Digging Deeper
“A discipline of asking probing questions to move beyond surface understanding.”
The explanation sounds plausible. Everyone nodded. But the same problem keeps surfacing in different forms, and you're starting to suspect you've never actually understood it.
Digging Deeper is an inquiry discipline that draws on several foundational ideas: Arie Kruglanski's work on premature closure — the human drive to accept the first reasonable answer and stop looking — and Chris Argyris's double-loop learning, which asks you to challenge the assumptions underneath the answer rather than just fixing what's on the surface. The practice maps closely to Rolfe et al.'s reflective framework: What? So What? Now What?
The technique fights the need for closure that Kruglanski identified — the pull to stop once a plausible explanation appears. Better questions typically matter more than better answers. Reach for it when solutions keep failing, which is often a sign you've been solving the wrong problem.
The practice requires intellectual humility: acknowledging that your initial understanding is usually incomplete. The failure mode is turning inquiry into analysis paralysis — asking one more question when the answer is already clear enough to act on.
Your next move: What's the question your team has stopped asking because everyone assumes someone else already knows the answer — and what happens when you ask it out loud in the next meeting?
“A stakeholder keeps changing their mind and I can't lock the scope.”