Interviewers should avoid judgmental words such as "right," "wrong," "good," "bad," "should," "ought," "must," and so on. Interviewees should feel free to make such judgmental statements, but the assessment team should always follow up by asking why the interviewee has made those judgments. For example, if the person being interviewed says, "The managers here don’t care about programmers," an assessment team member might ask, "What actions have you seen that make you feel this way?" People being interviewed need to express themselves and vent frustration. The team, however, always needs evidence to either substantiate or refute such statements. Follow-up questions of this kind will usually turn up data about practices that have had a negative impact on productivity .
All information must be corroborated. That is, the team must confirm all data with a second independent source. Follow-up questions provide a good way to corroborate and clarify issues without imposing outside interpretations. Assessment team members are ultimately required to make judgments when they come to the rating process ("The Final Stages of an Onsite Assessment"), but those judgments are always based on objective data supplied by the organization. (They also must always be the result of a consensus of the entire assessment team.)