One Prompt. One Perspective. One Very Expensive Mistake.

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Poor AI habits can make your AI experience incredibly limited and narrow.

A single AI prompt will result in a limited scope in an answer.

It can also become a (very) expensive one as well.

If you don’t ask for more than one perspective, you won’t get it.

One prompt. One answer. One perspective dressed up as comprehensive analysis. And then a decision gets made on the back of it.

Every serious decision deserves more than one opinion.

You would never walk into a board meeting, present a major strategic move, and base the entire thing on one conversation with one advisor.

You would pressure-test it.

You would bring in people who think differently. You would want someone in the room who would tell you where it breaks before the market does.

Was this newsletter forwarded to you?

The fix? Building a council of experts to help build additional context, perspective, and depth.

The problem is not the AI. The tools are extraordinary. The problem is the habit. Asking one brain, even a very capable one, for a single answer on a complex question is the most expensive shortcut in modern decision-making. It feels thorough. It looks organized. And it consistently misses the angles that matter most.

Instead of asking AI for an answer, ask for a council. I’ll walk through how this was put together and how I doubled down on my council.

Let’s dance.

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Decision

What an AI council actually is.

An AI council is one prompt that instructs the AI to approach your question from five completely different thinking styles simultaneously, each one with a specific job, and a sixth role that synthesizes everything into a single actionable verdict.

The output is not five versions of the same answer. It is five genuinely distinct lenses applied to the same problem, designed to create productive tension between perspectives. That tension is where the real thinking lives. That tension is what a single prompt will never produce on its own.

Here is who sits at the table.

• The Contrarian

• The First Principles Thinker

• The Expansionist

• The Outsider

• The Executor

• The Chairman

The Contrarian

The Contrarian is the advisor you instinctively want to leave out of the room.

• They are not there to be negative. They are there to be honest in a way that nobody else will be when the energy in the room is pointing toward yes.

• Their job is to find the crack in your plan before the market finds it for you.

• They are looking for the assumption you made that sounded reasonable in the moment but has not been tested.

• The dependency you built the whole strategy around that nobody has confirmed. The scenario where everything you are counting on goes sideways at once.

• The Contrarian does not tell you to stop. They tell you where to look before you commit.

The leaders who listen to them consistently spend less time doing expensive damage control twelve months later.

The First Principles Thinker

The First Principles Thinker does something more disorienting than finding problems. They question whether you are solving the right problem at all.

• They strip the question down to its foundation and ask what is actually true here, separate from what you have been told, what the industry assumes, and what your own experience has trained you to expect.

• They are looking for the moment where conventional wisdom diverged from reality and nobody noticed.

• One who catches that before you invest significant resources in a direction that was wrong from the first sentence.

• They are uncomfortable to work with and consistently among the most valuable voices in the room.

The Expansionist

Where the Contrarian looks for what breaks, the Expansionist looks for what you are leaving on the table.

• Their job is to find the upside you are underselling, the bigger version of the move you were too cautious to consider, and the opportunity sitting directly adjacent to the thing you were focused on that nobody on your team has looked at yet.

• They ask what becomes possible if this works better than you expected.

• They push back on conservative assumptions not to be optimistic but to make sure you are not artificially constraining a genuinely significant opportunity.

The Expansionist exists specifically because most organizations have a structural bias toward managing downside. Someone needs to make sure you are not playing small in a situation that actually warrants a bigger move.

The Outsider

The Outsider brings a perspective your industry, your experience, and your team’s collective knowledge have specifically trained you not to have.

• They look at your question from a completely different sector, a completely different customer relationship, a completely different set of assumptions about how the world works.

• They point out the thing that is obvious from the outside and invisible from where you are standing.

• They are the entirely predictable result of being deeply inside your own business, your own market, and your own mental model every single day.

They cover the gaps that experience and expertise create, which are often the most expensive gaps of all.

The Executor

The Executor has no interest in elegant analysis. Their job begins where everyone else’s ends.

• They take everything the other four surfaced- the risks, the reframes, the hidden upside, the blind spots- and they turn it into something you can actually do on Monday morning.

• Not a strategy document. Not a framework for future consideration. A specific sequence of actions, ordered by priority, clear enough that someone could execute them without a follow-up conversation to clarify what was meant.

The Executor is the difference between a council that produces insight and one that produces momentum. Insight without action is just an expensive meeting.

The Chairman

Five advisors with five different agendas produce noise without someone there to orchestrate it all together.

• The Chairman reads the full output of all five perspectives and delivers one verdict. Not a summary of what everyone said. A clear recommendation that accounts for the tension between the five voices and tells you what to actually do, what the single biggest risk is to keep watching, and what the first move is.

• This is the piece most leaders miss when they try to get multiple perspectives out of AI on their own. They get a list and then have to do all the synthesizing themselves. They end up with interesting observations and no clear direction. The Chairman does that work, which is the difference between a stimulating conversation and an actual decision.

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Example

When I was working through a market entry strategy for a client pursuing a significant federal opportunity in the nuclear energy space, I ran the initial strategy through a single prompt first. The output was organized and completely insufficient. It summarized the landscape. It listed the relevant agencies. It described the competitive environment in broad strokes. It was the kind of answer that would have walked my client into that meeting looking like every other vendor who had ever requested time with that office.

Then I ran the same question through the council.

The Contrarian identified immediately that the presentation was aimed at the wrong level of the organization for the wrong reasons. The office receiving it handles international nuclear policy, not vendor introductions. The entire ask needed to be reframed around what the client offered the agency’s policy objectives, not what the agency could do for the client.

The First Principles Thinker surfaced the single most important asset in the entire strategy that had not been mentioned once. The client’s partner country was already an established participant in a major US-led international program. They were not a newcomer asking to be let in. They were an extension of an existing partnership. That reframe changed the opening of every document that followed.

The Expansionist identified five specific named opportunities the strategy had missed entirely, each one a direct match for the client’s capabilities that the single-prompt answer never surfaced.

The Outsider reframed the entire narrative. The story was not that the client was experienced. The story was that a strategic window was closing, competitors were moving, and the client was uniquely positioned to help hold ground the agency cared deeply about protecting.

The Executor turned all of it into a specific ask precise enough that the agency contact could say yes before leaving the room.

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The Council

One prompt produced a summary. The council produced a strategy.

Here is the council I specifically put together for the nuclear market in the US. This council is made of experts (fake names).

• A senior leader with 30 years of experience in global nuclear energy who has worked around the world

• An SME in US nuclear power with 30 years of experience with companies such as Holtec, HII, and Fluor and knows where the opportunities lie

• A retired senior executive in DOE with 35 years of working in nuclear energy and understands the need for international partnerships, the gaps in the US, current stakeholders, current developers, and current SMRs

• A marketing executive with 30 years of experience with senior roles across the industry, including government affairs, strategy, business development, and marketing. She knows how to develop relationships with the government and industry and knows how to pitch new solutions to build trust

My council was built with the following people, with the following backgrounds. It is now:

• DR. JAMES WHITFIELD — Senior Global Nuclear Energy Leader, 30 years

  • Former VP at Framatome, project director on research reactor exports to Europe and Asia, IAEA consultant on international nuclear technology transfer

• MICHAEL BRENNAN — US Nuclear Power SME, 30 years

  • Former Director of Project Development at Holtec International, VP of Nuclear Programs at Huntington Ingalls Industries, Senior PM at Fluor Federal Services. Knows every program office, every procurement vehicle, and every gap in the US nuclear supply chain.

• ADMIRAL (RET.) PATRICIA HAYES — Retired DOE Senior Executive, 35 years

  • Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, former NNSA Director of International Safeguards, former representative to IAEA Board of Governors

• DIANA CHAO — Marketing and Government Affairs Executive, 30 years

  • Former Chief Strategy Officer at a Tier 1 defense contractor, former VP of Government Affairs at a major nuclear services company, former managing partner at a Washington, DC government relations firm. Has run nuclear energy policy campaigns, built relationships across Congressional staff, agency leadership, and industry at the highest levels.

From having a narrow prompt response to having multiple perspectives. You can ask the council for their opinions and angles in your answers. 

Build out your own council. Whether it is for a proposal, for an upcoming tradeshow, a piece of legislation in a state you’re lobbying in, or something else. 

The more identity you provide your council, the stronger your response will be. It will never replace a person, but it can greatly help you with the output you want.

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How

Open your next significant AI session with this prompt structure.

Tell the AI you want to:

Then ask your question.

Precise role definitions produce genuine tension between perspectives. That tension is where the most useful thinking lives and where a single prompt will never take you.

Want to never have to set this up again?

Save the council two ways. 

1. Paste the council instructions into a Claude Project so the council is built into that workspace, or drop them into your custom instructions so every chat already knows the format. 

2. After that, you just type your question, and Claude runs the full council automatically. You turned a one-time prompt into a permanent decision-making tool.

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Action item

Take the single most complex decision on your desk right now. The one where the answer keeps feeling incomplete. Where something about the obvious path does not quite sit right.

Run it through the council before you decide anything else.

One answer is fine. A council is better. And when real money and real time are on the line, better is the only standard worth holding yourself to.

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The tools are already in your hands. The council is one prompt away.

Recognize the pattern, and go back to asking AI a single question the next time something important lands on their desk. Not because they disagree with the approach, but because one answer is faster and faster feels like progress. It isn’t. It is just a more efficient way to miss the thing that matters most. Five perspectives, one Chairman, one verdict. That is the difference between an answer that feels sufficient and a decision you can actually stand behind.

Give it a shot and let me know how it goes. Always love to hear feedback!

See you next week.

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Whenever You’re Ready, Here are 4 Ways I Can Help You:

1. Unlocking Hidden Potential – Reconnecting with Past Clients for Explosive Growth – Check out my free eBook on how you can find hidden gems in your past clients and help you crush your sales goals.

2. AI for Business Development – Download our free eBook on how you can effectively leverage AI prompts to your advantage. From properly setting up your preferred AI tool, to how to shape your prompts, save time, and get the outputs you are looking for.

3. Sales Resources at Your Fingertips – From tools, tips, demos, and how-tos, check out our Pages and content that can provide you with additional support, whether it be social selling, account management, or something else.

4. Cribworks Advisor Program – Want more than just resources? Reach out to me and see if our Advisor Program can help you scale your business.

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