How to Conduct Expert Interviews Effectively : A 3-Principle Framework for Asking Better Questions
The Hidden Enemy of Successful M&A: 'Cognitive Biases'
Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norms or rationality in judgment.
They can be especially detrimental in complex, high-stakes transactions like M&A. During M&A processes, cognitive biases can distort valuations and strategic judgments, leading to negative outcomes.
For example, executives may fall into confirmation bias—preferring information that supports existing beliefs—or develop unrealistic integration expectations due to overconfidence bias that overestimates their ability to succeed.
Therefore, understanding and managing cognitive biases is critical for M&A success.
These cognitive biases affect not only macro-level decisions like M&A but also Expert Interviews, the process of gathering critical information.
An interviewer's unconscious biases can hinder their ability to gather accurate information, distorting objective insights and ultimately compromising the quality of intelligence required for successful M&A.
4 Cognitive Biases That Impact Expert Interviews
Expert Interviews play a critical role in gaining unique industry insights needed for business decisions, including identifying unmet market needs, gathering competitive intelligence, and validating strategic hypotheses.
However, when unconscious biases enter the interview process, the valuable information you sought becomes distorted, creating critical blind spots in your M&A strategy.
1. Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms existing beliefs or hypotheses while ignoring contradictory information.
Impact on Expert Interviews:
Interviewers seek only information that aligns with their preexisting beliefs, causing them to overlook potential red flags.
This creates critical blind spots that hinder accurate investment strategy development.
2. Anchoring Bias
Anchoring bias is the tendency to fixate on initial information (the anchor), filtering out unfamiliar subsequent information and remaining closed to new ideas.
Impact on Expert Interviews:
When conducting interviews in rapidly changing market conditions, analysts become overly attached to initial information.
To avoid this bias, maintaining an open mind to both new and old information is essential.
3. Survivorship Bias
Survivorship bias is the tendency to focus only on solutions that produced successful outcomes in the past while ignoring unexplored or failed solutions.
Impact on Expert Interviews:
Fixating on past successes erodes the flexibility needed to consider new solutions.
When developing strategies based on insights from interviews, there's a risk of overlooking other possibilities.
4. Halo Effect Bias
Halo effect bias occurs when positive experiences or impressions of a subject cause you to view all aspects of that subject positively, losing critical perspective.
Impact on Expert Interviews:
Prevents critical examination of interview subjects or their opinions.
Being swayed by certain positive elements increases the risk of blindly pursuing deals without seeing gaps in investment strategy.
Only by avoiding these biases can you extract the most effective and valuable information from interviews.
3 Principles for Designing Interview Questions That Yield Neutral Insights
To minimize bias and obtain objective insights, you must apply systematic principles when designing and managing interview questions.
For best results, Expert Interviews should follow a semi-structured format that blends flexible conversation with well-crafted questions.
1. Avoid leading questions and maintain a neutral tone.
Leading questions—where the framing itself guides the expert's response in a specific direction—are the most common source of bias in interviews.
For example, a question like "You're confident your new product will increase market share, aren't you?" already expects a positive answer and pressures the expert.
Such questions can influence experts to respond according to the questioner's expectations rather than their genuine opinions.
Therefore, analysts must always maintain a neutral tone when constructing questions.
Questions should be designed like "What impact do you expect your new product to have on market share?"—allowing experts to respond freely in any direction.
2. Focus the question's purpose on 'gathering objective opinions,' not 'persuasion.'
The ultimate goal of interviews is to obtain objective opinions and insights from experts, not to persuade experts that the hypotheses or business ideas you already have in mind are correct.
When questioners fall into confirmation bias and construct questions to validate their hypotheses, interviews devolve into mere hypothesis confirmation exercises.
Therefore, when designing questions, instead of "Do you think this idea will succeed?" approach it like "What are the most critical market conditions that must be met for this idea to succeed?"—requesting the expert's analytical perspective.
This approach encourages experts to leverage their expertise and offer critical perspectives, ultimately securing deeper and more objective information.
3. Keep questions as open-ended as possible to broaden the scope of insights.
One of the most effective ways to block bias is to keep questions as open-ended as possible.
Beyond avoiding leading questions and maintaining a neutral tone, the structure of questions themselves should be designed to enable experts to provide detailed, descriptive answers beyond simple 'yes' or 'no' responses.
Open-ended questions allow experts to freely discuss complex topics based on their experiential knowledge and provide nuanced insights and unique perspectives the questioner may not have anticipated.
This enables the discovery of new risks and opportunities the interviewer hadn't considered.
For example, instead of "Will this technology succeed?" ask "What are the biggest challenges and unexpected opportunities you foresee when this technology is introduced to the market?" to broaden the scope of insights.
3 Key Considerations for Objective Interviews
Success in business decision-making begins with recognizing cognitive biases and systematically mitigating them.
Expert Interviews in particular play a decisive role in obtaining distinct perspectives needed for business decisions, such as identifying unmet market needs and gathering competitive intelligence.
The three question design principles outlined above go beyond mere interview techniques—they are essential interview strategies for blocking bias and ensuring objectivity.
Even when conducting interviews using questions developed this way, there are several points to keep in mind:
Interviewers must ask questions that exclude their own biases to best elicit the expert's experiential knowledge and nuanced perspectives.
To utilize insights from interviews without bias, it's important not to rely solely on memory but to record detailed notes with the expert's consent, including audio recording.
Immediately after the interview, organize key summaries and insights to prevent bias from entering post-evaluation.
By conducting interviews with these three considerations in mind, you'll be better positioned to secure the expert experience and insights needed for successful M&A.
Market & Industry Expert Interview Solution, Brainconnect AI
Expert Interviews are a critical process for successful M&A. However, finding appropriate experts and conducting interviews efficiently presents challenges.
To solve these problems, Brainconnect.ai combines a high-quality network built on strategic consulting and ENS (Expert Network Service) experience with smart technology to support Expert Interviews and research for clients' informed decision-making.
How to Increase M&A & New Business Development Success Rates, Brainconnect AI
Brainconnect.ai provides insights in various formats tailored to client needs.
From discovering interview-ready experts to conducting interviews on your behalf for objective insights, and from proxy interview services to research services by specialized consultants on specific topics—we provide all services needed for successful M&A.
Format | Description | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
Call Interview | Remote voice call Q&A on specific topics | 20-minute increments (average 1 hour) |
Interview + Reporting | Expert interview conducted on your behalf with report delivery | 2 - 3 weeks |
Short-term Advisory | In-person or remote interviews and verbal advisory for specific periods | 1 week - monthly (customized) |
Deep-dive Research | Research and analysis services / report delivery on specific topics | 4 - 8 weeks |
Brainconnect's Differentiated Strengths
Brainconnect.ai strengthens clients' research capabilities through four core values:
Verified High-Quality Expert Network:
We maintain a network accumulated through strategic consulting and ENS (Expert Network Service) experience.
Our network includes numerous professionals across all industries, from C-Level to Director and Sr. Manager-level personnel capable of engaging in substantive discussions on strategy, sales, and operations.
Combination of Smart Technology and Human Touch:
We combine the convenience of a cloud SaaS platform with systematic managed services from professional research managers.
We leverage AI technology to provide functions such as optimal expert discovery, summarization, and keyword expansion to support efficient insight acquisition.
Reasonable Pricing Policy:
We adopt a pay-as-you-go pricing model that can reduce research costs by up to 50%.
Billing starts at 20-minute increments and varies by expert tier.
Expansion to AI Research:
We are expanding services as a comprehensive research partner through generative AI technology and partnerships.
Through AI Researcher, we will provide GenAI-based optimal research framework definition and initial research results.
Now you can achieve more efficient and effective results in Expert Interviews by leveraging smart technology including AI.
If you've been disappointed by traditional ENS that's expensive but inefficient, entrust your research to Brainconnect.ai, which helps clients succeed through active technology adoption and utilization.