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Clean Language Interviewing in 2018 with James Lawley

Clean Language Interviewing in 2018 with James Lawley

This is an edited transcript of a conversation with James Lawley about what is happening with Clean Language Interviewing at the end of 2018. It has been edited for ease of reading. If you would like to listen to the podcast you can do that through the Soundcloud link at the bottom of this post or subscribe to my podcast Ready to Come Clean with Sharon Small through Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher, or TuneIn. 

Sharon Small

Hi, this is Sharon. I’m with James Lawley, co-developer of Symbolic Modeling and leading developer of both Clean Language Interviewing and it’s corresponding verification method.

James, welcome, and thank you for joining us today.

James Lawley

Hi Sharon, I’m looking forward to it.

Sharon

For anyone who’s not familiar with the term Clean Interviewing or Clean Language Interviewing, James and I have an earlier podcast. You can find it here: “On clean interviewing” that will help catch you up to all the basics.

James, when I think about Clean Interviewing and Clean Language I often say we’re born with two ears, but that doesn’t mean that we’re taught to listen.

And interviewing seems like a simple thing – You’re just asking questions. And interviewing cleanly is very different.

I understand you have an example to share with us that might give the listeners a clue to what’s a little different about what we’re talking about today?

James

In order to understand Clean Interviewing you’ve got to also understand what’s not Clean Interviewing and what’s a leading question. Almost all interviewing training will tell you not to ask leading questions, “Don’t lead the witness”.

And what we’ve discovered is that’s fine advice, but actually, unless you realize how easy it is to unwittingly lead, then you don’t know you’re doing it.

So, here’s an example from a from a published journal of someone who was doing an interview, a health interview of people who had gone back to work after a major health incident. And this is published as a model interview.

The person has had a heart attack and they’ve gone back to work. They [interviewer and interviewee] are talking about the memory of the of the heart attack and the interviewer says:

“How has this memory affected your life?”

“What kind of impact has it had on your life?”

Sharon

Seems like a normal everyday question doesn’t it?

Metaphors and Unintentional Influence

James

It does.

And the interviewee says “Well, in my dad’s girlfriend’s apartment or my grandmother’s or both?” referring back to something earlier and the interviewer says:

“The first memory, how has this impacted?”

“What impact has it had on your life?”

And the interviewee answers: “I’m, well, I’m not going to attribute it to this memory solely, but it definitely has had a very large impact.”

Now if we just look at what’s happened there, we end up that the interviewee has agreed that it had a very large impact and then goes on to describe the very large impact.

The question we would ask [in Clean] is, where did the idea that it had a large impact come from?

And if you go back to look at the interviewer’s questions, you see:

“What kind of impact has it had on your life?”

“How has it impacted?”

“What impact has it had on your life?”

So the metaphor impact, because it doesn’t mean physically impact, it means having some kind of emotional consequences, has been introduced three times by the interviewer.

It’s an everyday metaphor [impact]. And so the interviewer probably has no idea that what can happen is that the interviewee will pick up on that [metaphor] and start describing it. Partly because interviewee wants to please, and they want to be helpful, they have agreed to do the interview.

So now, no doubt, that interviewer will write up a report saying what a great impact these things have on people’s lives. But actually, that was their own belief in the first place.

That’s the first thing, then secondly, if we look at the structure of the question “How has this impacted your life?”, there’s presupposed in that [question] that it has impacted their life.

It’s very hard for an interviewee to go. “No, actually, I don’t agree with your question. It hasn’t impacted my life at all or that question doesn’t fit for me.”

Almost no interviewee is ever going to challenge an interviewer and tell them they don’t like the question or it’s not right for them.

Here is another example “How has this memory affected your life?”. Well, maybe it didn’t, but the interviewer has presupposed it did and it’s very hard for the interviewee to get out of the question.

Why This Is Important

James

Why this is important is because this [interviewer] is trying to gather information about someone’s health.

And who knows what this report might do, where it will go, and what kind of policy issues, health and safety issues might come up as a result of this. And I would put money on it that the interviewer had no idea that they were leading, severely leading, the interviewee to that example.

Sharon

It’s almost like the interviewer was asking from their own imaginary construct, ‘if this had happened to me’, it would have had an impact. So I’m going to make an assumption that it’s had an impact on this person I’m interviewing.

James

Exactly.

Sharon

And that’s how their use of metaphor happened. It’s their metaphor.

James

Exactly.

And what is really clear from large amounts of research is the interviewee will process that metaphor “impact” and will not recognize it as a metaphor, will not realize that they will have taken it on. They will have no idea that that has happened. They will think that was their own idea. It’s going low level.

Sharon

Like an adoption process. Either adopting it because they don’t want the difficulty of trying to explain the slight difference in their experience to the interviewer or adopting it because it’s good enough, but it may not be just right.

James

Exactly.

A Systematic Validation Process

Sharon

This is a great example and this brings us to what Clean Language Interviewing (CLI) has that many other interviewing methods don’t, and you can speak to this, is a systematic validation of the interview process, a way of looking at to tell how Clean it is.

James

Exactly and, in fact, to my knowledge there is no other method that has something quite as systematic as the Cleanness Rating.

And what that does, is we would take an interview, like this one, and go through every single line of the interview and we would ask a number of questions:

Where did that did those original words come from?

Who did they originate with?

If they originated with the interviewee, then that’s fine, that’s clean. But if they in originated with the interviewer, like the word impact, then we would call that a leading question. So every one will be graded for that.

And then the second thing we grade for, is what I mentioned, there is this very subtle structure of questions and how the structure of a question can constrain the answer that was given. We’d also call that leading.

So we go through every single question. They all get put into one of four categories from classically clean all the way through to strongly leading, and then you can tabulate those.

That can be fed back to the interviewer and they can see where they were leading – and what they can ask themselves is: What was happening for me that I needed to lead them at that space? Why didn’t I ask a more clean question?

And they can understand exactly what you mentioned, their own unknown beliefs, assumptions, presuppositions. Then they can do something to put those to one side next time they interview and improve their interview.

And we’re not talking about small amounts here.

I’ve seen some research that says even good interviewers trying to stay clean will often only get thirty to forty percent (30-40%) of their questions clean by our definition. Sixty to seventy percent (60-70%) will have some element of leading.

Well, you can imagine, over a whole interview, the cumulative effect.

Getting to over 90% Clean

James

If we compared that to someone who has been on a Clean Language Interviewing training, they can push their clean questions up to above ninety percent (90%). It’s really hard to get a hundred percent.

Occasionally the odd leading question will slip in. For even the best interviewers, on average, one strongly leading question per interview is as far as it goes. And over ninety percent (90%) are very clean questions.

Sharon

But this isn’t a small change. This isn’t like a 5 or  10 percent less influence. This is like 40 or 50 percent!

James

Yes, at least double the quality of the questions and sometimes triple.

Sharon

Wow. Okay, so, this validation process and that it’s unique to Clean Interviewing and that clean questions are so easy to learn, once you get the principles behind them….

And I know we talked in 2017, that’s the podcast I referred to at the beginning of our talk. So there’s been a lot of movement with clean, oops my metaphor. There’s a lot of movement with clean interviewing over the past year and you’re in touch with people using Clean Language Interviewing in different ways.

Could you talk to our listeners about where it’s being used and what’s happening now?

What’s Happening Now – 2018

James

Well you’re right it is gaining traction in the business world and in the academic world. And those two things work together.

The more the academic world gives credibility to this process, the more the business world will take it up as well.

So there’s been a whole spate of Ph.D. theses which have been submitted in the last 18 months or so and I’ll give you a couple of examples.

So, there is a really interesting set of interviews that Heather Cairns-Lee did with 30 European business leaders to find out about their metaphors for leadership and leadership development.

She interviewed them using clean language questions. And in fact, one of the things she found was, which it’s kind of hard to credit this, but actually something like, she only needed four clean language questions to cover 60% of all the questions she asked.

Sharon

And what were those questions?

James

So those questions were:

~And is there anything else about ….? – something that they’ve described

~And what kind of …. is this something else? – Asking for more information

~And how do you know….? – asking for the person to describe their way of knowing this.

And then the last one which was specifically to the fact that she was trying to ask for metaphors was:

~And that’s like what? Which asks them to turn their ordinary description into a metaphor.

Her interviews were often an hour to an hour and a half long.

And what’s fascinating from the outside, I know, I imagine some of the listeners are going “Oh my God, how do you just ask four questions? Don’t people get bored?” And the answer is no.

The reason is because it’s always about their own their experience, the experience of the interviewee. It’s always about their experience and there’s nothing more interesting than our own stuff.

So they get into their own stuff and these questions allow some to go deeper and to think more about their own inner way of memories and processes and emotional reactions and concepts, and to really reflect on those, and be able to describe them in vivid detail that they’ve rarely, almost certainly never, done before.

She submitted this work for her Ph.D. Not only did she get a Ph.D. at the University of Surrey, in England, but, I didn’t even know this, but apparently there’s a kind of ‘Oscars of Ph.D’s’ where all the best Ph.D.’s get submitted to a panel, they have all the different categories.

She submitted her Ph.D. It was nominated, and she won the best category in leadership research for last year.

So, you know, what an amazing accolade to her, but also the fact that there is recognition that she used this Clean Language Interviewing process as a new and innovative way of doing research.

Open-Closed vs Clean 

Sharon

Before we go on, I know you have another couple of examples, but when you listed the questions… Now, I know when I’m teaching interviewing and I mention ‘Is there anything else ….?” I always get hit with the open/closed thing.

So I just want to backpedal a little and address that question and why that question “Is there anything else….?”, is clean in our methodology of working.

James

Okay, so it’s a great distinction, but there’s not a direct relationship between open and closed and clean and leading.

Closed questions can be leading. For example, you know, “Did you put the rubbish out last night?” That’s a leading question.

Sharon

We call that a dangerous question (laughing)

James

Exactly and it’s closed.

The person says yes or no. And the interesting thing about the question “And is there anything else about …?” (something to do with that person’s experience), is first of all, yeah, they can say no, or yes or no, but they could say no. In which case, great – They’ve got nothing more to say, you know that.

It is still clean because it doesn’t lead them to an answer.

Whereas we know “Did you put the rubbish out?”, there’s a hidden agenda in that question. Okay? And in fact, the person asking the question probably already knows the answer!

Whereas “Is there anything else about…?” the interviewer, the interesting thing about clean questions is the interviewer has no idea what the person is going to answer and doesn’t want to know in advance.

The second thing about it is, in English, the question “And is there anything else….?” is taken as an invitation to provide anything else.

And most people will answer that question by giving more detail, by giving another example, by adding to the richness of their description.

They won’t hear it as a closed question, they’ll hear it as an invitation. And so you win both ways. That either they can say no or they can go on.

But one thing is certain, they do not feel constrained. And leading questions constrain. Clean questions open up the possibility for the person to answer in any way they want.

Sharon

Super and you have another one or two examples of how clean is being utilized. You were talking about the Ph.D.’s., so let’s stay on that track because these guys [academics] are like kicking butt out there.

James

Well another PhD has just been submitted by Karen Hanley. She did some interesting research in both the UK and Denmark to find out ‘what is the person’s attitude to work beyond retirement age?’

This is important for a number of reasons in today’s world. One, retirement, people don’t necessarily want to retire anymore. But secondly, sometimes they can’t retire anymore. They’ve still got another twenty years of life left and they may have to continue to work.

There’s been very little research done in ‘what are people’s actual attitudes when they get to 65 and something about work’.

She surveyed those two countries, put that together and she used Clean Language Interviewing in both in English and Danish as part of her way to find out the genuine authentic descriptions of those people.

So that’s another interesting application that’s got a business sense to it.

Sharon

And very appropriate with our aging population, like you said.

James

Exactly. But apart from that, I mean these are being done within an academic framework and the reason I mention them is because they have to be rigorous.

Rigorous Proper Research

James

They have a supervisor. It gets peer-reviewed. They have to have a viva voce at the end of their Ph.D. process, where they get questioned on it. And you don’t get a Ph.D. unless you produce some real good proper research and bring it up in the right way.

The reason I mentioned them then is because every one of these and is adding a level of academic credibility to the whole process and making it more and more of an option for interviewers now.

And what makes Clean Language interviewing different is the systematic nature of it. The basic questions that are provided, you just have to learn them. As you know, there are only a dozen. And they will do you the vast majority of the time.

And what you also learn is what are the leading questions? How do you lead and and therefore how do you stop yourself doing that?

Everybody has that impulse, it’s not that you don’t have the impulse, but you can keep that to yourself, or set it aside, to use another metaphor.

I tend to think I put my own beliefs in my pocket during the interview and then I don’t have to bring them out in that way.

Sharon

Yeah.  You can see even our conversation we’re not completely clean. We know each other, we’ve already discussed where we’re going with this conversation.

I think that’s part of the … once you learn this methodology of question asking, it gives you the ability to calibrate when is it most important to be clean, rather than having the clean police. [like always thinking you need to be clean]

It’s like your being able to really listen to what’s happening now, even if it’s just a conversation at work, being able to utilize this in a really generative way.

James

I think it’s really important to say that.

So, you know, for managers sitting down and needs to talk to somebody about something that’s going on and they want to find out as much information about it as possible, then great, use Clean Interviewing to do that. But if they just have a general chat, then you don’t need to.

I mean in the field that I know you know about, critical incident interviewing and root cause analysis, it’s absolutely vital that high quality data is gathered there.

Do you want to say anything about that?

Sharon

Yes. I received a copy of some notes from a critical incident to do with some of the fires in California. One interviewer had actually thrown away their notes. But what this person had written down was barely legible, it was paraphrased and there was no context of what question had been asked, what answer had been given…

And I’m thinking, these are people in the top of their field. This is their Job, like 50 hours a week! They get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this work. And what I saw on that page was such a poor indicator of information gathering. I, .. sometimes I just wonder how any corrective actions or any other processes get done.

And there are some very good interviewers out there.

And even with the best of intentions, I know of no other model, like you’ve mentioned, that concentrates and pays such attention to the language being used and how subtly that can influence.

And in a critical incident, when you have someone who is perhaps been privy to something incredibly awful, an accident, a traumatic event, their psyche is very vulnerable, very open.

And this is a way to come in and find out, to do really fine level sequencing, they like to call it timelines, I call it sequencing, to gather information and to be able to sort out between that person’s experience and the observable objective data that you’re actually going for.

James

hmm…it’s hard to imagine a more important field than gathering this information, which is then used to improve the safety for all of us.

Sharon

You kind of heard me a pop up on my soapbox, didn’t you?

James

You know there’s  just a few examples and I could give so much more.

Clean Interviewing has been used in focus groups. It’s being used in gathering information about market research, even actually, interestingly, the designing of surveys, because the danger is if you ask leading questions, you will just get the answer that you wanted in the first place.

And I know some people actually want that, but if you actually want to find out what users and customers in the population are thinking then you have to ask clean questions.

Sharon

Yes, small business people, coaches.

James

Exactly.

Sharon

So, James what would you like to see happen with clean interviewing? What would you like to see happen next? (here is a great little example of my leading with the metaphor ‘see‘ – notice James answer!)

James

Well, I mean primarily I’d like to see it more well-known. So then people have a choice.

The people who are picking it up in Academia are the new researchers coming in, the ones at the beginning of their career, the ones doing the Ph.D.’s and that’s great because then they’re going to go on and tell other people about it.

And in a way I suppose this is kind of how most Innovations arrived. It’s rare for them to come in at the top and to change decades of old ways of working.

And the fascinating thing about it is what it’s really like is for people to get a first-hand experience because reading about it or watching an interview is a completely different experience to being interviewed yourself with clean language questions.

And on the training, as you well know, we ensure people get interviewed with clean language questions, so they get first-hand experience. And almost always they go “this is not like be an interviewed with other methods”. But you can’t see that from the outside. It’s so interesting.

And then that’s the first thing that happens. The second thing that happens is then they start asking these questions and the majority will go “Oh! It’s not quite as easy as it looked!”

Sharon

Ya …

James

It takes a bit of practice and feedback and support.

I want people to have those experiences and then they can choose for themselves whether they want to adopt this method or other methods, but I’m convinced that the majority of people will pick up on these ideas.

And as a result, you know computer specifications, academic research, doctors interviewing, … The list goes on and on,… critical incident interviews, that will get better quality data and that you know, it’s going to improve all of our lives.

Sharon

And just like Symbolic Modeling and Clean Language, in general, the Clean Language Interviewing, based on clean principles, is a neutral tool.

So if there is something that somebody uses and loves you can still, let’s say, clean it up and make it a cleaner model.

James

Yeah. Yeah and understand the principles.

Clean Language Interviewing January 2019

Sharon

James, you and I are having a two-day training in California in January [2019]. Could you speak to just one thing that’s unique about this live training, besides it being only once a year, and only here, and only with us.

James

I think actually it goes right back to what you said at the beginning, is that the quality of the feedback that people get on this training, the amount of practical experience, and then feedback on that, and then improve, and then have another go, and get feedback.

Plus being able to have the experience of being the interviewer, the interviewee, and watching experienced people modeling how they do it. You get all three perspectives on this training. Plus personalized feedback that that allows you to see what you’re doing that you don’t know you’re doing.

And then it’s your choice what you do about it. So that’s what I think really makes this training not only unique, but it means the people get a huge amount in simply two days.

Sharon

James, It’s been great having you here today and I know we went a little off tangent… and for those of you listening, I really hope you’ve enjoyed this time with James Lawley as well.

You can find out more about Clean Language Interviewing and our January training on my website: www.cleanlanguagetraining.com under the Trainings tab.

Or if you click the Work With Sharon tab, I have a complimentary webinar, between now and early January you can come on a webinar and have an experience of being interviewed yourself and learning a little bit more about it.

[Note from Sharon: We are still creating our 2019 webinar schedule. I invite you to schedule a 20-minute private consultation where you can ask me questions you might still have about Clean Language Interviewing. Schedule here Complimentary Consultation]

You can also find more on James Lawley’s website where there are all sorts of articles – a plethora of good stuff  – written by himself and his co-developer Penny Tompkins and that’s www.cleanlanguage.co.uk.

We really hope to see you online or in our training room very soon and James thank you again.

This is Sharon

Be well, think well, and question well.

The Wisdom of a Small Cup

The Wisdom of a Small Cup

I like coffee

I drink two American size mugs of coffee every morning between 7 and 9 am. That’s 12 ounces each! (350 ml). My cup is an elegant white bone china cup with a light curve that fits my hand perfectly, lovely on a cool morning.

But, I’m a sipper and my coffee gets cold as it sits on my desk.

I remember years ago when I was training in Japan. I went to a coffee shop, ordered a cuppa and was stunned to silence by the extremely small, delicate cup of coffee I was served. It must have only been 4, maybe 5 ounces at the most.

Hot fresh coffee, uhmm!

I hadn’t ordered an espresso, cappuccino, or other ‘small’ drink. And at first I was thinking .. Really? Is this all I get? It was a shock coming from an American coffee culture where a small cup comes as a ‘mug’ or in a large paper cup.

But what I found was this small, delicate, 5 oz coffee was one of the best cup of coffee I’d ever had. It was an awakening and I learned something important.

First, the Japanese roast a mean cup of coffee.

And second, when you drink your coffee from a small cup, the coffee stays hot from top to bottom and it tastes better.

No microwave needed, no throwing out cold coffee, and no tall cup to tip over on your lap top or desk when you talk with your hands .. Or your coffee table when your dog walks by and wags its tail.

I began to wonder, how is interviewing like drinking coffee from a small cup?

Here are two ways I’ve discovered:

  1. On a relational level, you want rapport and trust of your interviewee.Essentially you want to keep the interview warm from start to finish. 
  2. At the questioning level, you want to be sure the interviewee can answer your questions easily and without confusion. You might say the interview stays warm from ask to answer.   

If you go in with a big mug full of pre-formulated questions, pick lists, complex multi-segmented questions, or accidentally asking a question that takes your interviewee off-tangent, the interview can turn cold.

Without the two things above, an established sense of trust and easy to answer questions, an interview can easily become an intervention or even an interrogation.

There is no microwave to warm up a cold interview once it has been derailed. You’ve just got to let the work of friction … or reduction of friction do its work.

Here are a few other things Clean Language Questions in an interview process can help with…

Decrease & Reduce

  • leading or content heavy questions
  • dual or multi-content questions
  • conflation of terms
  • confirmation bias
  • addition of content (that would be yours)

Increase & Develop

  • questions that can be answered easily
  • rapport & trust of the interviewee
  • sequence or time lines
  • data accuracy / authenticity
  • better recall by your client (and you)

I would like to offer you a space at my Clean Language Interviewing workshop in January 2019 where I will be joined by one of the worlds primary experts on using Clean principles and questions in an interviewing frame.

There…
~ You will learn to serve your questions in a small cup
~ You will have a resource for keeping rapport warm from beginning to end – even with   the most difficult interviewees
~ You will have a functional way of repairing communication or mis-understandings
~ You will have principles to draw on that underlay what information you choose to ask about and how to formulate your questions
~ You will have a more flexible and useful notion of questions that out serves the over used and simplistic notion of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ questions

You will have a way of working with duel outcomes – when two or more people within the interview process have different or conflicting outcomes in:

  • Coaching
  • Sales
  • Management
  • Leadership
  • Hiring
  • Qualitative interviewing
  • Cause evaluation and
  • Auditing

Are you curious?

Head over to our trainings tab or join one of our complimentary webinars under the work with Sharon tab. There you’ll find a link to sign up on a Tuesday of your choice.

Alright, until next time
be well
think well
question well

On Clean Interviewing with James Lawley

On Clean Interviewing with James Lawley

This is a transcript for a 20 minute video chat James Lawley and I did on August 21, 2017. All grammatical anomalies simply reflect the conversational nature of this document. (3000 words, approximately 10-15 minutes reading time)

Our two day Clean Interview training is happening again January 19-20, 2019 near San Luis Obispo in California. Links in this document have been updated to represent this newest training date.

Would you like to listen to this post instead?  Click the Sound Cloud icon below for an audio version 

If you are a “real paper” person, click HERE for a pdf that you can print and read.

Would you like to watch the video? You can do this via Vimeo or Youtube using these links below:

Vimeo Link
Youtube Link

On Clean Interveiwing with James Lawley

Sharon: James it’s really nice to see you again and thank you for meeting with me to talk a bit about Clean Interviewing.

We’re going to be doing that training in January 2018 [Clean Convergence 2019 ] here in California and I thought it might be interesting for people to know a little more about Clean Interviewing; where it comes from, what it is exactly, where it can be applied and the benefits of it compared to other interviewing methods.

You’ve been involved in Clean language and Symbolic Modeling much longer than me, being the creator of Symbolic Modeling, could you tell me, I’m curious, where did Clean Interviewing come from?

James: Well, it came out of the work of David Grove’s therapeutic approach that used Clean Language as its main questioning technique. But primarily David was a psychotherapist, a brilliant psychotherapist, and it was left to other people, myself and Penny Tompkins and other people to take his work and see how it could be applied elsewhere.

And fairly early on, people began, without much conscious thought, applying clean language in interview situations where they were trying to gather information about … like some people who went into a company, they want to find out whats going on in the company and interviewed people. What did they do? They asked them Clean Language questions.

A colleague of ours was trying to find out about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland, so he interviewed some people from the paramilitaries and the armed forces about their experience. And so a few of us, slowly, but surely go “hello, hang on, there’s something going on here, this could become a thing.”

Sharon: Thats kind of what happened with the root cause interviews. With just my background in Clean and Symbolic Modeling I started applying it. So I was really thrilled when I started to see more formalized thinking about the interviewing, and thats something you have done a lot of work with, formalizing, how do you know if its clean?, how are you calibrating?

James: Ya, that came out of it. And as always when you put that kind of thinking in you start to realizing there is a richness and a depth to this you didn’t appreciate at first. But also what you realize is that you don’t need to go on a full training in Clean Language in order to be able to pick up some of these skills and improve the way anybody interviews.
And what we realize is people could learn them fairly rapidly and that would improve the quality of their interviews very, very quickly.

Sharon: So what exactly is clean interviewing? How would you describe it? How is it different?

James: Ya, definitions … I mean it’s principally based on the notion of ‘what is Clean?’ And the idea of the metaphor of Clean is the person who is asking the questions is aiming to put as little of themselves into the interview as possible.

Now lots of approaches do that, or say they do that. Because of the detail paid to the language, Clean goes much, much further than most, than any other approach that I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a lot of transcripts of interviews from different people and the key thing is that the interviewer does not know how much of their own thinking, their own assumptions, their own metaphors they’re bringing in.

They are simply unknowingly doing it and because of that, they can’t not do it, because they don’t know they’re doing it. Whereas with Clean Language, to some degree, it prevents them from doing that.

Sharon: So in a way it’s bringing in an awareness and a more, I’m going to use the word tactical, a more tactical thinking when you’re eliciting information from other people. We had a manager attend our training last year, the Clean Interview training, and she’s gone back and reported to me that it not only changed the way she does her interviews, but it has changed how she elicits information from her everyday workers and helps them find their own solutions. It’s been a real life changer for how she does business.

James: And especially in business, I think, where there is such a pressure to get things done fast. One of the ways that happens therefore is you kind of unwittingly suggest an answer, or the manager has already got an answer in their mind, or the interviewer, so they ask a question that just leads the Interviewee just towards the answer, because that’s obviously the answer, isn’t it?

And those are so subtle language, it can be the structure of the question, it can be presupposition, it can be framing. There are four or five key ways in which interviewers unwittingly bias, or potentially bias the interview towards answers they are already making an assumption about.

And a clean interviewer tends to minimize those. You can’t stop it entirely, but you can take out a huge amount of them. And then the real key is, not so much the interview, but the data you end up with, it’s more robust, authentic because you know it came from them and not from you.

Sharon: A couple of the areas I’ve use the interviewing in is cause evaluation interviews and CAP (corrective action programs) program development. And in those it is so easy for the interviewer, often the interviewer is a specialist and when they are looking at an event, it’s so easy for them to slip their knowledge into the interview without meaning to.

And there are a couple managers that have taken this into the CAP program and noticed the real difference between letting people, having the skill to let the people (involved) devise their own corrective action. Something that will work in their environment, rather than having the corrective actions put their ideas on top of (the people involved). Now you’ve use the techniques in a couple of other areas.

James: Ya, I’ve primarily been involved in using it in a qualitative research method for academics, and been involved in supporting a number of academic programs, one in the Czech Republic, one in Australia, in Britain. So, trying to gather high quality data that meets rigorous academic standards, it’s absolutely ideal for that. And one of the reasons is, that to my knowledge, theres an additional feature called a ‘cleanness rating’ that allows you to go back through the interview and look at just how clean or how leading what the interview and come out with a quantitive method.

There is no other interview method that allows you to go back and look at that and assess the reliability of the data gathered during the interview. That’s a big, big bonus in that area.

Sharon: And even in interviews where there’s not recording capabilities, like with a lot of the businesses I work with, they can’t record, but they can go back and look at their notes. So if your aware of asking clean questions and staying clean in principle, keeping your stuff out, you can still go back and ask “How did I do?”, “Where were areas that I interjected?”, “Where were areas that I changed the frame or even the topic?”.

James: And, I’m not directly involved in some of these areas, but I know people who use it quite extensively these days as a market research tool. And again, if you want to find out what people really think, you better keep your own stuff out of it. It’s also in focus groups, for example gathering information that way. It’s particularly now being used as a specification tool, like in information technology (IT), gathering the users requirements for example.

Again, its similar to what you were saying. Theres a specialist in the IT industry who’s interviewing someone who’s not a computer specialist, and its very easy for specialist to start making all sorts of assumptions.

And one area I am particularly interested in is in the health field. There are no more specialists than doctors. Highly, highly specialized. They have their own language, their own way of thinking. And its, you know we’ve all been interviewed by a doctor. And its really important, I think, that the patients own way of expressing themselves is preserved and not lost.

Sharon: I’m wondering, pretty much what I’ve found is that pretty much any time, any kind of conversation where your eliciting information from someone else, whether it’s a coaching intake, hiring, HR (human resource), I mean, this frame of thinking, this kind of thinking and using these questions can be really useful.

James: And what surprises a lot of people when they first come across this idea is how even changing a single word in a question can have a significant effect on the answer your given. It can get down to that level of influence, unwitting influence. And, as you said, people become much more aware of their language. Instead of just throwing out questions, they take time to ask questions that are formulated to give the other person the maximum opportunity to answer in any way they want. That’s the kind of key benefit of the process.

Sharon: So in a way, better questions and a different kind of listening, lead to more authentic answers which eventually leads to better qualitative data, and results, what ever needs to happen from that data.

James: I think it’s an important point you make that what people report is the more they ask clean language questions the better listener they get, because they actually hear what’s said. It’s a strange kind of by product that comes out of it. But what I reckon one of the reasons is that when you actually get the few basic clean language questions under your belt, you know, easy ..they roll off the tongue quite easily, you’ve got loads of space to actually listen to what the person is saying and actually think about what they’ve just said. But, without formulating what’s the next question going to be or formulate some clever question which can take up too much cognitive space.

Sharon: or go down your pick list.

James: Exactly, thats right. So those interviews where you don’t necessarily know the kind of information you’re going to get, you’re trying to discover that, discovery interviews, Clean Language Interviewing is really tailor made for those kinds of interviews.

There are some interview techniques where, as you say, you’ve got a standard set of questions, well that’s fine, they work in that way. But other ones, where more exploratory, trying to discover information, that’s what their best for.

Sharon: So some of the benefits are becoming a better listener, more accurate listener, lets frame it that way, asking simpler questions that are in context with the information your actually receiving, so you don’t have to be as clever and try to figure out what question’s going to happen next, you just need to know what context your asking in, Keeping your stuff out so, making assumptions, minimizing the influence of your own language, … What other benefits from Clean Interviewing?

James: Well there’s the one I said about if you want to actually go back and check the interviews that you’ve done, meet your own criteria of a high quality interview, a clean interview, you have a method for doing that. Or even having someone else, an independent reviewer do it. The other thing is that I think it is really useful when you want in-depth information.

You know, it seems to me, I’m not an expert, I don’t know about root cause analysis – critical incident interviewing, but what I guess is you want to try to get past the kind of surface things that people say, get them to think deeper about what actually happened and describe it in more detail. And that’s one of the things Clean Language allows you to do, get depth of information.

Sharon: And so earlier before we started recording we were talking about the benefits compared to other interview methods, and I think that what you said bout being able to really qualify, quantify, the cleanness rating is a massive benefit from other interview methods. What other benefits do you see as compared to …

James: Well, it’s interesting what you said about that person who went back and said it changed the way they asked questions generally, not just in an interview. And when I think about the word interview, for me its gotten broader and broader. You know, potentially if I stop someone on the street and ask directions, that’s a kind of interview. I’m trying to get some information out of them. And even in that context its valuable.

What happens, its like many things, the benefits grow over time. At first it seems a bit clunky with the questions, you’re not quite sure what to do. But slowly but surely, the more people practice, the more they relax, the more that relaxed the interviewee, and allows them to sink into their own experience in a very gentle way.

And because of that a level of rapport, an interesting level of rapport is built up without trying. And, also, what happens in some interviews there is a kind of belief that I have to encourage the interviewee with things like ‘good’, “oh ya, right, good good’. Actually, one I don’t think its necessary and two I think its kind of already telling the interviewee that they think some information is better than others. Its already kind of sorting it out. And, Clean Language, if you stick to Clean Language, you don’t need to do any of that either.

And the proportion, if you look at the proportion, of words asked by an interviewer in a Clean Language Interview is very small compared to the amount of words by the interviewee. And it seems to me that the more an interviewee tells you, the more you’re going to get valuable information.

Sharon: Thats a really good point, having that ratio between the interviewers words and the interviewee’s words. And also keeping the questions really simple, so you’re not inadvertently asking two or three questions in one long bit. Often its ‘and, …and, …and …’ and suddenly you have three questions in one which can be really confusing to the interviewee.

James: And similar, like sentence structure. On the course we’re able to show the kind of sentence structures where in the first three words you can tell if it’s a leading question. It doesn’t matter what comes afterwards. And, you know, once you get those clear, those questions that are just slightly pushing the interviewee towards a particular answer or restricting their answers, then you can leave those aside and ask a much more, a question that gives the interviewee more freedom to answer in the way they want.

Sharon: So, you and I are going to be doing an interviewing class, Clean Interviewing class, in January, 2 days, January 17-18th, 2018, here on the Central Coast of California, near San Luis Obispo.

[2019 Clean Interveiwing is January 19-20, 2019 – please see link below]

James: Lovely

Sharon: It’s beautiful, ya. And I think whats nice about our combination of working together is we have both been using Clean Interviewing skills and thinking in very diverse areas. Your working with academics, more subjective quality of interviewing, and then I’ve been in business and getting very specific information, like what you were saying, deeper information about what actually happened from their perspective.

James: So, I think its really useful that we bring those two backgrounds. But what I think we share though, is a real desire to make it practical. And thats our primary thing to make it, one, practical, and two make it so people go away with some really useful learnings that they can apply the next day, straight-a-way!

Sharon: And like the interviewer that I was talking about, not just apply it in their interviews, but also apply that kind of thinking and skill across the board.

James: Well I’ve had several people tell me it’s actually changed the way they talk to their children. Because, although it’s not an interview, parents want to find out what their kids are up to. And that leads to all sorts of situations and, you know, the more you stay clean when your asking your children, the more you allow them to answer from themselves. They’re much more likely to give you the truth about their situation, because they aren’t being pushed to give the kind of answers parents wish, so want to hear.

Sharon: I’ve had some personal experience with that. So, I see this interviewing that we’re going to be doing in January as a really nice, not just a nice introduction to interviewing, but a really nice introduction to Clean Language. And for people to get an idea, is this something they might want to learn more of. And also, if they are not in a coaching or therapy field, or doing a lot of in-depth work with clients, the Clean Interviewing is a wonderful way of learning clean and applying it to their context, their work space.

James: Good point.

Sharon: And its beautiful where we are.

James: Sure is, we’re coming all the way over there

Sharon: For those that are watching or reading, James is in the UK and I’m on the Central Coast of California. James Lawley and Penny Tompkins will be coming to California in January to join me for quite an extensive training. But today I really just wanted to have something to share about Clean Interviewing, because I think it is really particular, it’s one of the more vital smaller processes that have come out of Clean Language and Symbolic Modeling, and can just be so useful for people to see – what are they doing. Especially with the cleanness rating you’ve created, being able to really go back and look at something and get clarity on whats happening.

James: Looking forward to it.

Clean Convergence 2019 with Clean Interviewing January 19-20

Clean Convergence 2019

The Hardness Of Soft Skills

The Hardness Of Soft Skills

I have been thinking a lot about the phrase “soft skills”, and just how hard – read ‘difficult’ – they are to learn and master.

And I wonder how they were given the name soft skillswhen they are more labor intensive and difficult to learn than say doing a fishbone diagram or an excel spreadsheet. And why is there this idea that these are somehow less valuable in a business context than hardskills?

Unless you work in a vacuum, and none of us do – even solopreneur, like myself, who work on their own much of the time still have relationships with individuals and groups that shape who we are, what we do, and how we respond.

Soft skills are really hard skills.

It is fascinating to me that the most difficult things for us to learn – how to listen well, think well, and communicate with others are often referred to as soft skillsand often foo food as being silly, warm, fuzzy and just, well, soft. It is true that these kinds of skills have been used in compassion industries such as therapy and hospice. And they may be soft (even fuzzy around the edges) and yet they are not easy.

I think one of the primary reasons people tend to put soft skillsand the attention to learning, even mastering them off, is due to the very fact that they are difficult. They are hard to learn, hard to master and often times hard to implement. And that also is what makes them valuable.

Life is not black and white, linear, reasonable or rational; neither is business.

Soft skills have also been perceived as more art than science. And all science begins with empirical evidence and a persons idea or opinion of what might be so. This art to science ratio is a changing game in light of 21st century findings in both neuro and cognitive sciences. Our sophistication in scientific inquiry to the workings of the human mind and response systems has taken immense leaps over the past 50 years.

An analogy we might use is just as we had the industrial revolution in the 20th century, that changed the face of manufacturing.

What is happening is not an information revolution, although we are influenced with more information in a day than many previous generations had in a life time. It is not even a neuro-biological revolution, although the science of the brain and subtle chemicals has come a long way.

Lets call it a Meta revolution. A kind of perceptual revolution. A potatos are just as important to a meal as the steak, kind of revolution. And the Meta revolution is changing the face of interpersonal communication and human to human contact.

It is well to remember that just as the industrial revolution has not happened all over the world, but primarily in first world nations, the Meta Revolution is only just beginning. This is both a benefit and a difficulty.

The benefit is we can calibrate and change the perception of soft skills. We can learn what we need, to be very good at soft skillsand we can use new information and learning to quantify what we are doing and how.

The difficulty is the learning curve is high. The time is often longer than most either have or want to put into becoming facile and skillful and we, as human beings, tend to over rate our ability and under-rate the negative effects of our own knowledge and style.

The Meta Revolution depends on our perception, education, ability to think well, using various forms of logic and to take a meta position or larger view of what is happening outside of our own thinking and behaviors.

With this in mind, the Meta revolution is science taking many of the attributes of human communication and moving it into an arena that has a higher relationship to hard skills. Here is a definition I got from a Google search for What are hard skills?

Hard Skills are specific, teachable abilities that can be defined and measured, such as typing, writing, math, reading and the ability to use software programs. By contrast, soft skills are less tangible and harder to quantify, such as etiquette, getting along with others, listening and engaging in small talk.

In my world, interviewing is both a hard skill and a soft skill. Not just by googles definition, but by our current ability to quantify, learn and track skills that can be used in interviewing contexts.

Clean Language is on the edge of this revolution.

Wanna play hard ball? Learn soft skills

Negotiation training
Cause Evaluation Interviews
CAP program development
Management
Team Development
Leadership Development
HR Hiring Interviews
Business Plan development
Police Witness Interviews

Join James Lawley and myself in California, January 19-20, 2019 for full two day Clean Language Interview training. You can read more about what is on offer in January 2019 HERE

REGISTER HERE for CLEAN INTERVIEWING January 19-20, 2019

Would like to read something about using Clean questions and principles in an interview context right away? Here is a link to an article: Clean Evaluative Interviewing by James Lawley & Penny Tompkins