From Bias to Clarity: How Red Teaming and Strategic Questioning Improve Investigative Interviews

Success in high-stakes situations, such as criminal cases, compliance interviews, or HR investigations, requires more than just asking the right questions. It’s about asking the right questions for the right reasons, in the right way. That requires more than instinct or experience; it calls for strategic preparation. Integrating red teaming, setting clear interview objectives, and crafting a strategic questioning plan can elevate any investigation from routine to remarkable.

Red Teaming Assumptions: Guardrails Against Bias

Red teaming is the process of deliberately challenging your thinking to avoid blind spots, groupthink, and overconfidence. It forces investigators to ask hard questions about their assumptions:

• Is this based on logic or on bias?

• What would need to happen for this belief to be true?

• What evidence would disprove our current theory?

• Are we anchoring ourselves to the first version of events we heard?

These questions aren’t abstract. They form the basis of a process that builds investigative rigor. By testing assumptions before entering the room, red teaming reduces the risk of confirmation bias—the all-too-common trap where investigators interpret everything through a lens of guilt or suspicion.

Example: An HR manager assumes a specific employee is responsible for repeated compliance violations due to past behavior. A red teaming approach would ask, “What if this person isn’t responsible? What other explanations are plausible? Are we overvaluing historical patterns and undervaluing new data?” These questions aren't just rhetorical, they’re designed to expand your investigative lens.

Three Investigative Pillars for Questioning

Red teaming reframes the mindset from “prove what we think” to “discover what we don’t know.” It’s the investigative version of running diagnostics before you step into surgery.

In practice, this means deliberately ruling in and ruling out alternative scenarios. If the favored hypothesis is that this employee is the source of the violations, red teaming forces you to explore others:

• Could it be a team-wide misunderstanding of the policy?

• Has a new process or system change created gaps that multiple employees are falling into?

• Could someone else be mimicking this employee’s login or access pattern?

• What evidence would we expect to see if this person were not responsible—and is that evidence present?

Ruling in alternatives isn’t just about playing devil’s advocate—it’s about taking those possibilities seriously enough to pursue them. Ruling out your assumption requires testing it with objective criteria, not just gut instinct or history.

By doing this, the HR manager moves from a narrow frame—“This is probably just more of the same from this employee”—to a broader investigative posture: “Let’s understand what’s actually happening and why.”

This disciplined curiosity doesn’t just protect against false assumptions—it ensures that corrective actions are aimed at the real cause, not just the most convenient one.

In conclusion, red teaming will only ever make your case, criminal or corporate investigation, stronger. By thinking deliberately, you move beyond assumption and bias and into a mindset of deliberate analysis. You systematically close off avenues of escape for the guilty by testing and tightening your theory of the case. At the same time, you open space to fairly understand and potentially exonerate the innocent. And perhaps most powerfully, you come away with a clearer understanding of the risks, patterns, and operational gaps within your organization, insights that few others will have. Red teaming isn’t second-guessing; it’s sharpening. It’s how professionals elevate their investigations from reactive to rigorous.

Investigative Interview Objectives: Define the Destination Before You Question

Before stepping into any interview, the skilled investigator defines what needs to be understood. Objectives are not vague hopes for “a confession” or “some answers”—they are targeted facts or insights that guide how information is collected, tested, and applied to decision-making. Clarity on what you want to learn ensures that every question serves a purpose, every answer can be evaluated, and nothing important is left to chance.

Importantly, objectives can range from broad exploratory goals—like learning what someone was doing that evening—to precise fact-finding targets, such as whether they saw the event, handled an object, or were driving a specific vehicle. This spectrum of scope gives you the flexibility to gather context while also drilling into the details that matter most.

Well-defined objectives may include:

• Obtain a detailed description of the suspect(s): Clarify physical features, clothing, speech patterns, and behaviors to support identification and corroboration.

• Establish the essential elements of the crime: Focus on the legal components that must be proven, guided by applicable jury instructions or policy definitions.

• Gather specific details about any vehicle(s) involved: Determine make, model, license plate, damage, location, or timeline of use.

• Understand the relationships between involved parties: Uncover context that may explain behavior, bias, access, or intent.

• Establish a precise timeline of events: Pin down sequence, duration, and timing to detect inconsistencies or confirm alibis.

• Determine who had control of a specific item or vehicle: Clarify ownership, access, and movement to link, or unlink, individuals to the scene or item.

• Confirm the whereabouts of individuals during key timeframes: Map movements to known facts and evaluate consistency with physical or digital evidence.

• Uncover possible motives behind the actions or crime: Gain insight into underlying intent, pressure, or opportunity that may explain behavior.

These objectives form the backbone of your planning. They help prioritize lines of inquiry and ensure you're gathering not just more information, but the right information. When you know what you’re looking for, your interviews become more focused, efficient, and reliable.

Hot Take from the Field: Objectives Build Investigator Confidence

In my experience interviewing and supervising interviews, I’ve found that investigators who fail to set clear objectives often fall back on closed-ended, confirmatory questioning the moment they run out of steam. Without well-defined objectives, interviews tend to veer or, worse, devolve into a state of uncertainty and guesswork. But when investigators walk in with clear, purposeful objectives, the entire interview structure improves.

For newer investigators especially, having set objectives doesn’t just organize the conversation; it boosts confidence. It ensures they cover the known facts, hit all the necessary bases, and avoid freezing when the conversation takes an unexpected turn. With the essentials accounted for, they’re free to lean into curiosity, follow leads, and adapt with agility. In other words, clear objectives don’t just guide good interviews; they help create great interviewers.

Questioning Strategy: Structure for Discovery, Not Just Confirmation

With assumptions tested and objectives set, the next step is crafting a questioning plan that supports information gathering, not just information confirmation. A questioning plan isn’t a script, it’s a roadmap (after all, you are on your way to becoming an adaptable investigator). It ensures you stay anchored to your objectives while giving you the flexibility to follow new, relevant information as it emerges.

A solid questioning plan:

• Starts with rapport-building and open-ended questions

• Follows a non-rigid funnel structure: broad to specific

• Incorporates the Strategic Use of Evidence (when evidence exists)

• Leaves room for adaptability when unexpected but important information surfaces

Why Funnel Questioning Structures Matter

The funnel approach, starting broad and narrowing down, is more than just a method. It’s a memory-compatible strategy. Memory doesn’t work well under pressure or constraint. Giving people the freedom to tell their story in their words before questioning them on specifics improves their recall of information. Beginning with broader, open-ended questions like “Tell me what happened after you got to work,” allows the interviewee to access more detail-rich memories about the incident. This not only supports recall accuracy but also builds the foundation for deeper, objective-driven questioning.

Funnels also provide a framework, and it’s important to stress: a framework, not a formula. They help ensure that you comprehensively explore your objectives while maintaining enough structure to stay on track. Each objective you’ve defined can become its own funnel: starting with open narrative prompts, moving into clarifiers, then probing details that anchor the account, and finally adding the active listening technique of summarizing, to make sure you the skilled investigator got it right, while still allowing them to add more

Investigative Curiosity Keeps You Adaptable

While a solid questioning plan gives you direction, curiosity keeps you agile. The adaptable and curious investigator doesn’t just stick to pre-interview objective funnels, they build new funnels in real time. This is how you pursue the unknown unknowns, those unexpected but valuable, sometimes case-cracking, details that emerge from narrative responses. When something surprising surfaces during an open-ended question, the skilled interviewer takes note and they create a new line of inquiry, crafting a funnel around this new objective.

Example:

A corporate investigator may start with, “Explain to me your role in the budgeting process,” rather than, “Did you approve that purchase order?” The first invites narrative, uncovers unknowns, and may reveal new lines of inquiry. The second assumes guilt or at least foreknowledge and narrows the range of possible counter-interview responses.

This approach not only avoids confirmation bias but also empowers the interviewer to discover new insights, adapt their questioning, conceal their objective, and build out a more complete picture of what happened. It’s the difference between gathering short answers and uncovering truth.

Why It All Matters

This three-part framework—red teaming, defining clear objectives, and creating a questioning plan—isn’t theory. It’s applied science. Research shows that open-ended, objective-driven questioning produces more accurate, detailed, and verifiable information than accusatory or confirmatory approaches. It minimizes contamination, reduces false information, and improves overall decision-making.

For professionals in law enforcement, HR, compliance, or internal investigations, adopting this framework means better interviews, better documentation, and better outcomes. It builds public trust, supports ethical practices, and ensures you are listening—not just looking to confirm.

Next Step:Want to learn how to apply these principles in the real world? Check out one of our upcoming training events near you—or reach out to schedule a private or public sector session tailored to your team. Whether you're in criminal investigations, HR, compliance, or corporate risk, science-based interviewing techniques will transform how you think, ask, and solve.