Learning Agenda: Are We Asking the Right Learning Questions?
Introduction:
In a rural community, a development project was tasked with improving access to clean water. They conducted a learning workshop to gather insights and develop their learning strategy. During the session, the team focused on questions like:
- “Who in the community is responsible for maintaining water points?”
- “Where are the existing water points located, and how accessible are they?”
- “Who should be trained to ensure proper maintenance and long-term functionality of the water points?”
- “Where should we install the water hand pump?”
While these questions were logical, they only scratched the surface. The team moved forward, investing heavily in drilling boreholes and installing hand pumps. Years later, the project was labeled a success—on paper. Yet, when the client returned to evaluate the impact, they found most new boreholes unused or abandoned.
Why? The development team had asked the wrong questions. Had they dug deeper, asking, “Why don’t existing water points meet the community’s needs?” or “What barriers prevent consistent use of water facilities?”, they might have uncovered critical issues: maybe lack of maintenance training, cultural preferences for other water sources, or even barriers for individuals with disabilities or the elderly to access water points.
This scenario is not uncommon in the development world. Despite the best intentions, failing to ask the right questions to address knowledge gaps in our learning agenda/plan can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities to drive meaningful change. The usefulness of the knowledge we acquire and the effectiveness of our actions depend on the quality of the questions we ask. Good questions, when answered, create the foundation for impactful action and open the door to adaptation.
Are We Asking the Right Questions? - The Pyramid of Powerful Questions
In the development world, asking the right questions for learning is fundamental to achieving meaningful outcomes. But how do we ensure our questions are the most impactful and relevant to decision-making?
On the USAID Learning Lab, learning is approached systematically through three key steps:
- Asking specific, answerable questions that address critical knowledge gaps.
- Undertaking activities—such as performance monitoring, evaluations, or tacit knowledge capture—to find answers.
- Sharing insights with colleagues and stakeholders to enhance decision-making and program implementation.
The effectiveness of these steps hinges on one core principle: the quality of the questions we ask. A well-crafted question reveals important insights and guides our decisions in the right direction. So, how can we draft questions to help us make better decisions? This brings us to the Pyramid of Powerful Questions, which offers a useful framework to assess the effectiveness of our inquiries.
The Pyramid of Powerful Questions, extracted from The Art of Powerful Questions: Catalyzing Insight, Innovation, and Action, provides a useful guide for structuring questions. At the base of the pyramid are simpler factual questions, while at the top are more complex, strategic questions that drive deep thinking.
- Who/When/Where/Which and Yes/No Questions: These foundational questions establish basic facts. For example, “Who is responsible for maintaining this system?” “Where did this issue arise?” or "Are the necessary resources available for implementation?"
- Why, How, and What Questions: Positioned at the top, these questions delve deeper, encouraging reflection and uncovering underlying causes. For example: “Why did this strategy succeed in one region but not another?” or “What barriers prevent community adoption of this solution?”
As we ascend the pyramid, the questions push us to explore root causes, test assumptions, and drive innovation. While basic factual questions (BASE) are important for understanding context, higher-order questions (TOP) promote the reflective thinking necessary for breakthrough ideas and adaptive learning.
Here is a brief breakdown of these questions:
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Pyramid of Powerful Questions Why: Promotes critical thinking by probing motivations, root causes, and reasons behind outcomes or decisions. It encourages the exploration of "big picture" issues.
- How: Investigates processes, methods, or pathways to address challenges. It focuses on action-oriented problem-solving and planning.
- What: It encourages understanding specific details, implications, and contextual factors and seeks clarity on the factors driving or hindering progress.
These questions are important for uncovering deeper insights, informing the design of targeted and effective interventions, and fostering adaptive learning to enhance programmatic outcomes across diverse contexts.
Using the Pyramid of Power Questions in Developing Our Learning Agenda
Asking the right questions is important when developing a learning agenda—an intentional and structured approach to identifying and addressing key knowledge gaps that guide program design and adaptation. The focus should be on questions clarifying the context, driving meaningful change, challenging assumptions, and informing decisions to improve program outcomes. A well-designed learning agenda goes beyond data collection; it involves asking questions that explore the root causes of issues and provide actionable insights for continuous program improvement.
The Pyramid of Powerful Questions is a valuable tool in this process. It helps structure questions in a way that deepens inquiry and maximizes learning. At the pyramid's base, foundational questions establish context and ensure basic program elements are understood. While these questions are necessary for understanding the program’s environment, the focus of the learning agenda should shift to the top of the pyramid. This is where deeper, more strategic questions reside—questions that ask why, how, and what.
These higher-order questions challenge teams to go beyond surface-level understanding, exploring underlying causes, assumptions, and innovative solutions. This layered approach ensures that the learning agenda becomes a tool for reflection, critical thinking, and continuous improvement.
Conclusion: Why This Matters
Failing to ask the right questions doesn’t just waste time and resources—it can also lead to missed opportunities for meaningful impact. Whether developing learning questions for a water-access project, a health intervention, or an education initiative, the quality of the questions you ask determines the quality of your learning and decision-making. As development practitioners, we must commit to asking better, deeper questions.
So, before your next project or initiative, ask yourself:
- What do we need to learn to make this a success?
- How will we ensure our learning translates into action?
The insights from asking the right questions could enable us to learn, adapt, and improve our program implementation and make the most significant impact possible.
