The Context Compact
Before you prompt, agree on the one page of truth the model is allowed to use. AI fails teams less often from bad models than from missing context. Someone prompts with half the brief. Another person pastes last week's numbers. A third assumes the audience is the board when the real reader is a frontline manager. The draft looks sharp. The decision is wrong. Next-gen leaders do not fix this with longer prompts. They fix it with a Context Compact: a short, shared page that states what is true, what is out of scope, and who the work is for — before anyone opens a chat window. Why a compact beats a clever prompt A clever prompt is private. A compact is shared. That difference matters. When context lives only inside one person's head (or one chat thread): two people get two different "truths" from the same tool stale facts travel farther because they sound current reviewers argue about taste when they should argue about premises juniors learn to prompt f...