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Throughout my business career, I have watched people interviewing new candidates or trying to resolve a problem by turning what should be a dynamic conversation into a checklist: “Do you have any…” like a game of Go Fish. I say to these people, “You are talking at people, not to them.” Because business is a subset of life, there is no surprise I find people doing the same thing in their personal lives. Because of my background in human behavior, more than one of these people has asked me to write a book about information discovery to help guide their conversations with customers and others. When Jim and I were talking about his concept for this book, I shared with him how desperately people need these skills.

When I first met Jim, he was already an interrogator in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, returning to Monterey, California, to learn Arabic. I had not yet been trained as an interrogator. We spent most of two years there in Arabic school together, and along the way I got to know Jim well. He was among the brightest folks I met in the Army, and he had the added advantage of diverse work experiences prior to becoming an interrogator. He would constantly make observations about a person based on the words he or she chose. He would ask why more than any adult I had met. I assumed going to interrogation school would make me understand everything Jim had talked about.

When I left language school, it was off to interrogation school where Jim was an instructor. In interrogation school, you spend most of your time on two things: approaches, or how to get someone to “break”; and questioning, or how to get their information. Most people can get through the approaches portion of this training with lackluster performance, but questioning separates the successful interrogators from the failures. There is just no way to fake questioning; you need a logical mind, a clear plan, and a whole lot of curiosity about what and why. Without that curiosity it just turns into a checklist, or sort of a high-stakes game of Go Fish. Jim was a dynamic instructor with a spark for teaching people to think about why someone was saying something rather than to give a rote response and ask the next question on the list.

Jim would rely on that razor-sharp insight and a steady flow of source-driven questions to exploit the story so effectively that the questioning itself became the approach. Through many years I have watched Jim perfect his style of questioning to the point that it is his art in the interrogation room.

When I left interrogation school, I realized Jim’s style was not the product of 18 weeks of training, but of a varied background overlaid with that basic skill set and used in the intelligence business and daily life. This created an understanding of how to talk to people in a productive manner and turn even a mundane conversation into a fluid one. There is no better person to write a book about discovery than Jim Pyle.

Jim is among the best questioning trainers in the business. He is stellar at talking to someone to get at the root cause of a problem, gather information about a situation, and better understand the drive of the other person in the conversation. His style of questioning will help people in all areas of life.

Expertise is the intersection of people and knowledge – knowing how to question better than the average interrogator and raising that skill to an art form isn’t enough to write a book. Writing is a complex process, and getting information on paper in a form that others can understand and use is tough. When Jim asked me about writing, there was only one answer: He should partner with Maryann.

Maryann has a background as diverse as Jim’s. I often say to Maryann that she should brand herself as the working-with-diverse-teams expert. She has written with and helped experts from varied backgrounds publish their thoughts and along the way picked up something from each.

Maryann and I have written seven books together about human nature and interrogation. Maryann brings not only writing and publishing savvy to the partnership, but at this point, an understanding of the concepts of interrogation and the intelligence business. Maryann was a good and quick study in the body language books we wrote together. I knew Maryann would be a strong contributing partner who would challenge Jim to think of new ways to convey his thoughts.

This book is the joint effort of these two people I know well. Maryann perfectly captures the voice of her coauthor, and I think you will find Jim’s insight to human nature entertaining and useful. I hope you enjoy his way of thinking about a person’s relationship to information – and how to get at that information – as much as I have.

Gregory Hartley is a decorated former U.S. Army interrogator and the coauthor of seven books on human behavior and extreme interpersonal skills. He is currently Director of Project Management for Kone Corporation.