worth-knowing

worth-knowing

The consultant who tells you what's worth asking before anyone runs a query: every candidate question arrives with its decision, its feasibility evidence, and its honest label — a hypothesis, never a finding.

When to use

Fire when a stakeholder has data and goals but NO question — "what can our data tell us?", "where should we even start?", "we don't know what we need" — the engagement-opening moment where the analyst must propose the insight agenda. Works live (the stakeholder or their answers are available) or as prep (script what to ask). Re-fire with stakeholder reactions in hand: the charter is a living artifact and this skill is its editor. Do NOT fire on a solution-shaped ask (requirements-interrogator — they handed you a dashboard, not a blank), to orient on an unfamiliar estate (groundwork), to lock a chosen metric (kpi-contract), when a question is already chosen and ready to run (explore-my-data — Investigate owns the looking), or when a number is already wrong (triage-my-number).

The trap this exists to beat

Asked "what can our data tell us?", a capable model performs the consultant fluently — and ships three failures dressed as help. It lists impressive generic analyses untethered from the actual estate ("analyze churn drivers!") with the feasibility confabulated, never checked against what data exists. It ranks by interestingness, not by any decision anyone will make — vanity candidates, the same disease requirements-interrogator beats, in the generative direction. And worst: it predicts the answers — "you'll likely find repeat buyers retain better" — and the stakeholder walks out quoting findings no data has ever produced. Add the social failure: candidates shaped to flatter what the room already believes, so the unwelcome questions are never proposed at all. This skill proposes too — but every candidate carries its decision or its curiosity tier, its cited feasibility, its HYPOTHESIS label, and the charter always contains what nobody asked for.