Why, What, Who
Clarity drives successful outcomes. Know why you are doing this, what you are doing and who is going to do what. This is one of our core tools.
This guided conversation will help you collate what you understand or know and help you identify gaps, blind spots and risks and builds an action plan to help you achieve the clarity you need.
Upgrade: Use with our Irrational Change LLM to get a more nuanced assessment and practical, targeted advice.
The Science
We interpret our understanding based on our unique experience.
We are quick to please others and make assumptions when we have gaps in our knowledge.
Clarity reduces confusion.
Short Prompt
With less detail, the interaction may be more varied. Copy and Paste the prompt text into your AI tool of choice.
CONTEXT: The user is leading or managing a complex project.
ROLE: You are a project coach and thought partner. Be conversational, constructive, and friendly.
INTERACTION RULES: Ask one question at a time and wait for the user’s response before continuing. Where answers are subjective, gently test for outcome and tangibility.
THEMES TO EXPLORE:
1. What is this project? Please give a short description.
2. Why is this project important to your organisation, or team? Why is it a priority right now?
3. What does success look like? Make it tangible and outcome focused.
4. What does failure look like?
5. What is in scope for this change?
6. What is out of scope for this change?
7. In your business case, what % of the value is dependent on people doing things differently?
8. Who is impacted by this change and by how much?
9. What stays the same?
10. Is your organisation prepared to make sacrifices for this change to be successful?
SUMMARY: Synthesize the user’s responses into a project definition. Highlight gaps, blind spots, risks and offer a plan to resolve them.
OUTPUT: Use short paragraphs and bullet points.
Test Answers
Use these answers to help you test the prompt in your environment.
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We are building a pricing centre of excellence who will be able to guide our sales teams in their negotiation with customers.
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Margin Erosion. Our customers are gaining a disproportionate amount of the margin because they have better skills and systems leaving us at a disadvantage in our annual pricing negotiations.
If we continue as we are the pricing will continue to erode margin and it will become even harder to reset the client expectations.
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Margin levels return to 15-20%, depending on category without losing distribution in our customers. Over the past five years they have eroded to 8.7-9.4% due to agressive price negotiations by our customers.
We sign long term pricing commitments with our customers that commit to collaboration for our joint benefits.
Our sales teams have the confidence to negotiate very differently with our clients, with pricing efectiveness as a lever.
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Our customers reject the negotiations and delist our products, removing distribution from their networks. This is a real possibility and has been used as a lever with other suppliers.
Our sales teams do not want to disrupt the status quo and are not willing to negotiate differently, and with higher risks.
Our need to deliver performance to our shareholders makes it hard to take risks.
Our centre of excellence is left unused and is a drain on our cost base.
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Creation of a new pricing centre of excellence, with an expert team of pricing experts, and the space for them to work effectively.
Systems that are able to assess pricing effectiveness and elasticity and drive insights quickly to inform our sales teams.
Playbooks, tools and capability for our sales teams to be comfortable with using the pricing insights in their negotiations.
Dashboards for our commercial leaders to see how effective their pricing is.
New standards for category margins.
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The relationship building with customers, changing our ERP systems, shifting territories or the compensation of sales teams, how we measure performance, our distribution guidelines (who we sell to).
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Over 90%. We only realise value if our sales teams are prepared to negotiate differently, which is going to be very uncomfortable and feel risky.
Their relationships are historic and have settled into a routine. This will disrupt the status quo and feel difficult.
With the push for performance, they may choose not to take the risk.
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Sales teams: High, difficult negotiations with customers that carry risk of failure
Sales Management: The need to be comfortable with the risks
Executives: Recognise that we may be delisted and need to make sacrifices for this to be succssful. It will need their air cover
Finance and investor relations: Recognise that we may be able to meet our interim performance targets.
Pricing teams: Willingness to use and support the expert insights and analysis from the Centre of Excellence
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Our high quality and leading products, our commitment to customer value, our ERP and other systems, how we structure our sales teams and how they are compensated.
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The signs are mixed. We are investing $5m in building the Centre of Excellence, but the performance environment is tough.
We know that our margin erosion is hurting us, but we don't like to upset the negotiation with customers because of the risk of delisting.
Historically we have looked for other levers instead.
We typically protect current performance, there is no precedent for sacrificing.
