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Playbook · for everyone

Who What Ask

For: everyone. Time: works on the first try, tonight. Cost: nothing.

Most people get AI wrong the same way: they treat it like a tool. A tool does the same thing every time you use it the same way. AI is not that. The way to get the best out of it is to treat it like a best friend who happens to have infinite knowledge, and the whole skill, the entire thing, is knowing how to ask the right questions. That's what prompting is.

Here's how sensitive it is. Ask AI to "pick a number between 1 and 50." Feels random, right? It isn't. The word "pick" added an element of choice. Questions that feel identical are not identical, and with a friend who knows everything, the difference in the question is the difference in the answer.

What's underneath every good question

Every request you make carries seven things, whether you say them out loud or not: who is involved (you AND the role you want the AI to play), what you want done, when, where, why, how you want it delivered, and resources: the tools, budget, and constraints in play. It's how people communicate with people. Storytelling, basically.

Resources is the one everyone forgets, because it isn't natural to storytelling. It's also where half the disappointing AI answers come from: the AI suggested something you can't use because you never said what you had to work with.

Now, you could learn to pack all seven into every prompt. Or you could make one move that handles it for you.

The move

Who What Ask. Three parts:

  1. WHO you are, in relation to the task.
  2. WHAT you're trying to accomplish.
  3. ASK: tell the AI to ask YOU the questions it needs.

The original, word for word:

"I am a first-time founder trying to figure out what business or businesses I can start. I want you to ask me 10 questions that you can use to come up with 20 options that we can explore."

That's the whole method. You supply the only two things the AI can never know on its own: who you are and what you want. Then you flip the job of figuring out what else matters onto the thing with infinite knowledge. It knows what it needs to ask. Let it.

Try it tonight, in whatever life you're in

A business owner: "I own a small bakery with four employees. I'm trying to figure out which parts of my week I could hand to AI without risking my quality or my customers. Ask me ten questions, then use my answers to give me a ranked list of five things to try first."

An employee: "I'm an operations manager at a logistics company, and my boss wants an AI plan by Friday. I need a one-page proposal for where AI could save us time next quarter. Ask me eight questions about how we work, then draft the proposal from my answers."

A parent: "I'm the parent of a curious eight-year-old who asks better questions than I can answer. I want a summer plan that turns her curiosity into projects we do together. Ask me ten questions about her interests and our schedule, then propose six projects, easiest first."

Same shape every time. Who. What. Ask.

Do this

  • Answer the questions honestly, including the embarrassing ones. The quality of what comes back is built from your answers.
  • Put a number on the ask ("ask me ten questions," "give me five options"). Numbers keep both of you concrete.
  • When the result lands, keep going: "now ask me what you'd need to turn option three into a plan." The move chains.

Skip that

  • Skip hunting for the perfect prompt. The perfect prompt is the one where the AI interviews you.
  • Skip answering questions you don't understand. Say "I don't know what you mean, ask it differently." It's a conversation, not a form.
  • Skip copying anyone's magic prompts off the internet. They packed someone else's who and what. Yours are different.

Sharp edges

The questions you get back are only as good as your who and what, so spend your effort there. Ten honest minutes of answering beats an hour of prompt-polishing. And the method surfaces real decisions; if the AI asks what your budget is and you've never decided, that's not the AI failing. That's the method working.

The receipt

The organization publishing this playbook was founded with this exact move. We ran it almost word for word: who we were, what we wanted to build, ask us ten questions. The answers became the founding charter of the Indiana Founders Alliance, and the site you're reading is what got built on top of them. We don't publish methods we haven't bet on.

Go ask.