Not every open question is equally open
HM Treasury’s payments consultation, out on 14 July, runs to over a hundred pages and asks dozens of questions. Most of them are not really open. Where Treasury proposes moving PSR and EMR detail into the FCA Handbook, the direction is set; the consultation is asking how, not whether. A response there is worth writing, but it is shaping implementation, not shaping the decision.
The agentic payments section is different. Treasury has no settled position on how authentication, consent and liability should work when an AI agent, not a person, authorises a transaction. It is asking because it genuinely does not know. That is a different kind of question, and it deserves a different kind of response.
Most operators read consultations as a single category: a document to respond to, or not, based on how much it affects them. That misses the more useful distinction, which is not about impact but about tractability. Some questions in any consultation, tender, RFP or internal policy review are effectively decided already, dressed up as open for the sake of process. Others are genuinely undetermined, and the person answering first, with the most specific and well-reasoned position, has a real chance of shaping the eventual answer rather than just reacting to it.
The two categories look identical on the page. Both are phrased as questions. Both invite responses by the same deadline. The only way to tell them apart is to ask where the institution’s thinking actually stops. If Treasury has already built infrastructure, made public commitments, or established a clear policy preference around a topic, the question is rhetorical no matter how it’s worded. If the topic is new enough that no one, including the regulator, has a settled model for it, the question is real.
This matters because effort is finite and most people spend it evenly across a document instead of concentrating it where it can still change the outcome. A thorough, well-argued response to a settled question earns goodwill at best. The same effort spent on a genuinely open question can end up inside the eventual rule. The skill is not writing a better consultation response. It is reading the document once, quickly, to sort questions into decided and undecided before drafting anything, so the good thinking goes where it can still land.
The same distinction holds outside regulation. A client brief, a partnership term sheet, a hiring panel’s evaluation criteria — all of them contain a mix of questions the other side has already answered internally and questions they genuinely haven’t. Operators who win disproportionate influence are rarely the ones who respond to everything with equal care. They are the ones who correctly identify the two or three points still in play and spend almost all their effort there.
This week: take one open document on your desk right now — a consultation, a client brief, a board paper awaiting sign-off — and sort every question in it into two piles: decided and undecided. Notice how much of your usual effort has been going into the decided pile.
