A Question Is Not Yet an Inquiry

“How do we increase uptake of this service?”

It sounds like a reasonable question. A team could investigate awareness, simplify the application process and recommend a communications campaign. The resulting report might be thorough, well evidenced and persuasive.

Yet the question has already directed attention towards increasing uptake. It leaves less room to ask whether the service provides appropriate support, whether people trust it or whether using it creates difficulties its designers have overlooked.

Those issues might emerge during the work. Whether the team can examine them will depend partly on what happens next. Can it reconsider the question? Who decides? What becomes of the analysis already completed?

This is one reason I distinguish between asking a question and conducting an inquiry.

A question establishes something we want to understand. An inquiry needs a process for examining that question, developing the reasoning around it and arriving at an answer whose basis others can inspect.

The question shapes the answer

We sometimes say that an answer can be no better than the question it comes from. I would qualify that slightly. Useful discoveries can emerge from poorly framed questions. People can recognise the limitations of a brief and look beyond it.

But the question still matters. It directs attention, suggests boundaries and can carry assumptions into the work before anyone has explicitly agreed them.

“Which option should we implement?” assumes that the relevant options have already been identified. “Why did the programme fail?” assumes a judgement about its outcome. “How can technology solve this problem?” gives technology a privileged place before alternative responses have been examined.

Each might be justified. Each also deserves scrutiny.

The quality of an answer depends partly on the question that shaped it. An inquiry must therefore examine its questions as carefully as its proposed answers.

That responsibility continues after the opening discussion. As understanding develops, a question that initially seemed clear may prove too narrow, ambiguous or dependent on an assumption the evidence challenges.

Following the reasoning

INQUIRIM is a developing method for making the connections within an inquiry explicit: how its scope relates to its questions, how contributions bear on propositions and how the reasoning supports an eventual answer.

Scoping establishes the problem being examined, the intended use of the answer and the boundaries of the work. Relevant issues outside those boundaries need somewhere to be recorded, so exclusion remains visible and can be reconsidered.

The main question then needs supporting questions. In the service example, these might concern who needs support, what the service provides, who uses it, who does not and what explains those differences. A question hierarchy makes those relationships explicit and helps identify what must be understood before the main question can be answered responsibly.

Propositions give participants statements they can examine. “The application process is the principal barrier to uptake” is a proposition. It allows people to contribute reasons for supporting it, qualifying it or challenging it.

Those contributions may include experience, interpretations, claims and references to evidence. Their status matters. A workshop contribution does not become established evidence simply because someone has written it down. The inquiry needs to preserve its source, caveats and any need for verification.

Assumptions and knowledge gaps also need attention. In our example, the group might discover that it has assumed potential users understand the eligibility rules, while having little direct information about why people abandon applications.

As the inquiry develops, answers to supporting questions inform higher-level answers. An answer hierarchy makes that construction visible, leading towards a core answer that retains material qualifications and uncertainty.

A briefing, report or recommendation can then draw on that reasoning. The output has a record behind it that people can return to when they need to understand how the answer was reached.

These activities may lead back to earlier work. A challenged proposition can expose a missing question. New evidence can unsettle an assumption. An emerging answer can reveal that the scope needs another look.

When the question needs to change

Return to the service inquiry. Suppose participants identify concerns about eligibility, trust and consequences for other support. They propose changing the main question to:

“What prevents eligible people from accessing appropriate support?”

That could be a valuable revision. It allows the inquiry to examine whether increasing use of this particular service is sufficient to address the underlying problem.

It also expands the work. The group may now need different contributors, additional evidence and a clearer definition of “appropriate support”. The organisation commissioning the inquiry may have authority over only part of the problem.

Keeping the original question unchanged could prevent useful learning. Accepting the replacement without scrutiny could create an inquiry that cannot deliver within its remit.

The revision therefore needs an explicit decision. The group should record what changed, what prompted it and how it affects the inquiry’s purpose, boundaries and existing analysis. Contributors need an opportunity to challenge the proposed revision, and responsibility for authorising it needs to be clear.

Sometimes the appropriate response will be to change the main question. Sometimes a new supporting question will be enough. An important discovery may also need a separate inquiry, with a clear connection to the original work.

Keeping changes accountable

Convenience can influence reframing too.

A team finding little evidence that its service helps people might narrow the question to whether users like its website. That may produce an easier answer while leaving the consequential issue unresolved. A group could also broaden a question until uncomfortable findings become a small part of a much larger story.

Good intentions provide limited protection here. People can sincerely believe that a revision improves the inquiry while favouring the conclusion they hoped to reach.

For that reason, “this will improve the answer” needs an explanation. Does the change improve clarity? Correct a false premise? Address a relevant issue the original wording excluded? What becomes harder to see under the revised question?

Within INQUIRIM, I want revisions to questions to remain connected to their earlier wording and rationale. The record should allow someone to understand why the inquiry changed direction, which previous contributions remain relevant and where further work became necessary. The practical arrangements for that need testing alongside the wider method.

Recording a change cannot establish that it was justified. It gives people something concrete to examine.

An inquiry needs enough structure to preserve its purpose and enough flexibility to respond when understanding improves. Both require judgement. The method should make that judgement visible and open to challenge.

The aim is a considered, evidenced answer that people can assess, with its assumptions, disagreements and remaining uncertainty still in view.

A question begins that work. Conducting an inquiry means taking responsibility for what happens between the question and the answer, including the occasions when the question itself must change.

How does your organisation distinguish a justified change to an inquiry’s question from a change that makes the eventual answer more convenient?

First published on LinkedIn on 23 October 2026.

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