Once upon a time, long, long ago, the father (a management consultant) of one of my eighth grade students came into his daughter's computer applications class (which I ran as a business) to give, as a guest speaker, a presentation. (I encouraged this sort of thing.) The gist of his presentation was: "Telling isn't selling; asking is."

I don't know if any of the kids in the class heard a word that he said, but I did, and I thought the statement profound, perhaps because it explicitly stated something I had incipiently suspected. What he said is: if you want to sell a product or service or idea, or promote anything, you need to stop talking and start listening—listening intently and with genuine interest. I knew it was true the minute he said it, and I've seen the idea work wonders ever since.

And this is where the Democratic Party comes in: this past election—there was lots and lots of telling but almost no listening.

I am therefore badgering (this is Wisconsin, after all) the Party to initiate what I call "The Big Listen." Lots of town-halls, but with ordinary people on the dais and politicians asking the questions. And lots of what might be called questionnaires, on issues like health care, education, the environment, taxes, etc.

Instead of questionnaires, I call them Queries, based on the idea of Thomas Gilbert in his profound book, Human Competence, Engineering Worthy Performance. The idea behind Gilbert's Query is that of asking questions and then letting the reader (customer, client, citizen) figure things out for him or herself.

So I, with great temerity, have decided to create a Query on the issue of healthcare. This is a rough draft (I am meeting with Glenn to to learn the real stuff), and I know it's silly. Still and all, I think the idea is sound and points in the right direction.

Note: for some reason, the instructions to respondents was not printed on this draft layout. My bad. It will be fixed, and perhaps for now, it will still make sense.

Otherwise, the weather has been awful—dark, damp, chilly, gray, and now with a building wind—another gale warning on Lake Michigan. According to my weather app today's high was 107 and tonight's low will be 9. In this era of truthiness I give more credence to the low score.