like I said, that safe environment, the only stupid question is the unasked question and a few other rules that we had made it so that, you know, I could, I could ask people on, on how they do things.

One of the other things we had, and I still do this today, I think it annoys some people, but one of the things I do when people ask why I do things or why a system works. Okay. Okay. How do I teach an employee how to use this machine? Okay. Let's just call it that. Some machine on the floor.

Not only would we teach them how to use the machine, but why we do it the way we do it and why that's important. And we found that that next level of added thing, instead of just teaching people to mindlessly do shit because they were just told that way, why do we do it this way? I don't know. I don't know. We would teach them the why of how we would do it. And then what we found that came out of that, and I may have gotten this from Tom Peters or one of the millions of business books I read. One of the reasons we found, one of the things we found out of it was because they understood the why, if they saw a way to improve or innovate, they would come to back to me and, you know,

Hey Chris, you taught me how to use the machine this way, but have you ever thought of using the machine this way? And nine times out of 10, because of my innovation that I would always be, you know, checking and double checking, they would, I would be like, yeah, we actually did try that way. And that way really doesn't work, but thank you. I, you know, we really appreciate you. You're thinking about this. That's what we want. And, but you know, every now and then that brick of gold, you know, that golden goose egg would come out and they'd be like, you know, you could save like X number of dollars and X number of repairs. And you could, you know, you could save like X number of dollars and X number of repairs.

And you could, you could, you could close the gap on what it takes to process from front to back and, and save time and money with this idea. And you'd be like, holy crap, you hit it. And I was really good in my companies at like, man, when someone tell me it, I'd be like, there you're, that's the idea. I'd point him. I'd be like, you nailed it. That's, that you're, that's the idea. I'd point at him. I'd be like, you nailed it. That's, that's the, that's, that's what we're looking for.

And so, you know, being able to identify that, being able to reward that, being able to have an environment is, is really important for doing a lot of what you're talking about in these five steps. Yeah. And I think you're, you know, what you're showing is that, and I think this is true in, in every organization, there are incredibly valuable ideas right on the front line that people are only going to share if they actually believe that you, that it's safe and you're not going to punish them for it and that you're interested in it. And I love, I love how you created the environment where people could share that. And those things can be worth millions of dollars. Oh, yeah. One million. They're worth millions, dude.

From somebody. Oh, yeah. And I think it's very rare for leaders to really tap into that. I mean, I think I'm very impressed. Yeah. So, Jeff, why didn't you interview me for your book? I should have. Clearly, I should have.

Why are you holding out on me, man? You would have been one of the stories. Yeah. You'll be in my next book. There you go. We built a great empire off of those two companies. And, and and yeah i mean it was only 10 to 15 minutes in fact i don't think i put that in my book so i guess that's a book too so tell us a little bit about yourself we kind of skipped over getting into you and selling you to the audience the audience is always curious about

the people we have on the show what what got you into the field that you're in studying people how did you grow up what motivated you want to study you know you you said you kind of i think you featured in some adults and human behavior and stuff like that what made you interested in that yeah i mean i've always i've always had an interest in learning and in psychology from the beginning i remember when i was a kid every year that i was in school let's say i was in second grade or third grade and i thought what i want to be when i grow up i always wanted to be the teacher of the grade that I was in school, let's say I was in second grade or third grade. And I thought, what do I want to be when I grow up? I always wanted to be the teacher of the grade that I was in. I was always asking myself the question, what would I do differently if I was the teacher? And maybe because I was bored or something like that, but that's always where my mind went.

But the other thing I would say when I grew up, I didn't always feel myself that same level of safety that I talked about in terms of like my school environment and peers and things like that. And so I ended up being more quiet than I just felt, you know, staying quiet, kind of don't stick your neck out. You're a little, you're less likely to get, you know, get in trouble. And so I realized that I would be, I kind of developed a habit of asking questions more than saying things, but I knew I had a lot going on inside my head. And I realized if I've got all this going on inside my own head think about what other people might have going on inside their own heads that i'm not you know that i'm not finding out either yeah seeing some of those people on the internet

some of them you don't want to find out what's in there i mean uh george carlin said it best i think how dumb the average person is really is 50 of people are dumber than that but enough of cracking on this fuck right now they're sitting around going, I think someone's insulting me, but I can't tell. And then, you know, fast forward, my first job out of college, I worked at this incredible place called the Monitor Group, which was a global consulting firm. And we had a guru there named Chris Argyris, and he worked at, you know, a business school, an education school. And he said, the thing that he studies is why the smart, successful people consistently fail to learn from each other. His whole job is like, how do you teach smart people actually how to learn? And he did this incredible method with us. And this is what,

this is kind of what got me into this, where he said, let's take out a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle of the paper on the right hand side of the paper. I want you to write down the script of a recent kind of challenging or tough conversation that you had with someone just as a play i said this she said this i said this she said this etc and then on the left side of the paper what we call the left hand column i want you to write all of your unspoken thoughts and feelings and so it's kind of like almost like a an x-ray into someone's brain of what they're actually not saying. And as I got deeper into this and I got a chance to read all these people's left-hand columns, you know, clearly there's some junk in there, but I, every single case I read,

I saw, oh my God, you're not saying that to that person. If they only knew the reason why you object, if they only knew the thing that you're actually, the impact they're having on you, how much faster could you get to an answer? How much time could you save etc and so i just saw over and over again how little was being shared but the other pattern that i saw over and over again is if you were to just score these dialogues in terms of questions or statements questions or statements like 99 statements very few questions and so questions were the key to unlocking this gold mine that's in the left-hand

column and that kind of got me fired up there you go so you know yeah go ahead so with that guru that you talked to was it basically you know in assessing whether smart people can learn was that kind of like a sampling of the dunning kruger sort of study where you know people who actually think they're smart maybe aren't quite as smart. And the people that, that know the limits of their knowledge. Yes, exactly. You know, they, they're, they're the ones that kind of know where they're at on the curve and therefore they're, they can master stuff. That's right. And people who often are kind of conventionally rewarded for being smart sometimes can also become a little bit brittle because they're like, what if i don't get the a what happens if i don't get rewarded etc and so

they feel like they gotta have the right answer and they feel like they gotta and yet somebody who maybe has been knocked around a little bit more or hasn't been sent those messages like of course there's wisdom around me i gotta laugh i gotta ask questions and i'm not i'm not assuming i have to be the smartest person in the room and to me the smartest person in the room. And to me, the smartest person in the room is the one who asks questions. That's right. Exactly. One of the great books I read years ago was Anthony Robbins' second book. Was it The Secret Within?

But one of his chapters is the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions or something to that effect. Yep. And asking questions is so important. And that's how I did a lot of my innovation with my companies. That's how I solved a lot of problems innovation with my companies that's how i solved a lot of problems is asking questions why do we do it this way is a great way you know a lot of people tapped into that for business you know why do we do it this way oh we always do it this way it's not a good enough answer and times change business models change environment changes

economies change you can't just keep riding that same model into the thing but i like the dunning kruger aspect of it you know understanding there's a real difference i think that you've identified where there's a there's a difference between making statements where you're assuming or you're you're you're you're stating your theory as opposed to trying to understand where the other person is coming from and drawing a bridge it's like me just throwing down a wall at you going, this is the way it is, Jeff. Exactly. And where instead I create a bridge for you to welcome you across and go, how can I understand what you're seeing better?

How do you see it? Yeah. And then why? And one of the question strategies I talk about is I call it dig deeper. Don't just take the first thing that someone says, but say, where does that come from? And what are you seeing that I might not be seeing it? Tell me a story about that kind of thing. The other, the other interesting thing is that it doesn't have to be an either or between

making statements or asking questions. One of the most powerful things can be to make a statement and then invite people to help you see what you're missing. And so, you know, here's so here's what I actually do think. I'm not going to hide the ball. I'm going to tell you what I think about this thing. And I want to know, what's your reaction? What am I overlooking?

What am I missing? How do you see it differently? Yeah, we used to do pit crews of that with our company. We used to call it looking into the dragon's mouth. I love that. There's a different analogy for it, but that's what I called it. And we would sit down with whatever my innovation or my idea was, and I would be like, okay, what's wrong with this idea? Why is this not going to work?

How can this fail? And if we were making a big financial decision, purchasing decision, or something that was going to take a little bit of capital or risk, or maybe change a business model a little bit that could disrupt the business, we know, we'd sit down and we'd be like, what's the worst thing that can happen here? Yeah. And once we could determine that we could live with looking in the mouth of the dragon and if we got burned and, you know, how we, how we could mitigate the risk too, was part of it.

But yeah, a lot of it was like, how, what am I not seeing here? You know? And I really, I feel like I really should have interviewed you for the book because I think that's another. I mean, just to sort of like focus on what you just said for a second, two things stand out about that. One is, again, you're creating safety for people. Because when you're saying to them, how could this go wrong? They know that if they tell you why your idea is a terrible idea, you're not going to shoot them. You're actually going to be appreciative of them. So that's rare. And then the second thing is the

very nature of your question. We call that inviting disconfirming data, where you're literally saying to people, I want you to disconfirm my theory as to what I can hear. And most leaders do the opposite. They basically say, here's what we should do. And please follow me. Yeah. Bark orders. Yeah. Bark orders. Yeah, bark orders and being seen as a good employee is one who says, let's make it happen as opposed to here's what's going wrong. I bark orders after we flush out all the problems. Yeah, there you go. Just go along with the data.

I like that. But no, yeah, I'll send you a copy of my book. Some of it's in my book. I just learned that I was not the purveyor of great ideas. You know, you hit a few foul balls and you're like, okay, I need to start talking and trusting some other people. And I learned, like you talk about in your book, that there are people that have no idea that they have the good idea in their head.

They have no idea. And you've got to be able to pick it out of them, draw it out of them, flush it out of them, choke it out of them. No, don't do that, people. The bribe it out of them, draw it out of them, flush it out of them, choke it out of them. No, don't do that people. The bribe it out of them. And sometimes they just have that one, the one person you'll be sitting in a room and that there'll be that one person that, you know, never has any good ideas. You know, I used to always, my one, my one Forrest Baker, who was my last CEO, who gave me my CEO training send off for the last details I needed, I used to always say to him, I go,

why do we have negative Nancy Bob on the board? And he's always just negative. Whatever idea you have and the board likes, he's just going to tube it. He's just going to crap all over it. And you just know what he's going to do because he's always going to be the antithesis, the opposite of whatever you want to do. And he goes, Chris, you never want to have a board of a bunch of yes men. He goes, that guy might be negative a lot of the time, but he's going to give you things to think about and consider.

Kind of like what we talked about with looking in the dragon's mouth. But he goes, when that guy's dead on, he's dead on and he's going to save you millions of dollars. And all your yes men are telling you that was a great idea boss he goes that guy when he hits money he's on the money and you better be listening to him or else your car's going off the cliff i was like wow i guess that makes sense but he sure is freaking annoying but i love the advice because i think part of the whole thing about this is this is not just about kind of like tips and tactics and techniques. This is a kind of about a stance towards people and a,

and a deeper underlying stance, which is basically there's something I can learn from anyone. And even if it's the negative person or if it's who, you know, the quiet person, whoever, there's something in there of value that I can really learn from that person. And I think the other thing that comes up from what you're saying is when we're asking, when we're kind of pulling it out of that person, it's not just for us. You know, when you actually help somebody else see that they have an incredible idea or thought or give words to something that was tacit for them,

you're helping them be self-expressed. You're helping them see the value that they have as well. And it's, I think it's a, I think it's a gift to both people. Definitely. I agree with you. And as you mentioned, it's a gift to the organization of being able to look at their people in a different way. Because if you look at people as an untapped resource or the potential for great ideas, I've talked about this before on the show, one of the big things that set my standards for culture and environment was peter sender's book the fifth discipline discipline and so i always want to create a learning environment yes what we talked about here and and and so i used a lot of his tools to do that and so a big fan of his work yeah great guy the workbook was awesome for our companies. And so I wanted to have that, but companies need to realize that their innovations are there.

I mean, you don't need to pay McKinsey to come show up and tell you a bunch of whatever. I'm sure they're a good company or whatever. But a lot of your resources are right inside your hallways, right? I think that's so true. I think there is this idea of collective genius. There is genius in any team, in any organization. And the question is, is the leader ignoring it, squashing it, or actively activating it? And I think this approach of the ask approach isn't just a one-on-one thing. This can be between a leader and an entire organization. This can be built inside the DNA of organizations. And we have a chapter in the book of how do you actually weave this into the fabric of your organization? There's things you can do all the way from hiring for it, to training for it, to evaluating for it, to celebrating it, et cetera. All of that is part

of what it takes to unlock the collective genius of an organization. There you go. We've had people on the show that do surveys within companies and they collect these surveys that can be very brutal very honest they're anonymous of course you know how's the ceo doing how's the board of directors doing how's management doing and then then they in cases that the budget is large enough they do it on everybody so then your co-workers are going how bad does bob smell at lunch when he makes salmon in the microwave you know that sort of. But it's a brutal, honest way of passing that data around. I watched something that I think it was the CEO of HP and his schedule every day and how he moves about his company. And a lot of it is asking questions and listening that

he does. He goes and meets with the front line. He goes and meets with just anybody. He comes across their employees. He does a little bit of meet and greets and pass around, but he's usually asking them questions. How are we doing? What's going on? What are you seeing? And that was another thing I learned at being the captain of a ship that I likened a lot when I was a CEO.

Probably another good example is being a president in a White House. There's a bubble around that sort of office. I remember reading 1,000 Days with John F. Kennedy, and I think it was Schlesinger who wrote the book, and the bubble that you can experience where you don't have the information. Maybe a ship is better. So like on a ship, I don't know what's going on underneath. I don't know what's going on with the rudder. I don't know what's going on underneath. I don't know what's going on with the rudder.

I don't know what's going on with the engines. You know, I can get feedback, but I'm not there. And so you have these blind spots or scotomas. And I think I took them from Anthony Robbins, some blind spots, scotomas. And then Lou Tice taught me the sequence of the nine dot experiment where you create nine dots in a box and if you've ever done the out outside the box experiment yes i have yeah you have to draw four lines without picking up

your pen and that was life-changing for me because i didn't realize i had actually been doing that thinking out of the box since i was young but you know i just i just learned that that was one of the questions we always ask when we'd have our little look in the dragon's mouth what are the scotomas what are we missing what are our blind spots absolutely and i think all of that is hugely relevant to the first step of the ask approach which is choosing curiosity because it's so much easier to get curious about stuff if you're aware that you have blind spots oh yeah it's so much easier if you're aware that you don't know what's going on underneath the boat or all those kinds of things and so many of us i think operate for either unaware that we have blind spots or forgetting that we have blind spots. And that's part of what leads us to be not as curious. And so

a huge part of getting curious is illuminating for ourselves. What are the blind spots that we have? There you go. Creating more value in your employees as well. I've seen so many companies that will go outside of their company or hire outside of their company for management or CEOs. And I'm like, why are you hiring somebody who has no idea what goes on around here? There's a whole host of problems that need to be addressed. And you're just ignoring the people that know really what's going on. And you're just going to hire some people to come in and look around and point at things.

One thing you talk about in the book is in this fast-changing world where AI is sub-planning, increasing range of skills, the ability to learn from and connect with other people is one of the most important fulfilling and uniquely human capabilities to master. Is that going to be our survival technique to get an AI to keep us around?

I really hope so. I mean, I think that if we can, you know, there's no way that AI can tap into what people are not saying out loud, what they're actually holding inside of them, but we can do that. And so, but one of the things that that's really been fun for me to discover is that AI can help us get better at that. So for example, let's say, let's say that you have a really judgmental, righteous kind of opinion about somebody or some issue or some political thing or whatever else. I've done this. Write that into AI. I think so-and-so is the worst politician, blah, blah, blah. And then ask this question, what might I be missing? And it's amazing what AI brings back.

Like just that little statement into AI alone can get you so curious if everybody in our country especially in these polarized times would all dump all their opinions into ai and then just ask what might i be missing you would all be so much more curious i just found my anti-skatoma machine there you go exactly anti-blind spot machine yeah i just keep asking and you can keep asking it over and over. You can keep asking. You know, and what you talk about in the book is kind of how people are utilizing AI right now. You know, it's all in the gaming of the questions.

That's exactly right. And maybe that's what's so beautiful about ChatGPT and other models is it brings us back to, you know, because sometimes I'll ask it a question and it comes back with something really stupid. And I'm like, okay, the quality of my question clearly is the problem. There's a whole industry right now that they call it prompt engineering, which is all about how do you actually craft the best prompt to put into AI?

Because they realize that AI is kind of this mysterious black box. And so if we're going to get what we want out of it, we've got to be incredibly intentional about the prompts that we put into it and what i've thought is if what if we could be that intentional about the questions we're asking other people who are also full of mystery as well and what's really interesting there's an article i'm working on about this right now is that literally the strategies of prompt engineering the kinds of things that you do to get the best information out of AI can translate directly into the kinds of strategies and questions that we ask other

people as well. Ah, so don't go to the machines, go to real people. It makes all the difference in the world. Do you talk in their book about how to structure questions to ask better quality questions? Absolutely. Absolutely. So we talk about, you know, I mentioned earlier, one of the, one of the kind of best first questions to ask someone is what I just call hear their headline. What's the top level? You know, what, what do you, what's your opinion about this? Where do you come down on this issue? What do you think about this, et cetera? It's amazing how often people don't, don't actually say their headline. They might say, I've got this story or this objection to this issue, but what do you actually really think is here in the headline?

Then the next thing to structure is to dig what I call dig deeper. What makes you believe that They might say, I've got this story or this objection or this issue, but what do you actually really think is here in the headline? Then the next thing to structure is to dig what I call dig deeper. What makes you believe that? What leads you to say that? Where does that come from? Et cetera. But then don't stop there. The next step is what I call see what they see.

And this, I think you illustrated with your dad. Tell me a story. What are some examples? Illustrate that, et cetera. And if we can, if we can hear someone's headline, really dig deeper into their reasons and then see what they see, we're getting a really rich view of their perspective and where it comes from.

There's a few others that I talk about. There's some examples. One of the key things was, my dad didn't know the process of how things go from beginning to end. That's a business model. And so I asked him, okay, how does the process start? Okay, right along.

Okay, and what happens after that? I take it to the processor. And okay, and what after that? Where does it go? And then, I mean, he pretty much walked me through the whole steps. And it was just wild that he didn't understand any of it. And even when I was done, he didn't understand it, but he was a good man. One thing I wanted to ask you about was the quality of these questions are

really important and in getting people through them. I've lost the question I had set up, but you mentioned, I don't know, I've lost whatever it was. Feel free to fill in a punt for me if you want. So we, you know, one of the other kinds of questions that we didn't yet talk about are feedback related questions, questions that can actually help people understand ourselves. And so obviously there's the basic questions of what am I doing? Well, what could I do better, et cetera. Kinds of questions that we often overlook in that category are questions about

what's the impact it had on you when I did that. Because it's one thing if someone says, you cut me off or you jumped in too fast or you need to get better at this. But asking what's the impact often reveals something totally different that they're not going to tell you.

The impact was I felt totally demotivated. The impact was it shut me down. The impact was it made me care, whatever it is. And so adding that question and because to your point about blind spots one of the biggest interpersonal blind spots that we have is what's the impact we have on other people it we can only we can't guess at that we can only know that by asking do i have to care is that important that's your that's up to you that's up to you it's my dark triad nurse this is it coming out of there you only have to mock your villainism

exactly exactly there you go but no that's it's important point the the thing i was thinking about My dark triad nurses is coming out of there. You only have to carry. A little Machiavellianism. Exactly. Exactly. There you go. But no, that's an important point. The thing I was thinking about earlier that I lost track on is, you know, some of the things you're saying would work not only great for your friends, neighbors, relatives, and understanding them. It would work great in politics, but also work great in interpersonal relationships, husband and wife teams. Absolutely. Things of that nature.

You know, I've tried to do that with politics. I went from being a W. Bush. Once I saw that Dick Cheney was running the government and he was doing a bunch of religious stuff, I was like, no, I'm going over here. I didn't really wander that easy, but I wandered. Let's put it that way. And then I became a liberal, and now I find myself a moderate Democrat. And part of these, because I've constantly, constantly you know really asked questions in my head about is this really the truth is this really

reality is this just fantasy sounds like a queen song the caught in a anyway so now i find myself as a moderate democrat and i'm trying to i've tried to look at both sides of the arguments on what people want. And what's interesting to me is you, by asking a lot of questions, okay, so the left wants to do this and the right wants this. So how can we get everybody to achieve at least some of the goals they want, meet in the middle, and I'll agree. And when it used to be I would look at the left or right, and you'd think of, oh, those idiots over there are doing blah, blah, blah, and they must be stupid, you know, their stupid ideas. Now I try and look at their ideas and go, okay, maybe they have,

maybe I can understand what they want to achieve and what they're trying to do. And maybe the way they're trying to do it isn't the the the way that we can all agree on but how can we take what they want and try and find you know that agreement that we used to have before you know with tip o'neill and before that era where you could you could find common ground people who agree in congress and and find what's the word i'm looking for? Compromise.

Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with what you're saying. In fact, I end the book in the epilogue with saying, how can we apply this in our divided times right now? And I tell the story of a couple of years ago, I got into a ride share taxi and the driver had a hat and a bumper sticker that was like something that felt completely offensive to me. And I was like, how can I even be in this guy's car? And then I said, you know what? I said, we got a 45 minute ride here. Let me just ask him some questions. Let's ask him like, what makes you put that on your hat? And where'd that come from? Whatever. By the end of the taxi ride, I kid you not, I wasn't ready to put the hat on myself, but I had a lot of

respect for this guy. Not only respect, but appreciation for how he sees the world. And, you know, I think to your point, when we might see someone as this person's stupid, my fear for our country right now is we don't even just think that they're stupid. We think they're the enemy, the enemy, they're taking us down and we, and we've got to fight them. And my push to everyone is to say what if we could actually put this lens on that says what could i learn from this person i don't have to agree with him i don't have to support them but if i just say what could i learn from this person there's always something interesting to learn if only how did they come to believe what they believe

yeah and and usually when you do that you find a lot more common ground as you said exactly and and they feel that you understand them. Totally. And so it's not us against them anymore. It becomes a scenario where, hey, let's work together to achieve what we both want. And, you know, we've had to do this throughout all of our societies. There's no one way to do everything. Maybe if you're a king or an authoritarian, you know, you can, you can do whatever you want or else the head slop off.

Yeah. But, you know, we've, we've found a balance of society or at least we hope we have where, you know, everyone can't get everything they want unless you're a billionaire, then they can. You just buy a politician there and a SCOTUS judge. But, but, you know, for the most part, we know we've had to learn that there are certain rules that we abide by. You know, we stop at the stop sign because we realize that, hey, you know, if we all start not stopping at the stop sign, someone's going to get killed and it might be me. You know, I'm an atheist and people say, aren't you godless and moralist and everything else? And I am. But they're like, so what principles guide you where you're not, you know, running around killing and murdering everybody? And I'm like, we only do that on Fridays.

But also, I follow the golden rule. One to others is you want to do, you know, I don't go robbing and pillaging and murdering, except on Fridays. Because I don't want to be the one who also gets murdered, robbed, and pillaged. So, you know, I just kind of find it's a it's a good it's a good tool but i love this asking questions and trying to understand people and i like how you've done a thing where you're you're not just asking questions you're really drilling down into it and you're it sounds like from what you do in your book and you described in the ass method is is is finding out what knowledge,

the net knowledge, but what motivates that? Exactly. Where does it come from? Not just the information, but the values and the life experiences and the stories and all of it. Yeah. And then at that point you go, ah,

see your bat shit. One of my mentors talks about this metaphor. She says drilling for oil. She's, you know, no matter how crazy or bad someone seems, you keep digging about where did that come from? You're going to get to, you're going to get to something that you can connect to. You just got to drill deep enough. I think the reason I think the way that I do about this, cause I was kind of like you

when I was younger, you talked about how you're younger. You used to watch everything and try and learn. And I was that quiet person. Yeah. It's hard for people to imagine now cause they never shut up now but i was that quiet person i was a people watcher and i would always ask questions but i grew up in a cult very long and my first memory is going this is bullshit and so i've always had to deal with why people believe crazy-ass shit and question them. It was very hard being in a cult as a kid.

People are telling you to shut up and yelling at you because you just need to have faith. I'm like, I have some questions first. Is that cool? No. It really taught me to try and look at people and why they believe the things they do, why they think they… We all have that reticulating activating system that builds. Sometimes, you know, if you, if you decide one day that there's Martians walking amongst us and all the politicians are lizard people, your brain's going to build that whole dynamic for you. And so your ask concept analyzation helps drill down into getting to those core issues where people might be like,

why do I believe this stupid ass? 100%. Because even if someone believes something that we think is crazy, to them, it's not crazy. They've got an internal logic where it makes sense. And at minimum, what we can do is try to understand that logic. And then we'll know where they're coming from. We don't have to be able to agree with it. Yeah.

And then we can throw them in the funny farm and do a bottomy on them so exactly we're like we know where that one's at it's the old george carlin thing he's aha you're full of shit so there you go i love that bit that's one of my favorite bits any final thoughts as we go out that we didn't touch on about the book etc etc no i think i would just encourage people to ask the question what can i I learn from this person? To every single person we see, especially people that we think are maybe on the other side of where we are. And you will be amazed at what you find out. There you go. And then ask that question when you're listening to the podcast.

And like we said, you need to listen to it four times. At least. What did I miss? What did I miss? What could I be missing? What did I miss? Maybe it was something I missed. Never take your attention away.

You're like, don't do the dishes while you're listening to the podcast. I want you just to stare into the speaker and just be attentive to every word. And put some clothes on when you do it. I've been hearing stuff, so knock it off. Anyway, I'm just, I don't know. That was funny. So thank you very much, Jeff, for coming on the show. Give us your dot coms.

Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? www.askapproach.com www.askapproach.com And if you're interested in the education innovation stuff, it's www.transcendeducation.org www.transcendeducation.org There you go. So thank you very much for coming on. Thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com,

Fortress, Chris Foss, linkedin.com, Fortress, Chris Foss, Chris Foss 1 on the TikTokity, and Chris Foss facebook.com. You'll see this on LinkedIn newsletter, so watch for that. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe and listen to the podcast four times. We'll see you next time. Take care.