Why Your Prompts Are Too Short

Here is the prompt most people write: "Summarise this for the leadership team." Here is what comes back: a summary. Technically correct, uselessly general, and no closer to the thing you would have written yourself.

It is tempting to conclude that the tool is weak, or that there is some phrasing you have not been taught. Usually neither. The prompt was missing information the answer depended on, and the model — which will never mention this — filled the gap with the most average possible assumption and carried on.

• Who reads it, and what they already know. "The leadership team" means nothing. "Three regional directors who have not seen this project since March, and who care mainly about cost" produces a different document.
• What decision it should support. A summary written to inform is not the summary written to get a yes. Say which one you want.
• The constraints. Length, tone, what must appear, what must not. A model has no idea that this has to fit on one slide, or that nobody in your organisation says the word "synergy".
• An example of good. The highest-value thing you can paste is a past piece of your own work you were happy with. It carries the house style you would struggle to describe in words.

None of that is clever. It is the brief you would give a capable new colleague who was not in the meeting — written down instead of assumed. The reason we skip it is that we hold all four in our heads already, so it does not feel like information.