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

CHAPTER 6

FOR THE RECORD

Confrontational Questions

SOMETIMES YOU CAN’T BUILD BRIDGES. You’re not looking for empathy and you’re not looking for trust. You just need an answer. You have to hold someone’s feet to the fire, stare straight into their eyes, and ask what they knew, when they knew it, or what they did, said, or intended. You want a clear answer to a straight-up question. You need to pin down someone’s role or responsibility, complicity or culpability. You want accountability.

?

There are plenty of times when people need to be confronted and held to account. We do it with our children in order to teach them responsibility, set boundaries, and demonstrate the consequences of their actions. We want our politicians to be accountable because they hold a public trust. We think corporations should be accountable because they should do more than just make money. We hold one another to account if we think there has been wrongdoing, bad behavior, hypocrisy, or incompetence: Perhaps you suspect a colleague has been cheating on her expense accounts, the police chief may be turning a blind eye to corrupt cops, a relative is siphoning money from Aunt Sophie’s retirement account, or a partner is acting suspiciously.

Is this your handwriting?

Were you aware that this was happening?

Confrontation and accountability questions put issues on the table and demand answers for the record. They air a grievance, level an accusation, and reinforce the rules of acceptable behavior. Accountability questions are asked in public or in private, in the glare of the lights or in the shadows of the most intimate relationships. They are necessary, but they can be risky business. The principles of confrontational questioning reflect the realities of this high-voltage exchange. They are best approached when you:

Know your goal. Set it and stick with it. Do you want an acknowledgment, an admission, an expression of regret or remorse, or a confession? Plot your question trajectory with your objective in mind. Anticipate what it will take to get there.

Know your facts. Be sure they are complete and accurate. You need a solid foundation of information if you are going to accuse or confront. This is key to asking the right questions, anticipating the answers, and avoiding embarrassing mistakes.

Frame your questions surgically. Precise answers are elicited with precise questions. Use direct questions. Frame them to support your case. Listen closely and ask again if you don’t get a direct answer.

Care about the question. If you’re going into battle, you should be more than a mercenary. Your passion and your commitment will elevate the intensity and poignancy of the questions you ask. Craft your questions to project moral authority. Take the high road.

Expect a defensive, evasive, or confrontational response. People don’t like to be called on the carpet and may ignore the question, duck the answer, or attack the messenger rather than acknowledge their fault or flaw. Be ready to rumble. Be prepared with a follow-up if this happens.

Succeeding in the high stakes world of confrontational questioning requires engaging all of these principles so that you can be a worthy adversary. You will be tested on several levels.

Care to Listen

Caring about your cause brings commitment. Being knowledgeable conveys authority. Listening closely provides opportunity. If you’re going to stand up to the mayor or to the neighborhood bully, you need the courage of your convictions and the muscle of facts. And you want to use the clock to your advantage.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper is adept at using all of these skills. He is approachable, but he is tough and unflinching when he leans on someone for what they’ve done or said. We met at his home, a renovated old firehouse in lower Manhattan, to talk about these types of questions. Decorated with antiques, collector’s items from his famous Vanderbilt ancestors, and other gems—I especially liked the eight-foot black bear looming over the living room—the house is a mix of old-world royalty and hipster urban retreat. Not far from the commanding portrait of Cooper’s great grandfather, railroad and shipping magnate Commodore Vanderbilt, we settled in for a conversation about how questions, listening, and confrontation connect.

Cooper and I overlapped a bit at CNN. He always impressed me with his intelligence, range and sincerity. His work has taken him from epic disasters around the world and mud hut sanctuaries in Africa’s embattled hellholes to stage-managed presidential debates in America’s heartland and the most glamorous places on the planet. He is empathetic by nature. He told me that he tries to be a “capable recipient” of everything he hears. Respecting silence matters to him. He got involved in mindfulness meditationto become more “present.”

His interest in holding people to account is an acquired skill. “Confrontation doesn’t come naturally,” he acknowledged. But he believes that public officials are seldom held to account in a thoughtful and thorough manner. When he’s got facts that stand in stark contrast to the reality of a situation or what a person has said or done, he feels compelled to challenge openly.

He doesn’t like confrontational interviews driven by opinion or attitude. “I find them circular and ultimately unsatisfying. But an interview where you have facts that oppose and contradict what a person has said, and you are presenting those facts to them, you’re challenging them basically on something they said—those are the interviews I now enjoy and are important,” he told me. “These are the hardest interviews” because they require so much preparation and “you have to be armed with what is true.” Cooper has refined his approach.

“I used to make the mistake of thinking I had to cover everything. I now realize in those interviews, those confrontational interviews, that you focus on one or two points.” He knows the clock is ticking and his adversary is calculating. “The other person often relies on the time constraints and on you ultimately just backing off and moving on. But if you just refuse to move on and are willing to ask the same question over and over again, when they’re not answering, it reveals something else about them.”

Confrontational questioning often requires assertive interruption or repetition in order to make it as difficult as possible for your adversary to change the subject, dodge the question or run out the clock.

Cooper’s defining interview in this respect took place in the midst of disaster after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He had been on-site for a few days, had seen the flooding, and talked to everyone from citizens to first responders and elected officials. On this day, he’d been out with a recovery team from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). They had gone to a flooded home where the dead were still lying in their living room. The stench, the images, the loss were all fresh in his mind. They collided with images from other places where he’d seen bodies left to rot—Somalia, Rwanda, Sarajevo. But this was America. This was home.

How was this happening?

Who was responsible?

As he went on the air for an interview with Louisiana senator Mary Landrieu, Cooper had a hyperaware sense of the sounds around him—flies buzzing and plastic sheets whipping in the wind—the sounds of neglect, incompetence, and prolonged suffering. He got right to it, asking Landrieu:

Does the federal government bear responsibility for what is happening now?

Should they apologize for what is happening now?

Landrieu dodged.

There would be “plenty of time” to discuss the issues of “when and how and what and if …,” she said. Everyone understood the situation was serious. She wanted to thank people—the president, the military, the first responders, leaders who had visited, fellow senators. Maybe Anderson hadn’t heard the news yet, she droned on, but the Senate had passed a supplemental $10 billion emergency relief bill.

After nearly a full minute of this, Cooper jumped in.

“Senator, excuse me for interrupting. For the last four days I’ve been seeing dead bodies in the street. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know I’ve got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset and very angry and very frustrated. And when they hear politicians thanking one another, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now because literally—there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been lying in the streets for forty-eight hours and there are not enough facilities to take her up.” Then he asked:

Do you get the anger that is out here?

Landrieu, stilted and robotic, sounded like she was reading from a script. “Anderson, I have the anger inside of me …”

Who are you angry at?

“I’m not angry at anyone …”

She never directly addressed the question of who was responsible for the failure in New Orleans.

“Being in a place like that, all the bullshit is stripped away,” Cooper told me. “It’s like the flesh is ripped off and everything is raw and exposed. I just got angry … it just seemed wrong. It just seemed inappropriate.” He had been listening for an answer and instead got evasion and excuses.

Cooper brought together firsthand knowledge of the story with a sense of moral outrage. His questions demanded accountability. Landrieu’s answers, which were shockingly unresponsive, only accentuated the ineptitude of government at a moment of crisis. Landrieu’s performance tarnished her reputation; Cooper’s performance elevated his. But Cooper’s approach highlighted a pillar of confrontational questioning: persistence. He interrupted when Landrieu tried to make an irrelevant speech instead of offering a direct response. He returned to his question and asked again. He applied righteous indignation to emphasize the moral certitude that motivated his questioning. In the end, Landrieu acknowledged nothing, but the record was clear.

Unintended Consequences

Even with extensive knowledge, preparation, and skin in the game, confrontational questioning can go off the rails. I learned this the hard way, in a very public setting, when I interviewed one of the world’s most controversial and charismatic figures.

It was one of the strangest interviews I’ve done. I “presided” at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., in front of a live audience and a cluster of cameras from around the world. My task was to ask Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a few questions and then open the discussion to audience Q&A. Some people still considered him a terrorist. Others viewed him as a freedom fighter. It was a challenging assignment.

As we gathered, the Mideast was again in turmoil. Another Palestinian uprising, an intifada, had ignited the territories. The world bore witness to the sad story of the region’s endless conflict and suffering—this time, through pictures of young protesters, children in many cases, throwing rocks and using slingshots against well-armed Israeli troops. In the most searing image, cameras captured the fatal shooting of a twelve-year-old boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, as his father tried to protect him with his bare hands while they huddled behind a metal barrel.

Mixed with the outrage directed at both sides were calls for Arafat to encourage Palestinian children to stay off the streets and away from the hostilities. But Arafat was silent. Israeli leaders and others accused him of actually wanting more victims, more incendiary images to wave around in an effort to pressure Israel and rally global opinion.

I wanted to ask Arafat about those children. They were too young to be dying in his streets, too young to be traded for propaganda points. I felt he needed to answer his critics.

Why had he been silent?

Why didn’t he protect his children?

How did he respond to criticism from around the world?

I knew he would bristle at the accusation. I had worked the phones, talking to people who knew Arafat and the Middle East to figure out the best way to frame the questions so he’d actually answer. Acknowledge his stature, the experts told me. Play to his influence and his ego. Invoke the protective instinct a father feels when his child is in danger. In a region so poisoned by history, frame the question to look forward, not back. Appeal to his sense of destiny. All of it was sound advice. None of it worked.

We were seated at the front of a room on a small platform that was just big enough for our two green-upholstered armchairs and a coffee table with two glasses and a pitcher of water. Arafat wore his trademark kaffiyeh, a checkered head wrap that draped nearly to his waist. The room was packed. USA Today described the crowd as the “crème de la crème of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.”

I began with some innocuous questions about Arafat’s meeting that day with President Clinton, the situation on the ground, and prospects for resuming negotiations with the Israelis. Just before I went to audience questions, I turned to the issue of the children. Reflecting the advice I’d been given, I credited Arafat with being the “longtime leader” of the Palestinian people. I sought to acknowledge his influence by invoking “many” in America and the Middle East who said he had an “opportunity” to act. I made reference to his authority and tried to connect it to the future and the children by saying he could call on people “to stand down …” I hadn’t gotten the full question out of my mouth when he erupted.

“We are animals?” he shouted at me. I continued, intent on getting a response to the question I’d asked.

“Specifically, the children …”

He leaped out of his chair, shaking his finger. “You want me to treat our people as animals?” He appeared to be on the verge of storming out of the room.

“Sir,” I asserted, “I merely asked a question …”

I crossed my legs and extended them to fill the space between that coffee table and us, blocking his most obvious escape route. After a few seconds that felt like forever, he sat down, glowering. We continued.

It was an especially awkward moment because I was meant to be both questioner and gracious host. Arafat was a “guest” of the Council, whose events were supposed to be thoughtful and dignified. But this question about the children had to be asked, and asked unapologetically. I should have pushed harder and worried less about civility and propriety. I didn’t want to lose him, though. By now, it was time for questions from the audience.

One person took up where I left off. He came from AIPAC of all places, the American-Israeli lobby. He asked my question again, this time employing a highly effective technique in confrontational questioning: He invoked an impeccable third party. This tactic shifts the burden of assertion from the questioner to someone with expertise, stature, or moral authority. In this case, the impeccable third party was the Queen of Sweden, who had very publicly commented on the use of Palestinian children in the uprising.

“As a mother, I’m very worried about this … the children should not take part,” she had said.

Q FROM AUDIENCE: Mr. Chairman, could you comment on the Queen of Sweden’s public condemnation of the use of children by the Palestinian leadership in fighting against Israel?

ARAFAT: Use of children?

Q: I said the Queen of Sweden’s public condemnation of the use by the Palestinian leadership of children in the fight against Israel.

ARAFAT: Use of the children? I cannot accept this statement. I’m not using our children. We are working very hard for the future … Are you against this? (Pauses for a moment.) You know, someone from AIPAC should have apologized for killing all the Palestinian children. This would have been the high road.

Arafat had no intention of addressing the question directly, whether it came from me or anybody else. But the encounter served an important purpose: it put him on the spot—and on the record—for the entire world to see. His supporters would see his anger as defiance; his antagonists would see petulance. I still believe it was an important exchange. It illustrated that confrontational questions set an agenda and create a historical record.

The exchange also showed that no matter how much you plan or how compelling the “impeccable third party” may be, you can run into a defensive and angry buzz-saw response when you accuse or confront. People will bluster, bloviate, or evade. You need a strategy to assert control that goes beyond crossing your legs and hoping the person doesn’t storm out of the room. Sometimes you can’t worry about being polite.

Demanding Answers

When you adopt a true adversarial approach, you raise the stakes. Asking with righteous indignation can quickly create enemies. Jorge Ramos has no problem with that. He’s not trying to make friends.

One of the most famous Latinos in the United States, Ramos is a powerful and principled anchorman for the Spanish-language network Univision. He has been called the Hispanic Walter Cronkite—except Ramos has more than a million Twitter followers and goes toe to toe with world leaders in ways Cronkite would have found unthinkable. Ramos has gotten roughed up, shut down, and thrown out because he relishes confrontation in the service of accountability. He sees it as the foundation of democracy, transparency, and legitimacy.

“I feel a mission,” he told me. “The most social responsibility we have is to confront those who are in power. That creates a balance of power in our country and our world.”

Ramos is well aware that his confrontational style may infuriate and alienate the person he’s interviewing, especially if it’s someone in power. “I always assume I will never talk to that person again,” Ramos says.

But even Ramos was surprised when he got thrown out of a roomful of reporters as he tried to question the most unlikely of presidential candidates, billionaire businessman Donald Trump. Having concluded that Trump’s position on immigration was bigoted, ill-informed, and indefensible, Ramos showed up ready to hurl barbed questions and take on the man who was leading in the polls and would become the Republican nominee.

Trump made headlines when he declared that Mexicans were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He called for a wall along the Mexican border. He promised that if elected, he’d deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. He said children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be U.S. citizens, though the Constitution grants anyone born in the United States full and instant citizenship. For Jorge Ramos, a Mexican American who immigrated to the United States as a young man, these were insulting positions he wanted to challenge directly.

At a crowded news conference in Dubuque, Iowa, Ramos stood.

“I have a question about immigration …” That was about all he got a chance to say.

“You weren’t called. Sit down,” Trump barked.

Ramos wouldn’t budge.

Trump turned to call on someone else, but Ramos persisted.

“I’m a reporter, an immigrant, and a citizen,” Ramos said, “I have the right to ask a question.”

Trump signaled a burly security guard to usher Ramos out of the room.

Ramos protested loudly. “Don’t touch me, sir. You cannot touch me. I have the right to ask a question.”

In all his years confronting Latin American dictators and strongmen, he had never been ejected from a news conference.

After several minutes and some prodding from other reporters, Trump changed his mind and allowed Ramos back in.

“Good to have you back,” Trump said with a straight face.

“Here’s the problem with your immigration plan,” Ramos stated. “It’s full of empty promises. You cannot deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. You cannot deny citizenship to the children of these immigrants …”

Trump jumped in.

“That’s not right,” he asserted, saying that an “act of Congress” could change the status of the “anchor babies” born in the United States to undocumented migrant parents.

Ramos tried another tactic, asking, “How are you going to build a 1,900-mile wall?”

“Very easy. I’m a builder,” Trump said dismissively.

And on it went for nearly five minutes. Ramos asserting, arguing, asking, Trump dodging.

Looking back on it, Ramos said he probably got thrown out because Trump was unnerved by the basic premise of his question—that Trump’s policy was built on “empty promises”—and aggravated by Ramos’s decision to stand. But theatrics are often part of confrontation.

“We knew we had to do two things as journalists,” Ramos explained to me. “First, to stand up. If you ask a question sitting down, it would be a completely different balance of power. And second, we knew that I was only going to have a few seconds to ask the question. I purposely made the decision that I was going to continue asking the question regardless of what he was going to be doing.”

Ramos concluded that the spectacle was worth it. He made his point and put the issues on the record for all to see.

“I did my job as a journalist and the audience—especially Latinos—know exactly what kind of candidate Trump is. The big lesson is, never stop asking questions. I would have failed if I had sat down at that press conference in Dubuque, Iowa,” he said. “I did not sit down. I didn’t go. I did not shut up.”

Confronting Power

Ramos’s confrontational style is deeply rooted in his experience and youth. His autocratic father left little room for discussion or dissent and had rigid ideas about what his boy would become—an engineer, an architect, a doctor, or a lawyer. But young Jorge had no interest in those fields. Making matters worse, he regarded his Catholic school as a straitjacket. Home was often a battlefield.

“Growing up, I learned to confront the most powerful man in my world, my father,” he said.

At school, he challenged another father, the priest to whom the students had to confess their sins. This priest was also in charge of discipline—often harsh, physical discipline. Ramos saw this as an incredible abuse of power.

Why do you do this?

How is this moral?

He challenged the priest directly, telling him “It wasn’t right for an old man to hit a small child.”

As Ramos grew older, he became acutely aware of another abuse of power: his country’s corrupt politics. Again, he felt a duty to question it and expose those responsible. But, again, he collided with a culture that considered itself above challenge and certainly not accountable to a young reporter. In his first job in Mexican television, Ramos clashed with his bosses and with the censors who wanted the stories told their way. At age 24, Ramos moved to Los Angeles to study journalism at UCLA and pursue a career in the United States. He has been asking his questions ever since. He asked Fidel Castro why there was no democracy in Cuba. He asked Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez about his abuses of power and broken promises. He grilled former Mexican president Carlos Salinas about his role in the assassination of a political rival. He asked Colombian president Ernesto Samper about allegations that he was on the take from Colombian drug lords.

He did not make many friends. After one assignment, Ramos returned to the office to find a chilling gift—a funeral spray of flowers. They had been delivered anonymously shortly after he received a death threat. But Ramos wants to make people in power feel the heat, to challenge them directly on their broken promises, flagrant contradictions, and outright lies.

Ramos counsels that confrontational questioning must be approached from a position of strength. “Questions can be used as weapons. If you’re going to confront someone in power, there has to be an element of aggressiveness.” You must have the courage of your convictions and realize this isn’t a popularity contest. “Whenever I go into an interview I assume two things: If I don’t ask the question no one else will, and I’m always assuming this may be my last exchange.”

Ramos believes we should be asking for much more accountability. We should demand it at every level of our lives. “We all have the right—the responsibility—to challenge and question powerful people.”

An Audience Helps

You don’t need a television show to be effective when asking for accountability. If you have the basics—solid information, a clear objective to your questioning, and enough spine and moral indignation to stand up to authority—you can have impact, especially if you understand your platform and know your audience. Invoking community is one of the surest ways to give more heft to your case and more edge to your questions.

Thomas Wilson’s questions were powerful. But it was the audience around him that made his appeal impossible to ignore. Wilson was a specialist with the Tennessee National Guard. He was serving in Iraq at a time when large numbers of U.S. service members were dying as a result of improvised explosive devices—IEDs—that regularly ripped through poorly protected Humvees and other vehicles. At a gathering that was supposed to be a pep rally—the New York Times described it as a “morale-lifting town hall discussion with Iraq-bound troops”—Wilson raised his hand and asked the visiting secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, a pair of right-between-the-eyes questions.

Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?

Why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?

The place burst into applause. Wilson was asking what everyone in the room was thinking. Rumsfeld was caught off guard and, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words.

“Now, settle down, settle down,” he told the crowd. “Hell, I’m an old man, it’s early in the morning, and I’m gathering my thoughts here.”

“It was highly unusual for soldiers to dare to confront Mr. Rumsfeld directly,” the Times pointed out. But Wilson’s questions were poignant and accurate and brilliantly framed. They drew attention to the problem of under-armored vehicles and increased the pressure to fix the problem. Wilson’s platform—a troop town hall in Kuwait—was compelling. His community was reinforcing. He invoked the crowd and painted a vivid word picture of the problem. He gave it a moral undertone and framed it as a shameful betrayal of those who were doing the fighting and dying. And it wasn’t a speech; it was a question.

The Pentagon felt the heat and amped up efforts to provide the armor the vehicles needed.

Whether at a town hall or a staff meeting, confronting a powerful person is not easy. But having a community on your side creates an alliance. Your questions become the group’s questions, harder to dismiss as the ranting of a malcontent and easier to amplify because of the implied voices ready to join you. If you’ve done your homework, are prepared to stand up to the pressure of the encounter, and have crafted your questions so that you succinctly express the problem and the challenge, you can take the high ground and demand answers.

No Way Out

The situations, personalities, and dynamics of this line of inquiry vary widely. But whether you are confronting a politician who has broken a promise or a salesman who has ripped you off, a student who has cheated on an exam or an employee who has padded an expense report, you should prepare for an evasive or confrontational response.

Effective confrontational questioners have to be fast and uncompromising listeners. It’s what good lawyers do in a courtroom and what good interviewers do in front of a camera. They pick up on voice tone and swoop in on hesitation. They shut down attempts to filibuster or self-aggrandize. They keep the laser aimed at the core issue they’re after.

I’ve talked a lot about open-ended questions, those broad, nonthreatening inquiries that invite people to answer as they wish and go where they want. Accountability questioning is different. You want precision. You want to pin someone down. You don’t want to ask a question that lets someone off the hook or invites a speech she can use to obscure the argument or change the subject. Often, questions that elicit one-word answers can be the most effective crowbars to the truth. Yes-no questions.

You were late yesterday. Is that correct?

Did you call when you knew you were going to be late?

Did you think about the consequences of being late?

I wanted to explore how lawyers apply this yes-no strategy, so I called on Ted Olson, the great conservative attorney and former solicitor general of the United States. Olson had argued more than sixty cases before the Supreme Court—including the famous Bush v. Gore case that decided the presidency in 2000, which is where I first got to know him. In 2009, Olson surprised many conservatives and liberals alike when he took on California’s Proposition 8, which rolled back same-sex marriage in the state before the U.S. Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land.

Olson explained that lawyers like yes-no questions because they establish the record and draw precise boundaries. They put on the record a definitive response to a specific action or moment and give the questioner almost complete control over the witness and the testimony.

“You basically want to channel the witness into one of these box canyons you used to see in western movies,” Olson told me over lunch in downtown D.C. The advantage lawyers have going to trial is that they have studied the evidence and pored over the facts of the case. They have deposed the witnesses and can anticipate what those witnesses will say.

“It is good to ask the questions you already know the answer to—it’s very important to do that,” Olson says, “and to put [people] in a frame in which you’re having a dialogue, getting people somewhat comfortable with the rhythm. And then go someplace that maybe they haven’t anticipated.”

In the article you published on August 13, did you write these words…?

Did you believe those words when you wrote them?

Do you still believe those words?

“And the nice thing about yes-no is that the witness puts himself or herself on the record, and they’re on record categorically. What you don’t want in trial,” Olson advises, “is a lot of open-ended questions, because then the witness has no boundaries and may say something that you don’t anticipate and is damaging to your case. You don’t want to give the witness an opportunity for an exposition.”

Olson observes that a judge may still give the witness an opportunity to explain because “most things in life are not yes or no.” But asking yes-no questions conveys a purpose and a strategy.

Yes or no can paint a vivid picture. Oprah Winfrey did not make her name by grilling people. Confrontation and accountability are not her trademarks. But when she sat down with disgraced cycling champion Lance Armstrong for his first interview since he admitted to doping, she launched a series of surgical strike, yes-no questions that categorically established the facts.

OPRAH: Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

OPRAH: Was one of those banned substances EPO, which stimulates red blood cell production?

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

OPRAH: Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

OPRAH: Did you ever use any other banned substances such as testosterone, cortisone, or human growth hormone?

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

OPRAH: In all seven of your Tour de France victories, did you ever take banned substances or blood dope?

ARMSTRONG: Yes.

Having gotten the fallen hero to acknowledge his guilt, Oprah then took him through an extended conversation on his motivations and the consequences of his actions, along with the prevalence of doping in the sport he betrayed.

Armstrong may have hoped the exchange would provide some made-for-television redemption. It did not. But the interview clearly showed how effective yes-or-no, guilt-or-innocence questioning can be when the case is airtight, the prosecutor is disciplined, and the questions are precise and based on information you can bank on.

“It’s an art, it’s psychology, it’s brains, it’s communication, and it’s theater,” Olson counseled. For the record.

Blunt Force

It’s not often you get a Lance Armstrong confessing to his sins. Donald Trump certainly didn’t recant when Jorge Ramos pressed him. Mary Landrieu wouldn’t assign fault, no matter how many times Anderson Cooper asked. I can’t think of a single occasion when a politician dropped to his knees after being asked tough questions to say, “Thank you for grilling me like this … YES, I am a hypocrite. YES, I lied to the public. OF COURSE, I don’t believe half the stuff I say in public.”

But we ask these questions to get answers where we can. We use them to make a case, to say, “What you have said or done is not acceptable and you will be held accountable.”

Whether you’re taking on your boss or your mayor, your mother-in-law (which I don’t recommend) or the hapless customer representative at the airline that just left you stranded midway through your journey, your questions matter and make a point.

But you don’t want to pick a fight needlessly and you don’t want to be wrong. Accountability questions cannot be shots in the dark. They must aim at a real target. When you question and confront, draw from the knowledge you have and set the agenda. Listen closely to control it. If you hear a speech, stop it. If you hear dissembling, call it. If you detect weakness, zero in on it. Where you detect evasion, challenge it. If someone talks in circles or ignores the question, reassert control and ask again.

Confrontational questions entail risk because they put relationships and reputations on the line. Before you confront anyone, ask:

Is confrontation called for?

Are the questions clear and compelling?

Am I willing to stake my reputation on them?

After all, if you’re wrong or if you sound ill-informed or like a bully, the questions will boomerang and hit you, not the person you are trying to hold to account.

Ask yourself when and where. Is it appropriate to confront a subordinate in a staff meeting? With others present? Over lunch? Or in a private meeting in the office? Timing, venue, and atmospherics of this type of questioning define the dynamic.

Reflect on exactly how you want to frame your questions. Should they come in a series of short, sharp yes-or-no queries? Or should they be preceded by a recitation of the evidence to frame the issue and establish the premise? Think of tone and whether the questions should be served up with sarcasm or delivered with solemnity, posed in sadness or in anger. The theatrics of confrontational questioning matters, sometimes as much as the answers you get.

Consider the value of the relationship. I didn’t really care if I angered Yasser Arafat or if I ever saw him again, though I was keenly aware that my hosts probably did not want him to storm out. Anderson Cooper isn’t planning on having lunch with Mary Landrieu, and Donald Trump probably won’t be buying Jorge Ramos a vanilla milkshake. If you’re going to ask for accountability or confront someone with accusatory questions, consider the cost and be sure you’re willing to pay it.

Confrontational questions are the blunt force instruments of inquiry. But they are necessary if we are to live in a place where everyone respects and plays by the rules and is accountable for their actions.