Asking the right question can be very important.
What is the problem that you are trying to solve? That question must rank at the top of anyone's mind when trying to make a process improvement, but the answer is often not well defined with the result that the proposed solution is not what is expected or needed. If you don't ask the right question, you don't get the right answer.
Similarly, when a process has been targeted for improvement, it's important to verify what you may have been told about how a process works. How it's supposed to work and how it works in practice can vary considerably, especially where documentation is vague or adherence to it poor.
Even if you have the benefit of system logs, still go see for yourself and ask all those probing questions to expose reality. Along with "What happens next and why?", a good question to ask is "What happens if .. ?", as exception handling is often where an otherwise good process can breakdown. Just think for a minute about how many times you've assumed something about a process only to discover something completely unexpected occurs in practice, often for a very good reason.
Those clever Japanese LEAN people have a phrase for practical process discovery - Genchi Genbutsu, which was said to originate from the Toyota Production System. You may not need to be as rigorous as Toyota, but defining the problem and finding out what really happens in a process are key to making a worthwhile and lasting improvement.