Master-Scene Format: Prompting AI for Strategic Insight

Anyone else out here using master-scene format to query AI / LLM tools? I’m getting better results from better slug writing.

Here’s an example: Last year, these five paragraphs persuaded 40 million people to stop what they were doing, and spend the next 2 hours, 37 minutes focused on nothing else but this.

If you remember this scene, you can read this and visualize the wide shot, the push in, the closeups.

Master-scene format means setting up the scene for the audience, and the operational / production team: where are we? What time of day is it?

Once we’re oriented to the setting, we can move into the action of the scene, and propel characters towards achievement.

People who will be asked to perform work to visualize this data will use this information to calculate the operational needs in time, resources, and cost to make this scene worth more than anything else happening in the audience’s life for 2 hours, 37 minutes.

Prompting AI is very similar.

Set your scene, introduce characters, bring the action forward.

Say I need to know how people do something really difficult, like ask their doctor for a new medicine?

Asking this directly will produce trash.

But prompt in master-scene format, and AI/LLM will structure the scope of information in a way that is usable. Here’s how I think about structuring these prompts:

Exterior: Specialists office, 2pm.

Rhonda, a 38-year old woman, gets out of her Kia Sorrento, and walks across the parking lot to her specialists office in a low building downtown, stretching her legs because of the 45-minute drive from her home near Laval.

Interior: Specialist’s office, 3:15pm

Rhonda, perched on a table, above her 43 year old urban doctor, Darlene, on a low stool. Darlene is a dynamic, data-driven clinician, explaining test results as she taps notes into her 2019 Lenovo laptop.

Now that we’ve set the scene, we can start to prompt for clarity and specificity in dialogue:

How would this doctor talk about the diagnosis and treatment path? What is different about this conversation than one in which our brand is chosen?

How are you querying AI for strategy?