Can the I Ching Answer Yes or No?
Yes-or-no I Ching readings: what the tradition actually says, why a yes/no frame wastes most of the answer, and how to ask something better.
The short answer
Mechanically, yes — people have always flattened judgments into “favorable / unfavorable” and used the I Ching as a yes/no oracle. But doing so is like buying a sixty-four-volume book and reading only the color of the covers. A hexagram carries far more than one bit of information; framing the question as yes/no throws most of the answer away.
What a cast actually contains
A casting doesn't hand you “yes” or “no.” It hands you a structure: the primary hexagram (the present situation), the moving lines (where it's loosening), the changed hexagram (the direction it's tending), and classical text for each layer. Sixty-four situations × moving-line combinations describe how things stand, where the variable is, and which way it's moving — see changing lines and the 64 hexagrams. Receiving all that through one bit is like summarizing a long letter as “good/bad.”
If you still want a yes or no
Honestly: traditional practice does include conventions for reading a verdict — weighing words like favorable, misfortune, regret, or no blame in the judgment and moving-line texts. You can use it that way, as long as two things stay clear. First, those words describe the shape of a situation (“advancing serves you here” / “holding still serves you here”), not a guarantee of outcomes. Second, no random procedure can foresee your specific future — there's no evidence for that, and we never pretend otherwise; see is the I Ching real?.
The better question
Translate “Will it work out?” into the question actually hiding underneath it: “If I push ahead with this, what should I watch for?” or “Where do I stand in this situation right now?” Open questions give every layer of the hexagram something to answer — the judgment addresses the situation, the moving line marks the variable, the changed hexagram points a direction. The full method is in how to ask the I Ching.
One question, two framings
“Should I change jobs?” — the yes/no version yields at best a vague “favorable / unfavorable.” Reframed as “What am I not seeing clearly about this job change?”, the very same hexagram becomes readable at every layer: the judgment's assessment of the moment, the moving line's marker of what's shifting, the changed hexagram's trajectory — each one something to check against what you already know. The quality of the question sets the quality of the answer.