AI Prompts for Inversion Thinking

Find the failure the room won't name.

Every plan has a load-bearing assumption. The team built the plan, they believe in the plan, and the assumption feels so obvious that nobody thinks to question it. That was HP's mistake with Halo. It's probably somewhere in your current project too.

An AI has no ego invested in your plan. Point it correctly and it will say the failure out loud that the room won't. These five prompts do that.

What's inside

• The Post-Mortem — assume the project already failed, then build the ranked list of why
• The Assassin — let a well-resourced competitor design your defeat, move by move
• The Load-Bearing Assumption — find the single sentence your entire plan is resting on
• The Skeptic in the Room — surface the five questions you can't answer well
• The Reversal — flip the core assumption and see what opens up on the other side

Run them in order, on a real project, with real detail. Vague plan in, vague failure out.

Then decide: kill it, change it, or proceed with the bet named out loud.

Free, and stays free.

Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Share it, adapt it, teach with it. Two things in return: credit Phil and Innovation Tools, and pass the license forward.

Anyone can have the idea. Few make the call.