Reflective Interview¶
Interview — instantiates Implicit Assumption Surfacing
Elicits assumptions from a person through prompts about defaults, expectations, exceptions, and surprises.
Reflective Interview draws a single person's tacit premises into the open through structured, one-on-one questioning. Much of what an experienced practitioner knows lives as habit — defaults they apply without noticing, expectations they would only articulate if asked, the boundaries where their rules quietly stop working. The interview goes after exactly that: it prompts the person about their defaults ("what do you take for granted here?"), their expectations, the exceptions ("when does that not hold?"), and their surprises ("the last time you were wrong — what had you assumed?"). As each premise surfaces, the interviewer also marks two things the person usually knows but rarely states: where the premise stops applying, and how sure they are of it. It is introspective and individual — one mind's rulebook made inspectable — which is what separates it from a multi-party process aimed at collective blind spots.
Example¶
A hospital wants to capture the judgment of a veteran emergency-department triage nurse before she retires. The reflective interview walks her defaults. "When you decide a chest-pain patient can wait, what are you assuming?" She names a premise she has never spoken: the reported pain onset time is accurate. "When is that not safe?" — a validity condition emerges: except with elderly diabetic patients, who under-report and mis-time cardiac pain. "How sure are you of your gut on the borderline cases?" — a confidence marker: rock-solid on the vital-sign thresholds; much hazier on the "something's off about this one" feeling she cannot fully justify. Anchoring to a specific bad call from years ago ("what had you assumed that day?") surfaces a default about family-reported history she now distrusts. The output is her tacit triage model, written down as premises with their boundaries and her own confidence — inspectable, teachable, and no longer walking out the door with her.
How it works¶
- Prompt across the four registers. Defaults, expectations, exceptions, and surprises — each pulls a different class of tacit premise into words.
- Anchor to concrete incidents. Walk the person back through a specific real case; grounded recall beats abstract self-description at surfacing the actual premise.
- Reflect statements back. Restate each surfaced premise to sharpen it from a vague theme into a proposition the person can confirm or correct.
- Mark boundary and confidence. For each premise, capture where it stops holding and how firmly the person holds it.
The distinguishing property is that it extracts from one mind, introspectively, and goes after the tacit and habitual — not the negotiated premises of a group.
Tuning parameters¶
- Prompt structure — defaults/expectations vs. exceptions/surprises vs. critical-incident recall. Incident-anchored prompts surface the truest premises; abstract prompts are faster but invite rationalization.
- Reflection depth — how hard the interviewer presses each statement toward a crisp proposition. Deeper reflection sharpens premises but risks leading the witness.
- Session count — single sitting vs. repeated conversations. Repetition surfaces premises the person only recognizes on reflection, at higher cost.
- Interviewer neutrality — how carefully the interviewer avoids supplying the premise. Neutral prompting keeps the assumption the subject's own; leading prompts plant it.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is surfacing expertise the person could not volunteer unprompted — the tacit defaults and their boundaries that never appear in a written procedure. Anchoring to concrete cases is what makes it work; the Critical Decision Method formalizes exactly this — walking an expert back through a specific hard case to pull their decision assumptions into view.[n1]
Its failure mode is that self-report is post-hoc rationalization: people narrate reasons that sound coherent but may not be what actually drove the behavior, so the transcript describes their self-model, not necessarily their conduct. A leading interviewer compounds it by planting premises the subject then obligingly "confirms." The classic misuse is treating the interview as ground truth about what someone does rather than about what they believe they do. The guarding discipline is to anchor relentlessly to specific past incidents and to separate what the person did from the reasons they now give — and, where behavior itself is in question, to check the account against a record rather than trusting the narration.
How it implements the components¶
implicit_assumption— it elicits the person's unstated defaults and expectations and states them as propositions.validity_condition— the "when does that not hold?" probe fixes the boundary within which each premise applies.confidence_marker— it records how firmly the person holds each surfaced premise, separating the sure from the hazy.
It draws on one mind; it does not convene multiple parties to expose whom an insider consensus leaves out, attribute premises to accountable groups, or map their effect on a shared decision (excluded_case, assumption_owner, influence_path) — that group work is stakeholder_assumption_elicitation.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Implicit Assumption Surfacing — the interview elicits one expert's tacit premises, with their boundaries and confidence, ready for the rest of the archetype to test and record.
- Sibling mechanisms: counterfactual_assumption_test · design_critique · model_assumptions_log · premortem_assumption_probe · red_team_assumption_review · stakeholder_assumption_elicitation · assumption_audit
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Communication, Facilitation & Learning
Rationale: Reflective Interview operates as a designed message, facilitated interaction, ritual, or learning activity that changes shared understanding because it elicits assumptions from a person through prompts about defaults, expectations, exceptions, and surprises.
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Reflective Interview as 'Elicits assumptions from a person through prompts about defaults, expectations, exceptions, and surprises', so its operative form is Communication, Facilitation & Learning.
Nearest alternative: Assessment, Review & Assurance — Reflective Interview includes features of a bounded evaluation of existing evidence or work that produces a finding or disposition, but its defining operation is a designed message, facilitated interaction, ritual, or learning activity that changes shared understanding.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; medium confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Ethnography & Qualitative Methods
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Multi-domain
Rationale: Eliciting tacit assumptions through open probes is a qualitative interviewing technique.
Related originating lineages:
- Psychology — Cognitive interviewing materially contributes prompts about defaults, expectations, and surprises.
Review resolution: Both blind reviewers agree that ethnography_qualitative_methods is the primary origin. Explicit reconciliation of origin mode disagreement adopts reviewer_a's classification because eliciting tacit assumptions through open probes is a qualitative interviewing technique. The resulting lineage records alternates=psychology, origin_mode=cross_disciplinary_synthesis, and domain_reach=multi_domain; these describe formative provenance separately from later applicability.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
[n1] The Critical Decision Method — a cognitive-task-analysis interview that walks an expert back through one specific tough case, probing the cues and expectations at each decision point — is the established technique for pulling tacit decision assumptions into view. It is the reason a reflective interview anchors on real incidents rather than generalities. ↩