The Art of Asking Better Questions

The difference between a good analyst and a great one isn’t the sophistication of their models. It’s the questions they ask before they start building.

Why Questions Matter More Than Answers

Most projects fail not because of bad execution, but because they solve the wrong problem. We’ve seen it dozens of times:

A client asks for a “dashboard” when they actually need a decision framework
Teams build forecasting models before asking “what decision will this inform?”
Reports get generated weekly that nobody reads

The first question isn’t “how do we solve this?” — it’s “are we solving the right thing?”

A Simple Framework

Before starting any analysis, we ask three questions:

What decision does this support? If there’s no decision, there’s no point.
What would change your mind? This reveals what evidence actually matters.
Who needs to act on this? The audience shapes the output.

An Example

A client once asked us to build a price forecasting model. Impressive request. But when we asked “what decision does this support?”, the answer was revealing:

“We want to know if we should hedge our input costs.”

That’s not a forecasting problem — it’s a risk management problem. The model they needed was completely different (and simpler) than what they’d originally requested.

The Takeaway

Slow down at the start. The hour you spend clarifying the question saves ten hours of building the wrong thing.

This is part of our series on analytical frameworks. Have a question you’d like us to explore? Get in touch.