Why Intelligent People Still Need a Method of Inquiry
Intelligence and goodwill do not remove blind spots. Human reasoning is shaped by shortcuts, experience, culture and the ways people influence one another.
A room full of intelligent people can examine a difficult question carefully and still leave an important assumption untouched. Everyone may understand the discussion, recognise the terminology and find the conclusion reasonable. The assumption survives because nobody thinks to question it.
This possibility matters when we design an inquiry. Recruiting capable people is essential, but we also need to consider how those people think, what they have learned to take for granted and how they influence one another.
As I develop INQUIRIM, a method for structured collaborative inquiry, I keep returning to a question beneath its practical design: what kind of process do people need to examine difficult questions together, given the way human thinking has developed?
An anthropological perspective helps us approach that question. It asks us to consider cognition within human lives, cultures and relationships, rather than treating reasoning as something an isolated mind performs without context.
The usefulness of shortcuts
Human cognition developed through evolutionary processes, individual learning and cultural transmission. These influences interact. Our capacity to learn from other people means that each generation can inherit knowledge and practices it did not have to discover for itself.
Research by Bill Thompson, Simon Kirby and Kenny Smith explores this interaction between learning, culture and biological evolution. Their modelling cautions against explaining cognition entirely through fixed, innate constraints. It also gives us reason to be careful with convenient stories about precisely which ancestral problem produced a particular modern behaviour. PNAS
For inquiry, the practical point is that human thinking works within constraints. We have limited time and attention. We simplify, recognise patterns and draw on previous experience.
Psychologists call some of these simplifying strategies heuristics. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed how useful shortcuts in judgement can also produce systematic errors. We might, for example, judge something more likely because examples come readily to mind. Science
That does not make shortcuts inherently unreliable. Gerd Gigerenzer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier have examined how simple heuristics can work well, sometimes outperforming more elaborate approaches. Their effectiveness depends on the circumstances. Annual Review of Psychology
An experienced practitioner may recognise a familiar problem quickly and correctly. The difficulty arises when we need to establish whether the present situation really is familiar, which details matter and where previous experience might mislead us.
An inquiry method should help us examine those questions. Requiring exhaustive analysis of every judgement would create its own problems, including delay and effort with little benefit.
What our experience leaves out
Consider a hypothetical group examining why people are not using a new public service.
Its members have substantial experience designing services. They discuss communications, access and usability. They commission further analysis of the application process. Each contribution appears relevant and sensible.
Yet the group has largely assumed that potential users trust the organisation offering the service.
Someone with a different experience might ask whether applying creates a perceived risk: exposure to authority, loss of privacy or consequences for a family member. The group could have analysed the application process competently while overlooking a reason people never start it.
This is one distinction between an error and a blind spot. A claim can be examined and challenged. Something that never enters the inquiry may leave no visible trace at all.
It is also where cultural experience becomes valuable. Another person’s perspective may reveal an assumption we had mistaken for an ordinary feature of the world.
Culture here includes national and community backgrounds, but also professional, organisational and disciplinary cultures. A lawyer, an engineer and a community researcher may approach the same question through different concepts and standards of explanation. Individuals can belong to several such cultures, and nobody should be expected to speak for an entire group.
Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan made a related challenge to behavioural science in their paper The weirdest people in the world? They questioned broad claims about humanity based on narrow research populations, particularly Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies. Cambridge Core
For inquiry, I take a practical lesson from that challenge: we should examine whose experience underpins an apparently general claim, and whether it travels as far as we assume.
Difference needs a way to contribute
Cross-cultural collaboration offers opportunities to expand understanding. Those opportunities depend partly on how the collaboration works.
Return to the hypothetical service inquiry. A participant might hesitate to contradict the chair publicly. Another might consider forceful debate a normal expression of professional respect. A third might need time to formulate a contribution in a language they use less confidently.
These are possibilities to investigate, not characteristics to assign on the basis of someone’s nationality. Silence could mean agreement, uncertainty, deference or simply a need for more time. We need a way to find out.
If participation depends entirely on speaking quickly and confidently in an open discussion, the process may give some contributions much greater visibility than others. Having different perspectives present does not establish that the inquiry has heard or understood them.
Cross-cultural inquiry therefore involves examining the conventions of the inquiry itself. Who can challenge whom? How do participants express reservations? Can people correct the group’s interpretation of what they said? Which forms of knowledge receive serious consideration, and how will claims be tested?
Respect for different perspectives still requires scrutiny of evidence. It also requires enough curiosity to understand a contribution before judging it.
Designing for the people taking part
These considerations help explain several choices within INQUIRIM.
An independent first contribution gives participants space to record their thinking before encountering the group’s emerging position. Explicit propositions give people a statement they can support, qualify or challenge. Recording assumptions brings some of what is taken for granted into view.
Analytical lenses provide a way to ask which aspects of a question have received attention and which remain unexamined. Visible disagreement and knowledge gaps help preserve matters that a fluent summary might otherwise smooth away. Review gives contributors an opportunity to check how their views have been represented.
The underlying ideas draw on established practices. What I am developing is a way to combine and record them within a connected inquiry process. Whether that combination provides the intended benefits needs testing.
The method also needs scrutiny. Its terminology, written formats and expectations about challenge could carry cultural assumptions of their own. A structure that feels accessible to one group may create barriers for another. Testing across different settings should help expose those weaknesses.
Nor does every question require a formal inquiry. The effort should be proportionate to the stakes, uncertainty and need to bring different knowledge together.
For consequential questions, however, relying on intelligence and goodwill leaves too much about the process unspecified. We need deliberate opportunities to examine assumptions, hear unfamiliar interpretations and reconsider an emerging answer.
Human beings have developed ways to preserve knowledge, compare accounts and challenge explanations across generations. A method of inquiry belongs within that continuing effort. It should help us make fuller use of our capacities while keeping their limits visible.
When have you encountered a cultural or professional perspective that changed the question a group thought it was answering?
First published on LinkedIn on 22 October 2026.