The Prompt for a Big Decision You Cannot Take Back
Torn between a few options on a call you cannot reverse. Let an AI interview you, find the constraint, then judge it.
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Some decisions you can test. Run it small, read the numbers, roll it back if it flops. This edition is about the other kind. The three-year supplier contract. The hire that reshapes your team. One shot, no undo, and you are standing over two or three options trying to pick.
So you do the smart thing. You hand the options to AI and ask which one wins.
It answers. Confident, structured, reasonable. You pick. Six months later the number you chased looks better and something you never measured is quietly bleeding out. The fix worked. The business got worse.
The clerk and the advisor
That gap has a cause. The tool ranked your two or three options against the one goal you named. It never asked whether those options touch the thing holding you back, or whether that goal is a symptom of something one layer down. It could not. You gave it a shortlist and a metric, so that is what it sorted. Garbage frame, confident answer.
This is the line between a clerk and an advisor. A clerk sorts your list. An advisor looks at your list, looks at your business, and tells you the list is wrong. On a reversible call, who cares. On a call you live inside for years, that difference is everything.
The fix is a tool that refuses to sort anything until it understands the system your decision sits in. So it starts where a good advisor starts. It interviews you. And it will sometimes tell you none of your options were right, then point at the move you never thought to list.
Below: the prompt that runs the interview, pulls the data out of you when you think you have none, finds the real constraint, then judges the call.