Querying Qualia · Organisational inquiry
Asymmetric Query™
A symbolic perspective for consequential questions
An organisation can examine a decision thoroughly and still leave the terms of its question untouched.
You may have considerable information, experienced people and a shared commitment to finding a way forward. Yet the conversation keeps returning to familiar positions. Something important remains difficult to articulate.
Asymmetric Query brings a symbolic perspective into that conversation. Offered through Querying Qualia, it is a private, practitioner-led inquiry for founders, chief executives and leadership teams facing consequential questions.
Using Tarot as its symbolic instrument, the work helps participants examine assumptions within their question and encounter their circumstances differently. Its purpose is greater clarity, with responsibility for decisions remaining with those who must make them.
The question you bring
When the question itself needs attention
A founder asks: how can we grow while preserving what makes this organisation distinctive?
The question sounds clear. But the founder may understand distinctiveness through personal involvement, while colleagues understand it through standards others can learn or relationships they have built with customers. Each may support growth while carrying a different understanding of what must endure.
Those differences can remain hidden inside an apparently shared question.
Asymmetric Query creates an opportunity to examine them. A symbolic image provides a shared point of attention before the discussion returns to familiar explanations. What one participant notices may bring another’s assumption into view. The question can become more precise as people discover what they have each understood themselves to be asking.
This can be useful around succession, a change of direction, organisational identity or a transition that existing analysis has not fully clarified. No prior knowledge of the practice is needed.
The encounter
How the inquiry works
You begin with a question and the circumstances that make it matter now. Together, we establish the scope and whose participation would help its examination.
An ordinary Tarot deck is shuffled, divided into three stacks and one stack is chosen intuitively before seven cards are selected. Neither the deck nor the selection is treated as possessing special authority. The procedure is explained before anyone agrees to participate. The seven-card arrangement provides symbolic material for a live interpretation; its significance develops through the question, practitioner, cards and the knowledge of those taking part.
We call this relationship the field of the inquiry. A participant’s response may change the interpretation; that change may reveal an assumption within the original question. The practitioner’s account remains open to reconsideration throughout.
Live interpretation
The initial encounter brings human intuition into relation with the question and your responses. This first interpretation is preserved, including its uncertainties.
Symbolic field analysis
The arrangement is examined as a whole alongside the context and responses supplied. The developed analysis explains why connections are retained, qualified or set aside.
Integrated transmission
A substantial written account brings the examination back to your organisation, making its reasoning and development available for consideration.
The report and artwork are delivered before the private debrief or collective working session. Participants explore what connects, what needs correction and where they differ. The agreed revisions preserve that reconsideration, and a later follow-up returns to how the material has met experience.
Why Tarot?
An unfamiliar instrument can make familiar assumptions easier to notice.
Tarot offers a structured symbolic language whose images have not been composed to support your organisation’s preferred conclusion. Their relationships can provide a different starting point for examining the situation.
The value develops through participation. An interpretation may disclose a useful connection, need revision or prove unhelpful. You remain free to question it.
No spiritual belief or familiarity with Tarot is required. Each participant receives an explanation before agreeing to take part and may decline participation or an individual question. Participation or agreement is not treated as a test of loyalty. The inquiry does not establish organisational facts or determine the future; responsibility for decisions remains with the organisation.
Disagreement is preserved rather than interpreted as resistance or evidence of something concealed. Contributions enter the shared account within agreed permissions. Confidentiality, information handling and any proposed AI assistance involving client material are agreed before processing; the practitioner remains responsible for the delivered interpretation.
The Visual Invocation
An image to return to
Each engagement includes bespoke visual work developed from the interpretation and informed by the organisation’s own world.
This Visual Invocation gives the inquiry a further presence through imagery connected with your industry, working environment or identity. Something difficult to articulate in conversation may become easier to consider through an image.
The visual work accompanies the written account. Together, they provide a record you can revisit as circumstances change and different aspects of the question become significant.
The signature engagement
Corporate Field Interpretation
A complete engagement around one consequential organisational question, normally delivered remotely for a sponsor and up to two additional participants.
It includes contextual preparation, the live interpretation, the complete three-stage written account, one bespoke Visual Invocation, an executive debrief, an included revision and a later follow-up.
US$3,500
The written and visual work normally develops over two to three weeks from the contextual briefing and is delivered before the debrief. The follow-up takes place approximately four to six weeks after the debrief.
Wider engagements
Executive and Board Query
US$7,500
One organisational question with up to six participants, including the sponsor. Individual preparation conversations and review of up to 30 pages of selected material inform a live interpretation, one three-stage report and one artwork. The report and artwork precede a collective working session; written and minor visual revisions and a later follow-up are included.
Strategic Threshold Query
From US$15,000
At the starting fee, two connected organisational questions with up to eight participants, including the sponsor. Preparation conversations and review of up to 60 pages of selected material inform two live interpretations. An integrated report examines how the accounts affect one another, accompanied by two artworks, sponsor discussions, a collective working session, included revisions and follow-up.
Ongoing Institutional Inquiry
From US$30,000 annually
Four cycles across a year, normally quarterly, each at the Executive and Board Query scale: one question, up to six participants and the same preparation, source review, report, artwork, working session, revisions and follow-up. An indexed continuing record is updated after each cycle, with a written year-end synthesis and an additional 90-minute review.
The first-cycle continuation checkpoint follows its revision and follow-up, before the second invoice. Either party may end the remaining programme by written notice within ten working days of that follow-up, without fees for unstarted cycles. The organisation retains the completed cycle’s agreed deliverables and receives its record and a short closing note.
Each engagement can stand independently. Participant limits include the sponsor. Fees cover remote delivery within the stated allowances; the detailed proposal sets out session durations, delivery windows, payment schedules and revision provisions. Additional work is scoped and priced before it begins.
The practitioner
Mike Goodwin
Asymmetric Query is led by Mike Goodwin, founder of Querying Qualia.
Mike brings more than thirty years of experience in live events and complex project delivery, including board-level representation as a divisional director, leadership of large teams and senior responsibility for demanding construction and overlay. His work with senior clients, owners and public authorities has required judgement under pressure and responsibility for safety and wellbeing.
His Tarot practice began in his early twenties and includes thirty years of personal inquiry, alongside more recent work with individual clients. Asymmetric Query brings that practice into relation with his organisational experience and the philosophical work of Querying Qualia. The corporate offer is new in 2026 and is presented in its first iteration.
Discuss a commission
Begin with the question you are carrying
You do not need to arrive with a perfectly formulated question. Part of the work is discovering what the concern requires you to ask.
Read the detailed commercial proposal for the method, deliverables, fees and commissioning arrangements.
An initial conversation considers why the question matters now, the appropriate scale of engagement and whether colleagues can participate freely. The inquiry is unsuitable where a sponsor requires endorsement of a predetermined conclusion or cannot support meaningful disagreement. Factual investigation, urgent operational action or a formal dispute may require another route first.
Already have a question in mind? Discuss your question with Mike.
All fees are in USD. Commissions are confidential, with scope and any applicable taxes or additional costs agreed before acceptance.