When you're evaluating dozens of external assets every quarter — potential licenses, acquisitions, partnerships — speed matters. But so does rigor. The tension between those two imperatives is where most business development processes break down.

During my time at Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, we faced exactly this problem. The pipeline of opportunities was rich, but our evaluation process was a bottleneck. Cross-functional teams were spending weeks — sometimes months — on deep-dive analyses of assets that, with the right filter applied earlier, could have been triaged in days.

The answer came from an unlikely source: Clayton Christensen's work on disruptive innovation, specifically a framework we adapted and called HALK — High Assumption, Low Knowledge.

What Is HALK?

The core insight is simple: every asset evaluation rests on a set of assumptions. Some of those assumptions are well-supported by data. Others are high-confidence beliefs held with low supporting evidence — High Assumption, Low Knowledge.

The HALK framework asks teams to explicitly surface the assumptions underlying their enthusiasm for an asset and then rank them by two dimensions: how critical is this assumption to the deal thesis, and how much do we actually know about it?

The assumptions that are both critical and poorly evidenced — the HALK zone — become the immediate focus of due diligence. Everything else can wait.

What Changed at Pfizer

Applying HALK to our BD process produced three measurable outcomes. First, evaluation timelines compressed significantly — teams stopped spending cycles on assumptions that were either already validated or not actually central to the deal thesis. Second, go/no-go decisions became more defensible because the underlying logic was explicit. Third, and most importantly, cross-functional alignment improved because everyone was working from the same assumption map rather than operating from their functional lens.

The result was a 95% executive endorsement rate on the recommendations that came out of the process — not because we agreed on everything, but because we had earned alignment on what we knew, what we assumed, and what we still needed to learn.

Why It Still Matters Today

The pace of deal flow in pharma and biotech has only accelerated since then. Biotech valuations, competitive licensing timelines, and the increasing complexity of platform technologies mean that BD teams have less time, not more, to make high-stakes decisions.

HALK is not a silver bullet. It requires intellectual honesty — the willingness to say "we believe this, but we can't yet prove it." That's harder than it sounds in organizations where conviction is rewarded and uncertainty is sometimes penalized.

But the organizations that can build that discipline into their evaluation processes — that can separate genuine insight from confident assumption — will consistently make better decisions about where to deploy their most precious resource: the attention of their leadership teams.

If your BD process feels slower than it should be, or if your cross-functional alignment breaks down somewhere between opportunity identification and executive presentation, HALK may be the diagnostic you need.

Originally published on LinkedIn

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