GaneevEcoWhy the format actually matters
Self-reported surveys tend to describe the job as designed on paper, not the job as actually done in practice — the workarounds, the manual patches, the thing everyone complains about informally but nobody's ever written down as a formal problem worth escalating. A live conversation with a skilled interviewer surfaces exactly that gap; a form asking someone to rate their department's "AI readiness" on a scale rarely does.
This isn't a criticism of the people filling out the survey — it's a structural limitation of the format itself. Most people don't naturally think in the abstract terms a maturity questionnaire asks for; they think in terms of specific tasks and specific frustrations, and a well-run interview meets people where their actual thinking already is, rather than asking them to translate their daily experience into an unfamiliar abstract framework first.
What tends to surface in a real interview
- The one recurring task everyone on the team dreads but nobody's ever formally escalated as a problem worth solving, simply because it's become an accepted part of how things are.
- Workarounds built on spreadsheets and manual copy-paste that never made it into any process documentation, despite consuming real time every single week for the people doing them.
- Honest opinions about what previous tooling didn't actually solve — valuable context, and rarely something people volunteer on a form without a real conversation to draw it out naturally.
What makes an interview actually good
The interviews that surface the most useful information tend to start with open, concrete questions — "walk me through your Tuesday" rather than "how would you rate your department's AI readiness" — since the concrete framing gets people talking about their real, specific work rather than reaching for an abstract self-assessment they may not have a confident, accurate answer to in the first place.
It's also worth interviewing more than just the department head. A manager's sense of how their team spends its time doesn't always match the frontline reality closely, and the richest, most actionable detail often comes from talking directly to the people actually doing the recurring work, not just the person nominally responsible for describing it to an outside interviewer.
It's also worth training whoever conducts these interviews specifically on active listening and follow-up questioning, rather than assuming anyone can run a good one without preparation. A skilled interviewer who knows how to gently probe past an initial, surface-level answer tends to surface meaningfully more useful detail than someone simply working through a fixed list of questions in order.
It's worth running a few practice interviews internally before conducting the real ones, ideally with feedback from someone experienced in this kind of structured conversation. That practice run tends to surface an interviewer's own habits — interrupting too soon, asking leading questions that shape the answer rather than drawing it out naturally — that are much easier to correct before the real interviews begin than to notice and fix partway through a live assessment process already underway.