What makes a good focus prompt, and why it decides everything

2026-07-01

Everything a group contributes is an answer to the question you asked. That sounds obvious, but it has a consequence that is often underestimated: with the wording of that one prompt you set the boundaries of everything that follows.

At the level of action, not of wishes

Compare these two openings:

What is needed to make digitalisation succeed?
One concrete way we make digitalisation visible in the classroom is ...

The first invites abstractions: support, vision, resources. Those are not untrue, but you cannot design anything with them. The second forces something observable. Later, when you want to translate themes into measures, that is the difference between usable and unusable clusters.

Ask for wishes and you get wishes. Ask for actions and you get points of leverage.

One sentence, one subject

A focus prompt that asks two things at once produces two incomparable piles. "What is going well and what needs to improve" is really two studies. Pick one, or run them in sequence with a round of their own.

Make the sentence completable

The strongest form is an unfinished sentence that participants complete themselves. That works better than a question, because it fixes the grammatical shape of the answer in advance. You get short, comparable statements instead of paragraphs.

In practice that means: "One concrete way to ..., is ...". Everyone then contributes something that can be read the same way, which makes the sorting fairer later on.

Test it on ten people

Before you send the prompt out, put it to a handful of people with the instruction to give three answers. If you get incomparable things back, or if people ask "what do you mean?", the prompt is not sharp yet. That costs an hour and saves a project.

What you fix and what you leave open

The focus prompt fixes the subject, not the answers. Resist the urge to give examples that steer the direction; those are guaranteed to reappear in the statements you receive. It does help to say what you are not looking for, for instance that this is not about budget, if that would otherwise swallow the whole conversation.

At ConceptAtlas, sharpening the focus prompt is part of the intake, precisely because the rest of the project rests on it.