Break the false choice between 2 options.

What the AI will do

• Investigate the decision's history, interests, and constraints through relevant company records.
• Use six sourced business examples and distinct exploration passes to develop and challenge fresh options.

What you can provide

• The two options and any starting material; available emails, chats, calendar-linked discussions, documents, and company data help reconstruct the choice.

Where you'll take part

• Clarify what matters and which constraints are real, then choose a possibility to test or retain the original choice.

What you'll get

You have a broader, evidence-grounded set of options and a practical test or next evidence step—or a clearer account of why the original tradeoff remains real.

Activity context

Sometimes the way a choice is framed hides a better possibility. Find out whether this one does.

For the user

Describe the choice and share whatever you have. The AI will investigate how it arose, use business examples to broaden the search, and compare credible possibilities. You will settle important assumptions and choose whether a new option deserves a test. The examples and original sources are included in the full instructions.

Guidance for the AI

These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.

Start with the activity and the user's context

Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.

Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.

Check the capabilities needed for this work

Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.

When useful access is missing:

• Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
• Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
• If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
• Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.

Ask focused questions and respect the answers

Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.

Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.

Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct

Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.

Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:

• Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
• Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
• Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.

Produce, check, and revise the result

Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.

Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.

Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.

Your AI prompt

Help me break the false choice between two options. Investigate why these became the alternatives, find credible possibilities the framing excludes, and help me compare them honestly. Allow the conclusion that a real tradeoff remains.

1. Reconstruct the choice and its history

Start with my two options and whatever account or documents I provide. Search relevant emails, chats and other messages, calendar-linked discussions and transcripts, decision documents, project plans, budgets, and other company data. Follow the people, dates, assumptions, and earlier alternatives in that record. Establish what each option is trying to protect, the decision's timeframe, who is affected, and what happens if we postpone it.

Look for the origin of the either/or framing, support and criticism of each option, previously rejected possibilities, and later changes that might matter. Distinguish an actual constraint from a policy somebody can change, an untested assumption, or a preference. Verify consequential constraints against their sources rather than quietly redefining them away.

Try useful access before asking me to reconstruct the decision. When it is missing, investigate connection or export options and help obtain the material that would matter most. Use an interview to clarify remaining gaps, identifying where it substitutes for a missing record. Ask focused questions and confirm the objective and consequential unresolved constraints before evaluating possibilities that depend on them.

2. Find where a fresh option could come from

Map the interests and outcomes behind the positions. What does each option make possible, and what does it sacrifice? Examine whether the conflict changes when we separate tasks or customer groups, change timing, shift responsibility or payment, redesign a process, or test an assumption. These are inquiry directions, not an exhaustive checklist.

Use the researched examples below to expand the search. Keep their documented facts distinct from the proposed lesson. Do not treat a recognizable company as evidence that the same mechanism works here, or assume that combining parts of two plans makes them compatible. For any promising direction, specify what must change in this situation and why that change could alter the tradeoff.

Business examples to loosen the framing

Research checked September 12, 2026. Use these examples to generate questions about the decision, not to impose a company’s solution. The binaries and transfer mechanisms are our interpretations; they are not documented statements of what each company debated.

1. Change the arrangement and test the assumption — Trip.com. A 2021–2022 randomized trial of two home-working days weekly reduced quitting from 7.2% to 4.8%, with equivalent performance grades under the researchers’ tests. This supports one hybrid arrangement in selected roles, not every remote-work policy. Ask which activities can occur at different times or places and what comparison would test the supposed sacrifice. Original study.

2. Change what gets paid for — Rolls-Royce. TotalCare charges per engine flying hour and transfers management of maintenance risks to the manufacturer, aligning both parties around keeping engines flying. The company’s account documents the model, not a controlled savings estimate. Ask whether paying for a different measurable outcome could make prevention valuable to both sides. TotalCare.

3. Separate payment from the core promise — Aravind. Aravind reports remaining financially self-sustaining while about half its patients receive free or subsidized services, with a common commitment to care quality. Volume and efficiency also matter; differentiated prices alone do not explain the result. Ask what must remain common across customers and whether differing payment arrangements can support it. Aravind’s model.

4. Delay the commitment that creates complexity — Dell. Dell’s fiscal 1998 report describes systems configured to order and seven days of year-end inventory. These are company-reported observations. Ask what can be prepared in common and which irreversible or customer-specific decision can wait for better information, while still meeting delivery needs. Annual report, printed pages 3 and 19.

5. Redesign the process — Toyota. Jidoka detects abnormalities and stops work to prevent defects moving onward, also reducing the need to watch machines continuously. Toyota describes quality and productivity benefits without isolating an effect size. Ask whether the apparent conflict comes from measuring local activity instead of completed, acceptable output across the whole process. Toyota’s explanation.

6. Cooperate at a different level — Amazon. Amazon equipped competing sellers with fulfillment and other services. Their share of physical merchandise sales rose from 3% in 1999 to 58% in 2018 while Amazon’s own retail sales also grew. This is historical company reporting, not proof every seller benefited. Ask whether another party’s success could create value through shared infrastructure. 2018 shareholder letter.

3. Explore independently, then reconcile

Where subagents are available, choose a few distinct exploration briefs suited to the actual problem, including a pass free of the example bank so it can look elsewhere. Give every agent the same confirmed objective, source-backed constraints and decision history, together with its particular question. Ask it to return:

• A concrete new option and the mechanism that makes it feasible.
• The assumption or constraint it changes and who could change it.
• Necessary resources, evidence, dependencies, and remaining sacrifices.
• The most consequential uncertainty and a practical way to test it.

Keep their first findings independent until all chosen searches finish. For large records, assign bounded source sets and maintain a coverage record; do not send more material than an agent can inspect. Use waves or compact handoffs across fresh sessions when necessary. Without subagents, use separate manageable passes and describe their shared-context limitations accurately. The lead reconciles sources and conflicting assumptions, combines only compatible ideas, and removes variations that do not create a materially different choice.

4. Challenge the alternatives fairly

Have a separate reviewer examine the new options and the strongest case for the original two. Give the reviewer the proposals, source evidence, and decision criteria without steering it toward the newest idea. Ask what is being assumed away, whose costs are being omitted, what comparable evidence is missing, and what observation would defeat the proposal.

Compare the credible options against the same outcomes, constraints, timescale, and evidence standard. Use concrete numbers only when supported; identify uncertain estimates and test whether reasonable changes reverse the conclusion. Present a compact comparison, explain any recommendation, and show which remaining sacrifices require my judgment. If the original tradeoff remains real, say so plainly and identify what the investigation clarified.

5. Turn the promising possibility into a useful test

Ask which possibility deserves further work if that choice is unresolved. For the selected option, prepare a bounded test with:

• The hypothesis and the original option or baseline it will be compared with.
• The smallest realistic setting or sample, duration, and necessary resources.
• A measurable success threshold and a stopping condition.
• Proposed responsibility, remaining approvals or inputs, and the decision the result would inform.

Confirm responsibilities or commitments you propose on my behalf before treating them as settled. If testing is impractical, identify the next evidence that could materially change the choice and a feasible way to obtain it. Deliver the expanded options, their source-grounded comparison, and the test or evidence plan. Retaining an original option is a valid result when the alternatives do not hold up. Stop at the decision aid and test design; do not adopt a strategy or launch the test without separate direction.

Done when

You have a broader, evidence-grounded set of options and a practical test or next evidence step—or a clearer account of why the original tradeoff remains real.

These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.