How to get people to tell you the truth

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.}

Happy Wednesday, founders,

Today’s topic has been in my content calendar for a while.

I’ve always loved reading or listening to negotiation and interrogation techniques. They’re often more useful than we think.

Drawing on the work of WWII interrogator Scharff and a group of psychologists who spent years researching his techniques, today’s edition is about how to elicit information you want, without, well, interrogating someone.

Take notes, and you can thank me later after your next successful confrontational conversations (wink).

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During WWII, a German Luftwaffe interrogator extracted more usable intelligence from Allied airmen than anyone else on either side of the war, without raising his voice or making a single threat.

Hanns Scharff took prisoners on walks. He offered coffee and cigarettes. He talked about hometowns, families, and flying careers, for hours, before the conversation ever touched the mission that had gotten them captured.

Airmen who sat across from him often walked out convinced they had said nothing useful, but Scharff had gathered all the information he needed.

For decades, Scharff's infamous interrogation techniques went beyond military folklore but had never been formally validated in a lab.

That changed when psychologist Pär Anders Granhag and colleagues set out to turn his approach into a tactical framework and test it in a controlled experiment decades later.

The Scharff technique rests on one idea: a conversation centred on statements elicits more information and truths than a conversation on questions. It breaks into a few parts:

This technique keeps the exchange warm and unhurried, nothing like an interview. The interviewer builds rapport with the source, which is critical to their cooperation.

This is achieved by asking as few questions as possible and avoiding explicit questions. Instead, the interviewer tells a story and makes claims, giving the source the opportunity to add details. By doing so, the interviewer evokes information from the source rather than demanding it.

The interviewer presents thorough, detailed, accurate information designed to make the source believe it’s unlikely they will contribute anything new.

This tactic implies that any new information the source reveals was already known to the interrogator. Since the interviewer acts as if there are no surprises in any new information shared with him, the source stays unaware of their contribution and the interviewer’s information objective.

In this technique, the interviewer makes a specific claim and presents information as known facts, inviting the other person to accept or correct the interviewer. Instead of asking a question such as “When will the xxx event take place?”, the interviewer presents the information as “We already know the xxx will take place on the 27th of April”. The interviewer presents the information as certain facts, then waits for confirmation or correction from the source.

The first controlled test, conducted by Granhag and colleagues in 2015, put the technique against a standard direct-questioning approach.

Researchers gave 93 participants secret information about a planned event and told them to reveal some of it in an upcoming interview. Some were questioned directly, others were questioned using the Scharff approach, with the interviewer acting as though they already had the full picture of the events.

Participants in the Scharff condition found it noticeably harder to tell what the interviewer was actually trying to find out than those questioned directly.

The techniques secret agents use to gather information seem far from everyday life. But the underlying communication frameworks are insightful, and we can borrow them when we need information in a confrontational conversation.

Take our 1:1s and retros as examples. These meetings can be evolved around direct questions:

These questions tell our ‘source’ exactly what's being investigated and exactly what answer would make them look bad. So the answers we get back are usually defensive deflects, safe, politically correct replies, or blame instead of the truth.

So, instead of saying: "what happened to the delay,"

We can offer an informed guess:

"My understanding is that the scope was underestimated before the project kick-off."

Instead of saying: "why was the handoff messy,"

We can say what we've heard:

"I've heard from a couple of people that the design-to-engineering handoff was rough this week."

We can also offer a knowingly wrong statement instead of a question to invite a precise correction.

In each case, the other person isn’t busy defending themselves, because they are asked to correct us.

A few ways to put the structure into practice when you’re aiming to elicit information in a confrontational conversation:

Founders negotiate every day, and you may be surprised just how much a simple elicitation tactic can help you with your next difficult conversation.

ps. Be generous and share your story with me if you ever try out to 'interrogate' someone today!

As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.

Until next week,
Lavena

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