Now that I make my living teaching, this may sound odd coming from me, but many of the training requests I received as an HR leader were not really training problems.

One that stands out came from a branch manager who wanted customer service training for her tellers. Complaints about long waits had climbed for two straight months, and she was sure her team had gotten sloppy. When we stood at the teller line and watched a few transactions, the cause was easy to see. A recent system update had added several extra screens to a routine lookup, and the tellers were doing exactly what they had been taught, only more slowly.

Training would have cost time and money and done nothing for the wait times. The fix turned out to be a conversation with the vendor and a revised procedure.

Performance problems usually happen because of three things:

Each one of these calls for a different fix, and the most common mistake is choosing the fix before diagnosing the problem.

This is a great example of where AI is a helpful partner at the diagnosis stage. Describe the problem, what you have observed, and any data or complaints you have, and it can sort the evidence into skill, tool, and process explanations, show which ones the evidence actually supports, and suggest a quick way to test each one before you spend money.

The final call remains yours, and it often requires a visit to where the work happens. AI can organize the evidence you give it, but twenty minutes of watching the work may tell you more than any summary from a computer.

Today's brief helps you figure out what kind of problem you have before you pay for a solution. Give it a try and let me know what you find.

Let's go raise your AIQ.

Every Master Prompt in AIQ with Paul is written as an AIQ Brief. Each section answers a question AI needs answered before it can do good work for you.

Context tells AI what the situation is and who the work is for. Intent says what the result must accomplish, and Constraints list what cannot change or is off limits. Output describes what good looks like, and Check names what AI should show you and what you will verify before you use the result.

Fill in the brackets, run the brief, and treat the Check section as your to-do list once AI responds.

Take your skills beyond the brief. In my AIQ Advantage™ program, I teach working professionals how to build briefs into reusable workflows, check AI output before it goes out under their name, and decide where AI fits in their work. Learn more at AIQAdvantage.com

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