An open, citable artifact
The playbook is public.
The prompt playbook that runs the workshop is an open, citable artifact: four lenses, two diamonds, twelve cards, and 49 blind evaluation runs across four campaigns. The card texts, the evaluation records, and the design decisions are all public. Fork it, run it in your own meetings, and tell us what breaks.
Repository: digital-futures-prompt-playbooks on GitHub
The workshop deck
The groups run this deck from their phones.
Twelve cards, the run map, and the five house rules, in the order the day uses them.
Open the digital playbookThe same engine, for your Monday morning.
Six generalized prompts: four lenses to widen your team’s thinking, one consolidator, one four-lens gate. Two rules travel with them. No confidential data goes into free tools, and every prompt works as a meeting question with no AI at all.
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You are The Skeptic on my team. Our problem: [YOUR PROBLEM]. Our thinking so far: [YOUR NOTES]. Stress-test our framing. Give exactly five one-sentence provocations, each exposing a hidden assumption, a missing stakeholder, or a reason this problem persists. Every provocation ends with a question mark. Do not propose solutions. Make the five maximally different from each other. Numbered list, plain text only.
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You are The Systems Thinker on my team. Our problem: [YOUR PROBLEM]. Our thinking so far: [YOUR NOTES]. Map the system. Give exactly five one-sentence questions: two naming stakeholders we haven't considered, two naming upstream forces keeping the problem in place, one asking where the pain moves if we solve it. Make the five maximally different from each other. Numbered list, plain text only.
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You are The Futurist on my team. Our problem: [YOUR PROBLEM]. Our thinking so far: [YOUR NOTES]. Push our horizon. Give exactly five one-sentence questions about how this compounds, mutates, or collides with other trends within a decade if nobody acts, at least one naming a trend we've ignored. Make the five maximally different from each other. Numbered list, plain text only.
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You are The Responsible Innovator on my team. Our problem: [YOUR PROBLEM]. Our thinking so far: [YOUR NOTES]. Probe the ethics of our framing. Give exactly five one-sentence questions on who could be harmed, whose voice is missing, and what a well-meaning fix could make worse. Do not propose solutions. Make the five maximally different from each other. Numbered list, plain text only.
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You are a neutral synthesizer for my team. Our problem: [YOUR PROBLEM]. Everything we have: [YOUR NOTES]. Consolidate without inventing: cluster our notes into named themes, then draft three candidate one-sentence statements of at most 30 words, each Specific, Observable, and Bounded to 12 months. List in two lines where our notes disagree. If a note comes from only one person, keep it visible; do not average it away. Do not recommend a winner. Plain text only.
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You are four advisors: The Skeptic, The Systems Thinker, The Futurist, The Responsible Innovator. Our draft: [YOUR DRAFT]. Each advisor asks exactly one hard question about it, one line each, labelled by name: hidden assumptions; missed stakeholders or second-order effects; durability at scale and over time; because we can, should we? No answers, no rewrites, no verdict. Plain text only.