The art of asking questions

I watched last night the first part of BBC TV series The House of Cards (1990). A friend handed me the CD-rom as a present. It was a lovely surprise. I found the screenplay wonderful, but also the interpretation, the voices, the emotions conveyed. The overall making is delightful.

A while ago I thought it could be a nice topic to dig and look for in movies and sitcoms: "the art of selling things" by asking questions. Particularly, one scene of The House of Cards awakened again this wishing in me yesterday. Francis Urquhart is arrived in home after getting nothing from the new Prime Minister and is clearly upset He is in conversation with his wife who, naturally, plays the role of bloodyly cold, calculator woman. The glass of whisky simply comes too handy for swallowing the bitterness.

Unexpectedly, the young, clever, sleuth journalist, Mattie Storin, rings the bell at Urquhart´s with the sole purpose of obtaining information. Well, it is just a masterpiece in dialectics how she got what she is looking for and how Mr. Urquhart just goes for it. Once he accepts his involvement in the game he sais to Mattie: "You might want to ask me a few questions".

That´s the key: Questions! The making of questions is a valuable skill and the art of making the proper questions at the proper time, the result of much practice. It is certainly an ability to be tought and praise. It comes to my mind the holography of Dr. Alfred Lanning challenging to Spooner in I, Robot: "My information is limited. Ask the right questions".

Again, the art of making the proper questions is that: an invaluable piece of art, from which an individual can be much benefited. You might say that asking too much can get you in trouble, which is true. However, a good questioner always follow the rule: "Never ask for what you don´t wanna hear". I had a chance to start a training on that when my times as a Sales Specialist, learning how to make proper questions as a tool to delimit customer´s  needs and wants and build trust. This sole ability made worth the shot. I read somewhere, sametime: "To do my work I just count on my five friends: why, what/who, where, when and how".

And thus, I might investigate a little further, taking my time, no need to rush, in the use of questioning in movies. It comes now to my mind a scene from The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), when after repeated failures, Colonel Saito releases Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) and try to lure him in order to get his help and finish the bridge on time, but intending to keep myself in control. Well, it turned out oppositely: with 2 simple questions, apparently irrelevant, Colonel Nicholson imposes his conditions but, most important, devastates Saito, in a master lesson of negotiation. From that point on, Saito loses all moral authority and becomes a nul, secondary character, lacking all significance: a point of inflexion in the story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihejsTJg-_c

Learning and getting use to asking questions will be, for sure, a life-turning, that´s my advice.