“The best stuff lives in someone else’s head,” I explained to an attentive class.

When it comes to finding content for writing projects, there are really two approaches:

#1: Search like crazy: This involves spending hours on the Internet, reading hundreds of pages of documents and filtering the good from the slop.

#2: Interview people in the know: This approach is greatly streamlined. Basically you get on the phone with the experts and ask the right questions. You are in and out in 60 minutes or less.

If you want to get at the right information rapidly, might I suggest approach number two.

When I am interviewing an expert, say a vice president of a major corporation, I do no prior research before the interview.

WHAT you ask?

Yes, that is right, I literally go in blind.

And, I do this every single day.

WARNING: If you do not know how to ask good questions and quickly engage a person, you should read the link above in this article.

So here is my strategy and why it really works:

Let’s say you are working on a big project, like a white paper.

You know you need to talk to people to understand the topic and write about as if you were the expert.

My approach is to break the project into a series of interviews based on topic. For example, you might talk about the history section one call and perhaps a list of benefits on another.

Rather than reading all the documents that the company has already published, you should simply get a high level overview of the project topic and then arrange time with the experts.

By NOT reading the materials provided by your client (not yet at least), you:

• Improve the likelihood of digesting every word that comes from the interview
• Are more likely to ask probing follow-on questions
• Get some great ideas for use in your work
• Eliminate the likelihood of simply rewriting what has already been written
• Greatly speed the research process
• Have a chance to ask your expert specifically what you should read (after your interview)
• Develop a sense of commitment to the project with the experts
• Speed the reading process (when the interviews are done, you have a narrowed focus)

Be warned that your clients may not appreciate or see the wisdom in this approach right off the bat. However, if they stick with your process, they will be pleasantly surprised to see the valuable content that results from your many interviews.

Having done this literally hundreds of times, I can promise you it really does work.

A case story: I had a client that hooked me up with some executives at his company. He was the one who personally wrote most of the materials that were used by the company. During the interviews with the executives, they were clearly enjoying the process and saying things like, “these interviews are really great,” and “Mike is making us think hard about the reason’s we say what we say.” Now my contact started getting frustrated because he said, “If you had read the materials I had sent, you would see that many of the answers to your questions were in there.” I assured him that this was part of my process and there was a method to my madness. I did read his materials after all the interviews were done. I noticed that the “answers” he mentioned were not really there. If they were, they were so barely mentioned that it would take a master puzzle man to piece them together. After my contact saw the document I delivered, he mentioned he was very pleased with the result. Time spent in interviews, about five one-hour sessions. Time spent reading documents: about two hours. Time surfing the web: zero minutes. Time saved: about eight to ten hours.

Disclaimer: There are circumstances where this approach will not work. For highly technical white papers, you will need to become familiar with the industry terminology. In these cases it makes sense to do a little reading first.

What say you? Do you spend hours reading before interviews or just jump in blind?

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