Practice
At the end of August, my dad shipped my grandfather’s antique pool table and other family memorabilia from my parent’s home in North Carolina to our home in New Hampshire, where we’d created a cool, basement library to house the table. Unfortunately, the moving company stole the pool table and the rest of the shipment, sending my parents on an epic journey to recover it from the thieves, leading them to a remote warehouse outside of Atlanta. In rather heroic fashion, they retrieved the pool table and everything else, and drove it themselves from Atlanta to New Hampshire.
Not only am I proud of my parents’ great effort, I’m also excited to begin practicing pool again and doing so using the deliberate practice methods Anders Ericsson has spent years researching, and which he explains fully in his outstanding book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. This type of deliberate, focused practice, with immediate and unambiguous feedback works great for things like pool, but how does it apply to the messier world of Intelligence Interviewing?
David Epstein, in his book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, suggests deliberate practice may not be the complete answer. In terms he borrows from noted research psychologist Gary Klein, Epstein notes there are “kind” and “unkind” environments. Deliberate practice is much better suited to kind environments, such as most sports where you can replicate patterns and accurately correct errors. It does not work as well when dealing in unkind environments, where patterns do not repeat in consistent ways and where feedback most often is unclear or even inaccurate.
As anyone who has been an interviewer or interrogator knows, what worked one day can create a complete mess the next day when interviewing someone else. We can look to psychology and research for guidance as to how people will likely respond to different situations, and most often this works, but people are people and sometimes it does not work. This is the unpredictable side of interviewing where the learned and practiced responses do not work as expected. This unpredictability often is what makes interviewing fun, but it can also sometimes feel like you are sliding into a deep, dark hole.
To excel at interviewing, I think we need both types of practice – Ericsson’s deliberate practice and the “rangy” form of practice described by Epstein. Anyone who has conducted more than a couple intelligence interviews has experienced the moment when the interviewee challenges you on something or wants to argue a point. On multiple occasions, I’ve been told by an interview “You have no idea what my life has been like.” My natural inclination is to argue back, to prove that I do know, but the better response is to reflect back to the interviewee what they have just said to get them to talk more.
Reflections are tricky and come in many forms and applying them smoothly during an interview is a practiced skill. It develops through conscious, effortful practice at responding to difficult or provocative statements made by an interviewee. You can practice this by sitting down with a partner, asking them to throw challenging lines at you, and you reflect the issue back to them. Not arguing or answering but reflecting. Your partner then gives feedback, together you work out a better response, and you try it again and again. This is deliberate practice.
But that is not always enough; you will inevitably find yourself in situations where the practiced approaches just are not working. Based on the research, I would argue the route to being a great interviewer, beyond practice, and more practice, is having a broad range of experiences from which to draw. This means going outside of our comfort zone in life, experiencing and doing things we don’t normally do, and learning things we’d not normally learn.
As Epstein notes, this allows us to draw on those experiences and analogies that might not seem immediately relevant but that our brain knows how to synthesize into something that works in the present situation. Rather than relying on previous solutions and becoming cognitively entrenched in a certain line of thinking, we create new solutions that work in novel and unpredictable situations.
In expanding our range we are building what can be termed cognitive flexibility and in recent research by Laurence Alison, at University of Liverpool, he and his colleagues found cognitive flexibility to be a predictor of the ability to design a questioning strategy most well-suited for specific interviewees. In previous research he has found the ability to adapt to the interviewee’s line of thought to be an important predictor of information yield. The more recent research is preliminary, but I believe it is in line with the vast research Epstein draws on in Range.
An example of rangy practice is reading works of fiction. According to a Harvard Business School study, “Reading fiction predicts increased social acuity and a sharper ability to comprehend other people’s motivations.” So while it may feel a waste of time sitting down to read a John Le Carré novel, it really is a form of practice that will make you better next time you are trying to figure out where someone is coming from during an interview. Take this as permission to dive into the stack of books that have been accumulating on your nightstand or desk. I know I do.
I’m excited to get to work on deliberate practice to improve my pool game and I’m hoping that what I learn from hanging out with my wife and friends while playing pool, rangy practice, will come into play some day to help me through a sticky situation in an interview. I’m confident it will, and I know for sure my parents’ recent adventure and the characters they met along the way will expand their range for handling whatever challenge comes next.
