Consulting Discovery Questions Template
Four documents and one sheet that score every discovery question against what it actually surfaced last time, not how good it sounds on paper.
Free download · No account needed
Question Register · how a status gets computed
Three statuses, and none of them is a guess
| Status | Times asked | Engagements | Hit rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core | 3 or more | 2 or more | 50% or more |
| Trial | under 3, or | confined to 1 | not decided yet |
| Retired | 3 or more | 2 or more | under 50% |
A hit needs a citation, not a good vibe. An answer only counts once it produced a finding cited downstream. An articulate answer nobody used again is a miss.
Two engagements, not one. Three perfect asks in a single interview are one client tested repeatedly, not a track record. The second engagement is what tells you a question travels.
Every row in the Question Register carries these three numbers, plus which point in the interview the question was asked at.
Search this and every result is a list: eight questions for stakeholder buy-in, a dozen for a change readiness call, thirty for a discovery interview sorted by role. All of it answers what should I ask, and none of it answers what actually matters by the third engagement: did asking it ever produce anything. A question that read brilliantly in one workshop three years ago and one nobody has used since sit on the same page in the same font weight, because nothing in the format tells the two apart.
So the unit here is the question, not the guide. Every question in the Question Register carries a status computed from three numbers: how many times asked, across how many engagements, and how many times the answer was cited in a finding. An answer nobody used again is a miss, not a hit, however articulate it sounded. Three asks across two engagements at half a hit rate earns Core, the same floor under half earns Retired, anything short stays Trial. Small wording changes shift what a question gets back, so wording stays fixed once live.
The bank behind this pack, run at an operations practice across four engagements, carries twenty scored questions: eleven Core, six Trial, three Retired. One of them, on who actually approves a fix, clears Core at a 77.8 percent hit rate overall. It still fails cold, at 33.3 percent, against 100 percent after a walkthrough, which the Sequencing Note tracks. A thin answer gets diagnosed against Gordon Willis's four stage model rather than re-asked louder. Run the interviews with the stakeholder interview programme pack, or price the hypotheses with the hypothesis and workplan pack.
What's in the pack
Question Register
Every question's real count: how many times it was asked, across how many engagements, and how many produced a finding someone actually cited back to it.
Question Bank by Domain and Role
Four domains, Core questions first in the order you would actually ask them, then Trial, then Retired with its failure mode named rather than deleted.
Probe Guidance
Gordon Willis's four stage model for why an answer comes back thin, comprehension, retrieval, judgment or response, and the different probe each failure needs.
Sequencing Note
Where in the interview a question performs best, read off its own position tagged history once two positions have real asks behind them.
Starting the Bank Cold
What an honest bank looks like at zero engagements, and which of your prior guides, transcripts already coded into themes, or synthesis writeups to send first.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and send whatever guides, transcripts or a workshop record already exist, or download the Word documents and CSV sheet and start the register yourself.
- 2
Score what you send against outcomes
Every question actually asked in the material gets an ask logged against its engagement and position, and a hit only when the answer was cited in a finding, never when it merely sounded good.
- 3
Let the count decide the status
Three asks across two engagements at half a hit rate earns Core, the same floor under half earns Retired, and a question short of either stays Trial no matter how its one answer read.
- 4
Carry the winners into the next guide
The domain document keeps Core questions in asking order, Trial questions with what they need next, and Retired questions with their failure named, ready for the next stakeholder interview guide you build.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes. The zip is Word documents and one CSV sheet, no account and no card needed. Edit with AI is the optional half: the agent reads whatever guides or transcripts you send, scores each question, and builds the register from there. The rest of the library sits at the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Four Word (.docx) documents and one CSV (.csv) sheet, zipped together. Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets open the register straight off the download, and the four documents open in Word, Pages or Google Docs. Nothing needs converting first.
How is this different from a list of interview questions organized by topic?
A topic list tells you what to ask. This tells you how many times each question has been asked, by whom, and how often the answer became something you could cite. A question earns Core status from a count across two engagements, never from how good one answer sounded in the room. Turning a cited answer into a finding is the findings and recommendations pack.
What happens to a question that keeps coming back thin?
It gets diagnosed first, against the reason an answer comes back thin, comprehension, retrieval, judgment or response, detailed in a federal cognitive interviewing guide, and a matching probe replaces a louder repeat. Only once it clears three asks across two engagements with a hit rate under half does it retire, with the failure named rather than deleted.
Does it tell me when to ask a question, not just what to ask?
Yes, once there is enough history to say so. The Sequencing Note reports a position verdict only after a question has three or more asks at its weaker position. A question like DR-04 can clear Core overall at 77.8 percent and still carry a specific warning against asking it cold.
What does 'Edit with AI' actually do?
It signs you up, installs this pack as a private workspace, and puts the agent in front of an empty Question Register. Send it a prior guide, a transcript or a synthesis writeup, and it scores each question against what actually got cited, then reports what moved status and what to send next.
Does a question in the bank ever get tested at population scale?
Not by this pack directly. A Core question here reflects what already got asked and cited across engagements, not whether the underlying belief holds at population scale. The client survey and assessment pack is the next step for that: it turns a specific belief into a survey item, with a prediction staked before fielding. The two packs share the same evidence at two different scales.
Stop rewriting the same question bank
Take the Word documents and CSV sheet blank, or send River a prior guide or transcript and get the register scored before you draft next week's interviews.
Edit with AI