“What are we doing when we explain why?” Mr. Francis said. “We are showing people respect.”

Many flight crews do quite well at this, and some extremely frequent fliers don’t want to be bothered. Then, however, there are the employees who don’t want passengers challenging their authority and resent innocent questions born of ignorance created by the silence from those very employees.

Mr. Francis has no patience for such people or the managers who muzzle them. “My job is to create a situation where people can comply with me and still save face,” he said. “If they do, I won just because they got an explanation.”

The Choice (Is Yours)

This bit of context setting is part of a five-step process that begins with an employee’s ask and ends with a confirmation and the requested action. After the why, there may need to be a set of options if someone is not satisfied with the explanation and proceeds to do his own thing in spite of the ask.

Take the airplane standers who defy the sit down-seat belt sign and threaten the on-time departure that is the subject of so much management attention. Ms. Nelson, the flight attendant union president, knows just what to do with them.

“‘Sir,’” she demonstrated for me in a phone interview. “‘If you don’t sit in your seat, you are going to be removed. You have a choice here, and I want to give you that choice. But I want you to be really clear about what your options are.’”

Mr. Francis endorses this, sort of, but he likes his students to present a positive choice first. Someone who jumps at that choice straightaway may not need to experience the ill will that a threat might sow.

This was something I struggled with as Mr. Francis and I acted out role-playing parts in front a room with cattle-branding irons on the mantel of a stone fireplace. My instincts, apparently, were a tad too confrontational: I kept wanting to threaten him with arrest for staying in an imaginary park in Brooklyn for too long rather than shooing him off to a nice diner down the street. He kept calling me “Rookie.”