Sharp Hue ads

One question changes every AI training session we run. "What is challenging you this quarter?" Not what's broken. Not what's wrong. What's creating pressure right now. The distinction matters. People open up differently when the question doesn't feel like a diagnostic. They stop defending and start describing. And what they describe tells us exactly where to focus. Some of it is operational. Some of it is personal. All of it is useful. The other thing that question does is shift the timeline. A challenge this quarter becomes a solvable problem this quarter, or at minimum, something they can start next quarter with a clear plan for. That reframe alone changes how people show up to the work. We ask it before every engagement. Not because it's a warm-up exercise. Because the answer usually reveals the real project. If you want to run that question through your own team before committing to anything, that's exactly what our workshops are built around. https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu

Most AI training I see doesn't work. People sit through two hours. They nod a lot. They leave with a few neat tricks. Three weeks later their workflow looks exactly the same. The reason is simple. Generic training assumes everyone in the room has the same problem. They don't. The marketing person needs to write 12 customer emails a week without sounding like a robot. The ops manager needs to clean up financial reports faster. The IT director is trying to figure out which tools the team is already using behind their back. A two-hour overview doesn't move any of them forward. The training that actually changes behavior starts before the training shows up. When we run a workshop at Sharp Hue, we send every attendee a survey ahead of time. We ask what's challenging them this quarter. We ask which AI tools they're already using, including the ones not on the approved list. We read every single response. We build the session around what we just heard. Every person leaves the room with one usable example or demonstration that solves a problem they actually have. In their own workflow. On their own files. That's the standard for an AI workshop done right. One thing they can do Monday morning that wasn't possible Sunday night. If you're booking AI training for your team this quarter, this is what our session looks like end to end. https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu

Most AI training teaches people what AI is. That's the wrong starting point. By the time someone shows up to a training session, they already have opinions about AI. They've tried it. They've been disappointed. They've also heard someone rave about it. What they haven't seen is their specific problem solved. That's the only thing that actually changes behavior. I survey participants in advance of every training session I run now. What tools are you using? What does your day look like? Where are you stuck? The answers tell me everything. Including which tools people are using that nobody officially approved. Leaders already know this happens. They're not surprised. What surprises people is the moment in the session when someone sees their exact workflow handled by a small AI tool or add-in they didn't know existed. That one example unlocks something. Suddenly the question isn't "what can AI do?" It's "what else can it do for me?" That one epiphany per participant is what we strive for in every session. If your team hasn't had that moment yet, that's what the workshop is for. https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu

The most useful question I've asked in years of consulting is one short line. "What's challenging you this quarter?" I ask it before every workshop. Every project. Every new client engagement. It does more work than any other question I know. The reason is in those last two words. This quarter. That timeframe forces a specific answer. It pulls people out of strategic ambitions and into the actual friction making this week harder than last week. The report they're dreading. The vendor they need to follow up with three times. The thing they're dealing with on Thursday afternoon. The word "challenging" matters too. People respond differently when something is framed as a challenge versus a problem. Problems sound like a flaw. Challenges sound like something you can actually do something about. Same situation, different posture, and that posture changes whether they open up at all. I've watched 30-minute conversations that started with that one question turn into months-long engagements with clearly defined requirements and goals. Because someone finally felt heard. Because the person across from them stopped pitching and just asked them where it hurt. If you run a team, try it in your next 1:1. Replace the standard status update opener. If you want to see how that question gets used to scope a real engagement, it's how every one of our AI Training Workshops starts at the team level. https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu

Every company has institutional knowledge that lives in exactly one place. Someone's head. When that person leaves, the process walks out the door with them. The way onboarding runs. The logic behind proposal scoping. The steps that make a handoff clean. Gone. I started converting our playbooks and processes into Skill Files. Plain-language instructions that capture how we do a specific task at our best. Decision logic. Quality standards. Formatting rules. Here is what surprised me. A Skill File I built in Claude performed almost identically when I moved it to Gemini. It is portable. It belongs to the business, not the tool. Most companies are not treating this as intellectual property. It should be. I teach teams how to build these in our AI Training Workshops. https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu

If your team has to remember a 500-word prompt every morning, all you have done is change the shape of the manual labor. The industry taught us that prompting is the goal. Learn to prompt. Take a course. Write better instructions. And for a while, that works. Then you notice your people spending 20 minutes every session rebuilding the same context from scratch. Different team members get different results because nobody remembers the exact wording from yesterday. You are training a new employee from zero every single conversation. That is exhausting. And the compute bill that comes with it is painful for any founder watching the numbers. We stopped "prompting" our sales decks months ago. We built what I call a Skill File. It is a permanent logic layer that holds our design rules, tone, formatting, and structure. My team drops in raw notes. The Skill File handles everything else. Updated once. Worked for six months. The best part is what my teammate did when building our internal tools. He did not hard-code the logic. He gave me a spot to update the Skill anytime I want. If I feel like something needs to change, I do not call a designer or a developer. I tell the AI to update the Skill, test it, and move on. A prompt disappears after the session ends. A Skill File compounds value every time it runs. I documented how we structure these in a one-page breakdown. If you are building repeatable AI workflows for your team, tell me what process you are trying to standardize. I will send you the template that fits your situation. We teach teams how to build these systems in our workshops: https://lnkd.in/euuce3xu