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How can one identify the motivating question that drives an experiment, and who has the right to make this identification? Not the experimenter! Rather, it is the client who has this right because this is the person who is paying the bill for the experiment!

Identification of the motivating question is rarely easy. The urge to learn something may be strongly felt, but expressing exactly what you want to learn is very difficult. It is bad enough trying to talk about the subject when you have an hour or more to try to make clear your intentions. It is incredibly difficult to write down a concise description in such language that it cannot be misunderstood – and that is what we are trying to do. How often has the exercise of writing exposed our own sloppy thinking? How often have we felt despair at “trying to get it right” in writing? Take courage! The end result, your motivating question, is worth your effort to identify it early!

This chapter addresses how to formulate the motivating question and the advantage of working to a question you are trying to answer. If you experiment without a motivating question, you will take a series of steps – but when will you arrive?