Should I raise an invoice?

Should I raise an invoice, or do I offer my services?

An organisation called “Madrigal Communications” (which seems to be a bloke and an internet site) has lifted the meat out of one of the posts here in my blog, added one sentence at the top, and three at the bottom which are soliciting business, and put the whole thing up on-line. He did this in November, but the credit’s just turned up here. Oh, and he has miss-spelt “Behn” but there you go. Ironically, he offers proofreading services. At least he doesn’t offer ethical advice.

So, the question is, do I send him an invoice for the time I spent putting the original blog together which was a professional lifetime plus a couple of hours? You could argue “no” because what he has lifted are quotations from Einstein, Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll which are in the public domain. On the other hand, the “Questions” series is the result of a good couple of decades thought, the post he’s lifted them from is about a specific category of questions to be used for a specific kind of analysis, and I make it plain that I ask questions for a living. It seems he doesn’t, though he does write for a living and is trying to get business off the back of my blog post. Or maybe I should be grateful that he credited me at all.

Bugger the internet.

Photo later in the day, I think.

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I just received a very pleasant and honourable email saying that he’s removed the post from his site. I’ve reminded him that he can wrap his own words around the Kipling questions, and pointed him in the direction of my source material for the Carroll and Aristotle questions. To be honest, if he’s soliciting for business for his writing skills, then it would do no harm to cut out my list of questions and use the space for his own words. I do hope he does. I didn’t create the questions, just the thinking about them expressed in my post.

Unasked questions

Very occasionally something interesting turns up on the list of search terms people have used to find my blog. A couple of days ago someone searched for “question NLP never asks”. It’s almost a zen koan, and it’s certainly an interesting search term for a thinking NLPer. All NLPers should be thinkers, though sadly this is not so.

There are of course two sorts of questions one never asks. Actually, make that three.

The first sort are the ones which there is no point in asking because if, by happy chance you are told the truth, you won’t believe it: Does my bum look big in this? Have you stopped seeing her? Do you really love me?

The second sort are the questions which will rock the boat. The US Military has made not asking questions its official policy on homosexuals in the military: “Don’t ask, don’t tell” indeed. In these cases, it is better not to know the truth. These are the questions that Tessa Jowell presumably didn’t ask her husband.

The third sort though are the interesting ones. These are the ones we don’t ask because we don’t think in those terms. These are the questions that inhabit our blind-spots, whatever they might be.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a koan to play with, and without getting too thought-for-the-day about it, I am now asking myself “what questions don’t I ask?”

It’s easier to see the back of your own head without a mirror.

Questions - 8 - More NLP Meta Modelling

This considers how to use the NLP Meta Model to give structure and direction to your questions. If you have not come across the Meta Model before, you can find out about it in Questions - 7.

Got that?

Good.

Before we consider the Meta Model in more detail, here is a simple scope warning:

The Meta Model is not the best tool for investigation and analysis. It is easy to get seduced by it because it is so comprehensive and so well documented. Many NLPers seem to assume that it is applicable to all circumstances and that is the only way to work out what questions to use. Bandler and Grinder developed it when observing therapists at work, and they used it to explore people’s own models of the world. But Hookins tried to use it in the analysis and design of computing systems and he found that the Meta Model is not interactive enough to use in a questionnaire and that it is too personal to work in a group setting.

The Meta Model, however, is great for those situations where someone is stuck in a mental loop and simply will not consider any viewpoint other than their own. It’s useful for discussing things with teenagers if you can get them to stop sulking long enough to answer any questions at all. It is of course important to be able to use it gently and conversationally, and not to let it turn you into an inquisitor.

Ok, on to considering it in practice.

Many statements fall into several Meta Model categories, and it is up to the questioner to decide what direction they want to take the conversation, and to choose a question accordingly. For example:

“It is up to you to choose what question to ask”

Revealing the lost peformative:

Who says it is up to me?

Revealing some of the presuppositions:

Do I have the right and the opportunity to ask a question?
Do I have the skill to choose what question to ask?
Is now an appropriate time to ask a question?
Will my question be answered?

Revealing the universal quantifier:

Is it always up to me to choose?

Exploring the nominalization:

So I’m the one with a choice to make, am I?
So the questioning isn’t automatic, then?

Exploring the unspecified verb:

How, specifically, do I choose the question?

Uncovering the referential index:

Whom do I ask?

As you can see, you can go charging off in a vast number of different directions, some of them inward, some of them outward. The Meta-Model helps you to understand what’s missing from a description of the world, but it is up to you to understand what those directions are, and where they might lead you.

It is fun to take a simple statement - any simple statement - and do what I have just done, to look for the Meta Model deletions in it, and to challenge it accordingly. This sort of practice makes it much easier to recognise the questions you can choose in the real-time of real life.

The Meta Model is taught over days or even weeks of NLP training, and I feel rather mean giving you the whole thing in such a huge and indigestible lump.

If you want to explore the Meta Model in more detail, I’d recommend printing out Larsen’s table or the one I put together in Questions - 7 and watch the News with it on your lap. You will soon get a reputation for devastatingly clever insight and cynicism. Play with it like that for a while, and then find yourself a book about NLP which doesn’t aggravate you. (If you thought “ooh look a presupposition about NLP books” then very well done.)

Playing with the Meta Model is such a good starting point for considering the power of questions that I think I am going to leave you with it.

Have fun.

Questions - 7 - The NLP Meta Model - what’s that?

A friend of mine asked me “what brought the Questions on?” - Good question!

Recently, I had to help a colleague consider how to find something out, so I was thinking in a fairly structured way about questions and writing about them helped me do this. I’ve been thinking about questions for a good long while. As I said in the first of these posts, asking questions has been my job one way or another for most of the last 20 years.

I’m almost done. Just this post and one other, and then back to my normal random posts about whatever sparkly thing catches my mind’s eye.

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We have looked at how to use questions for investigation and analysis; we have looked at how to use questions to control a conversation and steer it; we have looked at how to use questions to intensify emotions. Finally, I want to look at one way to use questions to reveal the stuff we hide from ourselves.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed the NLP Meta Model of language and presented it to the world in The Structure of Magic. A meta-model is a model of a model, so this is a description of the language people use to describe their world.

There are a large number of detailed and frankly arduous descriptions of the NLP Meta-Model out there. I had been going to write it up myself but I’ve decided to follow the structure given by Loren Larson, though I have created my own examples. The key word here is example. The questions in the right hand column are each just one way of many that could be used to open up and find the hidden content beyond, behind and beneath the statements in the left hand column.

PATTERN	RESPONSE
DISTORTIONS
MIND READING (claiming to know someone else’s thoughts without specifying how you know)
Dogs come when they’re called. Cats take a message and get back to you later. (Mary Bly)	How do you know the cat is taking a message?
LOST PERFORMATIVE (Value judgements where evidence for the judgement is omitted)
Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.	How do you know they have staff? Who says so?
CAUSE & EFFECT (Statement implies that A causes B, or vice versa)
Don’t use cats - they’ll screw up your data. (Anonymous science professor to student)	How will they screw up the data? (Seek evidence) Do they always screw it up, every time? (Seek counter example) But what happens if you want data on cats? (Seek counter example)
COMPLEX EQUIVALENCE (Statement implies that A is equivalent to B)
Long ago, there lived a creature with a voice like a vacuum cleaner. We know little about it, but we do know that it ate cats. (Anon)	Could there be some other reason that cats run away from vacuum cleaners? (Seek counter example) Are the only things that cats run away from creatures that used to eat them long ago? (Seek counter example)
PRESUPPOSITIONS (The statement assumes that something is true or will be true)
The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. Presuppositions: Owls and cats get on together Pea green is a beautiful colour Owls and cats are capable of going to sea	There are a huge number of ways of attacking presupposiitions: Do owls and cats actually get on together? Is pea green an appropriate colour for a sea-going vessel? I thought cats didn’t like water - do they? etc

GENERALIZATIONS
UNIVERSAL QUANTIFIERS (words like: always, all, every, everyone, never, no one)
Never play cat and mouse games if you’re a mouse. (Don Addis) Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity. (T. S. Elliott)	Never? What would happen if you did? No one at all? Every single human law that ever there was?
MODAL OPERATORS (of possibility: can, will of impossibility: can’t, won’t of necessity: must, have to, it is necessary)
Did St. Francis really preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats. (Rebecca West)	What stopped him? What would have happened if he had?

DELETIONS
NOMINALIZATIONS (verbs that have been made into nouns; the rule is, if it’s a noun and you can’t put it in a wheelbarrow then it’s a nominalization
Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity. (T. S. Elliott)	Whom does he deceive? How is he sauve?
UNSPECIFIED VERBS (verbs where some detail of the action is not specified)
And when the larder’s looted, or the jewel-case is rifled, Or when the milk is missing, or another Peke’s been stifled, Or the greenhouse glass is broken, and the trellis past repair - Ay, there’s the wonder of the thing! Macavity’s not there! (T. S. Elliott).	What’s been looted from the larder? Whose jewel-case? Milk missing from where? How do you stifle a Peke? etc
LACK OF REFERENTIAL INDEX (an action is specified, but WHO is doing the action is left unspecified. Put another way, it’s any non-referring noun phrase)
Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called “the Hidden Paw”. (T.S. Elliot)	Who calls him “the Hidden Paw”?
COMPARATIVE DELETIONS (A comparison is made, but what it is being compared to is unspecified;included words like: better, worse, more, less, best, worst)
By associating with the cat, one only risks becoming richer. (Collette) One reason we admire cats is for their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing, or pretend they do. (Barbara Webster)	Richer than whom? Richer than what? On top of what?

It is not easy to come to grips with the Meta Model; as you have seen, there is a lot of it to take in. There is also a real risk that you can end up being intimidating and smart-alecky or humourless if you permit your responses to become too Pavlovian. (Too Pavlovian, how, specifically?).

In the meantime, it is fun to take a statement at random from just about any source such as television, a newspaper or a blog, and run it through the Meta Model to see how many of the categories it fits.

There is a lot to discuss with the Meta Model, so…

… more another day.

Questions - 6 - Using questions to persuade

We took a brief look at the various things a good sales person can achieve with questions, now lets take a brief look at what questions they use.

We’ve already looked at what Hopkins calls “the tie down”. Annoyingly, the entire bloody planet under the age of 30 is using it, innit?

Hopkins considers three other main categories of questions in sales to be

• The Alternate of Choice
• The Porcupine
• The Involvement Question

The Alternate of Choice is a question with two answers, either one of which takes you forward.

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: Oh, er, whatever you think best. Do you think I look more statesmanlike if I hold on to the podium with one hand or two?

By stating the options, the questioner is subtly excluding other options such as - to pluck an example out of the air - not attacking Iraq in the first place or, in Blair’s case, being a self-deluded wanker.

We’ve already met the Porcupine. At its simplest this is merely answering a question with another question.

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: I don’t know. What do you think is best?

But it can be used to regain control of the conversation and point it in another direction

Bush: Shall we launch air-strikes against Iraq, or invade with land-troops?
Blair: What the f***? What makes you think that invading Iraq is a good idea?

Actually, that last one is a dangerous one, because it would let Bush detail his entirely spurious reasons and make them even more convincing, to himself at least. A better way to change direction would have been:

Blair: What the f***? Do you want to be considered a war criminal?

Oh dear. One can but dream. That was all in rather poor taste, innit?

Involvement questions are questions which make the person being questioned imagine themselves in the future.

What would be the minimal amount of paperwork required to grant the rebuilding contracts to Haliburton?

Won’t it be wonderful when people think of you as a Great World Leader for winning what looks like a straight-forward war?

When you’ve unlocked the Iraqui oil fields, will you have a direct majority share-holding in the company that controls them, or will you hide it in a series of investment trusts?

As you can see, sales people use questions in ways which go far beyond the simple investigative questions of Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll.

I feel I owe you an apology for the examples though.

More, in better taste, another day.

Questions - 5 - How do sales people use questions?

We’ve walked in the footsteps of Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll, considering which questions help us with analysis and investigation.

We’ve learned the power of the closed yes/no question from Meatloaf and Jeremy Paxman.

Wouldn’t you like to find out how sales people persuade us to buy shiny new toys using questions?

Yeah! Why not?

A good sales person will use open-ended questions (Kipling’s six) to keep the conversation bouncing along, to gently find out what it is that you are looking for, and to build up your emotional commitment.

For whatever evolutionary reason, the mind will try to answer a question while it finds it easier to simply ignore a statement. This is the reason why FAQs work as a way of communicating small and un-related points about a product or service. Not only do they create the illusion of dialogue, they also provide hooks for the reader’s mind to latch on to. Questions are used powerfully and daily in advertisements, advertorial, political speeches and other copy that is written to persuade.

The simplest and best structured introduction to the power of questions that I have ever come across is How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins. Hopkins is no stylist, he is the antithesis of an academic, but he really understands how questions work. It’s a book I recommend to anyone seeking to write or speak persuasively.

Hopkins lists these reasons for a sales person to ask questions

1. To gain control
2. To isolate areas of interest
3. To acknowledge a fact
4. To receive minor agreements
5. To arouse and control emotions
6. To isolate objections
7. To answer objections

We’ve seen the control thing with Paxo and Meatloaf.

Points 2 and 6 are about scoping something, about uncovering what is important and what is not important and drawing boundaries between them. It is important to me that I live in the sticks. It is important to the one I don’t live with that his house should be near a railway station. Good estate agents use questions to uncover that sort of thing. They should use Kipling’s six questions.

Acknowledging a fact - compare:

Them: Nasty weather today
You: Yes

with

Them: Nasty weather today
You: Isn’t it?

It’s a subtle difference, but the first one can be rather abrupt while the second one indicates a willingness to have a conversation. Saying “isn’t it?” instead of “yes” is a habit,which makes minor interactions with people serving in shops and waiting in bus queues softer and friendlier, and which encourages minor agreements between two people.

You can see how easy it is to use questions to gain minor agreements, can’t you? Simply turning a statement into a question is really effective, isn’t it? Doesn’t it get irritating, though? But isn’t it powerful?

To arouse and control the emotions. That’s the interesting one. That’s the one where the sales person’s true skills lie, because it has to be done without annoying the prospect. The prospect can know exactly what you are doing - a good sales person is the easiest person in the world to sell well to, but done well, the effect is irresistable. A sales person will uncover what turns you on about a product or service, and then they will use questions to reinforce the emotion. I remember standing by the the window of the house I live in now when the estate agent said “You said you wanted a good view, you couldn’t ask for a better view than that, now could you?” His question reinforced the emotion I was already feeling, because it is a good view.

Isolating objections is, as we’ve already seen, a scoping question. Using questions to answer objections is just another instance of using questions to persuade.

The key thing here is that questions - used with subtlety - are far more powerful than statements if you are trying to get someone to agree with you. If I tell you something is true, then that’s my opinion. If you tell me something is true, then it’s true.

Want to know more? ‘Course you do! There’ll be more another day.

Questions - 4 - What do Rudyard Kipling, Aristotle and Lewis Carroll have in common?

This post follows on from Questions - 3.

Einstein famously said that he arrived at the general theory of relativity by asking childlike questions with an adult mind. It’s telling that Kipling’s six serving men (what, why, when, how, where, who) are listed in a rhyme in a children’s book. As we shall see, another children’s author - Lewis Carrol, tops off Kipling’s list with four more.

But in case you think that this is all too frivolous, let us consider a Great Classical Philospher. Aristotle.

Ah, classical philosopy, that’s more like it, isn’t it?

Aristotle listed eight questions to discover what he called the “circumstances of an act” - Aristotle was interested in investigation:

Cause

Why did it happen?
What made it happen?
Who made it happen?
With what instruments?

Circumstances

When did it happen?
Where did it happen?
How did it happen - in what manner?

Result

What happened?

What this shows us is that although Kipling’s serving man will steer the question in a specific direction, the rest of the question is, if you like, the payload.

There is a difference between:

How does it happen?

The answer will describe the mechanism in qualitative terms.

How much does it happen?

Which produces a number of some sort which can be measured in some way, a quantative answer.

How often does it happen?

Which is in fact a time question and more closely related to “When” than to “How” because you can measure how often it happens. If you want to use jargon, it is a quantative temporal question. Doncha love those long words?

Spatial questions should sometimes include direction. Kipling limited his six serving men to the main one-word questions available in the English language but he omitted whence, meaning “where from”, and whither, meaning “where to”.

There is a powerful and not very intuitive, set of questions which let one examine a theorem, its converse, its inverse, and its reverse mirror image. You were doing fine until I said “reverse mirror image” weren’t you? This isn’t mine. I’ve picked it up out of a paper by a chap called Tony Hookins. I’ve taken out the maths to make it easier to read:

Theorem What would happen if you did?	Inverse What would happen if you didn’t?
Converse What wouldn’t happen if you did?	Non-Mirror Image Reverse What wouldn’t happen if you didn’t?

This, deliciously, comes from Lewis Carroll, and you can that sprang from mind of the man who wrote “Through the Looking-glass”, can’t you?

Sad bunny that I am, I have produced 18 questions to pick and choose from when analysing systems and processes:

Time - When? How often? For how long?

Place - Where? Whence? Whither?

Quantity - How many?

People - Who by? Who for? Who with? Who from? To whom? Whose?

Events - What happens?

Means - How is it done?

Things - What things are used? What things are produced?

Reasons - Why do it?

One can extend almost all of these questions out along another axis by applying Carroll’s matrix, (what would happen if it was done then / what would happen if it wasn’t done then, etc).

To be honest, this way madness lies. Ultimately one can produce check-lists and tables to one’s heart’s content, but what matters is to think about extending Kipling’s questions by considering number and direction, and - as Caroll shows us - to consider inversions and opposites.

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Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, book 3 section 1.

Carroll, L, (originally writing as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, presumably). 1939. The complete works of Lewis Carroll. London, The Nonesuch Press.

Kipling, R. 1902. The Elephant’s Child, The Just So Stories. London. Retrieved 3rd February 2007.

Hookins, T. Revisiting the interrogative pronouns and adverbs in the design of information systems. Retrieved 3rd February 2007.

More another day.

Questions - 3 - Kipling’s honest serving men

This post follows on from Questions - 2.

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling

These are the ‘open-ended’ questions beloved of sales people; questions which open up the conversation because they cannot be answered with either a simple “yes” or “no”. It should be no surprise that Kipling based his poem on the standard six questions of journalism, he was a journalist for years before the literature-thing took off for him. These questions still form a useful basis for any investigation or analysis, though it helps to understand how each question works. The usefulness of each question depends on the context you are using it in.

Why is immensely powerful. Scientific hypotheses and theorems seek answers to questions which start “Why”. However it can be a slippery tool, leading you into recursive navel-gazing. If you want to uncover a good rock-solid motive for making a change (rather than delving into what caused the problem in the first place) then repeated whys can take you in some very odd directions whereas repeated “what will that give you”s will help you uncover the real benefits.

Compare:

I want to lose weight
What will losing weight give you? - I’ll be healthier
What will being healthier give you? - I’ll live longer
What will living longer give you? - More time on the planet!
What will more time on the planet give you? - More time to do things

With:

I want to lose weight
Why do you want to lose weight? - Because I’m too fat
Why are you too fat? - Because I eat too much
Why do you eat to much? - Because I comfort eat
Why do you comfort eat? - Because I am stressed

It is easy to see that repeating the question “what will that give you” has let us uncover a solid benefit for the responder, a powerful motive for losing weight: they’ve given the same reason three times and as Lewis Carroll said, “What I tell you three times is true”. But repeated “whys” are just driving the conversation round in spiral of self-indulgent pop-psychology and not actually getting anyone anywhere.

On the other hand why can be a ruthless tool for exposing ill-considered assumptions. Years ago small businesses would say “we need a website” and the first professional question to ask them was “why?” The most frequent reason in those days was was “well, everyone says we should”, which was no reason at all. But this exposed the underlying lack of thinking in a way which other questions didn’t. If you asked “what will a website give you?” you’d get “it’ll bring us more customers” which was and remains an entirely groundless assumption, and the only way to even touch the assumption lightly with a fingertip was to ask “how will it do that?” Asking “Why” was a much quicker way to get a grip on the sloppy thinking, hold it up to the light and shake it until some cogency fell out.

Kipling’s six serving men are a good place to start any analysis or investigation, but you need to understand what you want to achieve and work out which questions will get you there. If you have the time, rehearse possible answers in your own mind before you select the question.

More another day.

Questions - 2 - Whoever asks the questions has the power

This post follows on from Questions - 1

Knock knock
Who’s there?
The Gestapo
The Gestapo who?
Ve vill ask zte Qvestions!

Whoever asks the questions has the power.

This of course is the reason behind the following exchange between an unknown interviewer and Harold Wilson, one of Britain’s slythier Prime Ministers of the 1960s and 1970s:

Interviewer: Why do you always answer a question with a question?
Wilson: Who told you that?

I like to think that Wilson was being ironic rather than instinctive. Reflexively replying with another question is a technique called “the porcupine” by sales trainers. By catching the porcupine and throwing it straight back you keep the conversation going in the direction you want it to.

Paradise by the Dashboard Light shows us the power of the repeated yes/no question: the Boy is just about to make it when the song segues into Sections II and II (it’s that kind of song) and the Girl shrieks Stop right there, before we go any further! and repeatedly asks the poor sap Do you love me? Will you love me forever? You gotta feel sorry for him. She’s got the upper hand, and they both know it. I hope they use it as an example in Negotiation School.

Probably the most brutal example of the questioner’s power is the infamous Paxman / Howard interview where Paxman asks Howard the same question 12 times. Howard got away with it during the conversation, but it made Paxman’s reputation and destroyed his.

Interestingly, this only happened because the video for the next item was not ready and Paxman had run out of other questions to ask. In normal circumstances he’d have accepted Howard’s first prevarication, so his early reputation as a ruthless interviewer was based on a studio cock-up. Also interestingly, Howard had in fact not threatened to overrule whoever it was, so a simple “no” would have brought the interview to a rapid end, which just goes to show that he really does have the integrity of a corkscrew made of spaghetti. And get those glasses!

The art of small-talk is built around small questions, from the hair-dresser’s standby of “are you going away this year?” to the generic British greeting of “how are you?” Mind you, that one does function only as a greeting.

Doctor: How are you?
Patient: Fine thanks Doc, how’re you?

Hmmm. Not really. You wouldn’t be in the Acute Medicine ward if you were fine, now would you?

If you are shy in social situations you should learn the gentle art of polite enquiry using questions which cannot be answered “yes” or “no”. “How do you know [our host]?” “What are the schools like in [the town you've just moved to?]” “What made you choose dentistry as a career?” (They never ever say “the money” or “the power-kick”. Funny that).

This is a useful skill, unless you are talking to a Tory Politician of course, in which case you should learn the gentle art of not actually assassinating them.

More another day.

Questions - 1 - Who’s asking?

I am - quite literally - paid to ask questions, and have been for most of the last 20 years. Every proper job I have ever done has boiled down to asking questions. My first memory is of asking a question and evaluating the quality of the answers.

Me: What’re those things in the trees?
Her: They are the candles darling.

Now, I knew that candles were tall thin wax lights, so:

Me: No. What are those white things in the trees?
Her: They’re the flowers, darling.

And I knew that flowers grew out of the ground, not in amongst the horse chestnut leaves, but I was too young to argue the point, so I gave up.

Different professions ask questions in different ways and for different purposes.

A man comes into a bar. He looks distraught: his hair is a mess, his pupils are dilated, he is visibly shocked and he’s staggering.

His wife asks: why are you late?

The policeman asks: what’s just happened?

The psychiatrist asks: and how do you feel about that?

The lawyer asks: who else was involved?

The doctor asks: where does it hurt?

The journalist asks: can I have an exclusive?

The photographer asks: can you just look this way?

The local queen asks: what have you done to your haiaiair?

His best mate asks: what are you drinking?

The barman asks: can I help you sir?

Ach. You get the point.

The questions we ask give away a lot. They show what assumptions we are making, and they highlight our own areas of concern or obsession. The question we choose sets us off in one specific direction. Each of those questions is the starting point for a conversation which excludes the other conversations the man could have.

If you reach a stalemate, it can be illuminating to work out what questions other people would ask about your situation. Katherine Whitehorn used to sanity-check her plans for activities at her children’s parties by asking herself: “what would the Coroner say?”

The simplest generic question to start with is: “what is the best question to ask?”

More another day.