We live in a world where we are given about 60 seconds to capture the attention of others. TikTok and Instagram videos are expected to be under a minute. As if that isn’t daunting enough, social media “experts” remind us that the first 10 seconds often determine whether people will keep watching.

Not long ago, TED Talks changed the way we thought about sharing ideas. Speakers were challenged to take complex topics and communicate them in fewer than 18 minutes. Sir Ken Robinson certainly did that with humor and a sense of urgency that made us all lean in. His famous TED Talk on creativity has been viewed more than 30 million times and fundamentally influenced how many educators think about teaching and learning.

There is real value in communicating ideas clearly and concisely. Brevity forces us to focus on what matters most. The challenge is that we sometimes confuse capturing attention with creating change. While our ability to consume information has accelerated, our willingness to stay with difficult problems often has not. We have become consumed by quick answers, rapid feedback, and moving from one idea to the next. Unfortunately, the most significant challenges facing schools don’t work that way.

Improving instruction, strengthening school culture, building trust, developing leadership capacity, or creating equitable learning experiences are not problems that can be solved in a single meeting or through a one-time initiative. They require leaders to remain curious long after the excitement of a new idea has faded. They require inquiry.

Neither of us is suggesting a return to long-winded meetings that leave everyone wondering why they were there. Time is precious. Teachers and leaders have enough demands on their schedules already. However, meaningful improvement does require something that has become increasingly rare, which is sustained attention. The goal is not to spend more time in meetings. The goal is to spend more time thinking deeply about the right problems, testing our assumptions, gathering evidence, and learning together before rushing to the next solution, which is why the two of us engage in inquiry, regardless of whether we are working with individual leaders or instructional leadership collectives.

Inquiry takes time, which is often not valued in today’s fast-paced world. Engaging in inquiry is not slow because it lacks urgency. It is deliberate because lasting improvement rarely happens at the speed of our social media feeds.

The Collective Inquiry Cycle

Inquiry is a process many of us know about. It’s at the center of action research. The issue is that many leaders want teachers to engage in it, but those leaders rarely use it in their own practices, and that results in a missed opportunity. At its core, inquiry consists of developing a problem, creating a theory of action, collecting evidence to get a pulse on how our actions are working, and reflecting on the process we went through to see how we might do it differently next time.

What we have learned in our work is that reflection is not the final stage of inquiry. It is the thinking that connects every stage. As leaders clarify the problem, develop a theory of action, collect evidence, and determine next steps, reflection helps them refine their thinking before moving forward. Time and time again, teachers and leaders who engage in inquiry with us want to jump from naming the problem to jumping into action. When we engage them in reflection at every point of the inquiry process, they find that their problem becomes more defined, their theory of action becomes more actionable, and their evidence becomes more impactful to the next actions they want to take.

Individual Inquiry Versus Collective Inquiry

Although we often talk about instructional leadership collectives, we believe inquiry begins with the individual leader. Every leader faces decisions, challenges, and opportunities to learn. Whether it involves giving feedback to a teacher, leading a faculty meeting, responding to a parent concern, or improving instructional leadership, individual inquiry helps us pause before acting. It encourages us to define the problem clearly, test our assumptions, gather evidence, and reflect on the impact of our decisions. In many ways, it is the discipline of becoming a better leader.

Collective inquiry builds on that same discipline. When leadership teams engage in inquiry together, they are no longer learning only from their own experiences. They are learning with and from one another. They challenge assumptions, develop shared understanding, construct theories of action together, and use evidence to determine whether their collective efforts are making a difference. The result is not simply better collaboration. It is better decisionmaking.

Neither form of inquiry is more important than the other.

Individual inquiry strengthens the leader. Collective inquiry strengthens the system. Organizations need both. Leaders who never engage in personal inquiry often rely too heavily on gut feelings or experience alone. Collectives that engage in inquiry together learn how leaders from other schools or regions engage in the work but also find that the challenges each faces in their own context are the same challenges as their colleagues in their collectives. There is strength in that fact because they can learn together how to overcomes those challenges.

In the end, inquiry is not another initiative to add to an already crowded calendar. It is a way of approaching leadership. It reminds us to slow our thinking before speeding up our actions. It asks us to remain curious when certainty feels easier. Most importantly, it helps ensure that the changes we pursue are grounded not in assumptions but in evidence. In a world that values speed, inquiry reminds us that the most meaningful improvements are rarely the quickest. They are the ones we stay with long enough to understand, improve, and sustain.