Prompt Kit
Prompt Kit: Restructuring Teams for the AI Era — From Meeting Overload to Strike Team Velocity
This kit operationalizes the core frameworks from the article: diagnosing coordination overhead, classifying work into scout and strike team missions, writing an organizational constitution, designing a Dunbar-ratio org structure, and reframing strategy around ambition expansion rather than headcount reduction. Five prompts, each targeting a distinct executive decision.
How to use this kit
These prompts work in sequence but each stands alone. Start with Prompt 1 if you want to face the numbers on how much coordination is costing you. Jump to Prompt 3 if you already know your teams are oversized and need the constitution that makes strike teams coherent. Go straight to Prompt 5 if the strategic reframe is what your leadership team needs most.
Run these in a thinking-capable model like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The prompts gather your specific context through conversation — paste them in and the AI will ask you what it needs. No editing required.
For Prompts 4 and 5, consider running them with your leadership team present. The outputs will surface disagreements about priorities and structure that are better confronted together than discovered later.
Prompt 1: Coordination Overhead Audit
Job: Calculates the communication pathway math across your teams and estimates the real cost of coordination bloat.
When to use: When you suspect your teams are too large but need hard numbers to make the case — to yourself, your board, or your leadership team.
What you'll get: A team-by-team analysis showing communication pathways, estimated coordination cost as a percentage of productive capacity, and a prioritized list of teams where restructuring would unlock the most value.
What the AI will ask you: Your teams (names, sizes, rough functions), your industry, approximate revenue per employee or total headcount and revenue, and how many hours per week your people spend in meetings.
Prompt 2: Scout vs. Strike Team Mission Classifier
Job: Takes your current projects, initiatives, and backlog and classifies each as a scout mission (1 person, exploration) or strike team mission (5 people, execution), with specific assignment parameters.
When to use: When you're planning a quarter, allocating people to projects, or trying to figure out which work should move fast with zero coordination and which needs a dedicated team optimizing for correctness.
What you'll get: A classified list of your initiatives with assignment type, team size, success criteria, timeline, and the specific traits needed for each assignment. Plus a flag for anything currently structured wrong (a strike team doing scout work, or a committee doing what one person should).
What the AI will ask you: Your current projects and initiatives (even a rough list), what stage each is in, and what matters more for each — speed of learning or correctness of output.
Prompt 3: Organizational Constitution Builder
Job: Helps you write the specific, falsifiable principles that define what "correct" looks like for your organization — not values operational constitution that strike teams use to verify AI output and make autonomous decisions.
When to use: When you realize your teams can't make independent decisions because there's no shared standard of correctness. This is the prerequisite for the strike team model — without it, small autonomous teams produce incoherent output, and you end up back in alignment meetings.
What you'll get: A set of 8-15 specific organizational principles, each with the tradeoff it represents, a test for whether work complies with it, and an example of how a reasonable competitor would choose the opposite. Plus a gap analysis on where your current stated values fail the specificity test.
What the AI will ask you: Your company's current mission/values (to stress-test), what you build, who you serve, the key decisions that define your company's identity, and — critically — what you've chosen NOT to do and why.
Prompt 4: Strike Team Restructuring Blueprint
Job: Designs a concrete org restructuring plan from your current structure into strike teams of five, nested at Dunbar ratios, with the coordination and taste layers defined.
When to use: After you've run the Coordination Audit (Prompt 1) and built your Constitution (Prompt 3). This is the structural design step — how to go from your current org chart to federated strike teams.
What you'll get: A restructuring blueprint showing team compositions, the Dunbar-ratio nesting (teams → clusters → divisions), which coordination roles survive and which become taste roles, a transition sequence, and an honest assessment of where this will break.
What the AI will ask you: Your current org structure (functions, teams, sizes, reporting lines), your key capabilities and domains, your Constitution (or a summary of it), and how much organizational disruption you can absorb at once.
Prompt 5: Ambition Expansion Strategy
Job: Reframes your strategic conversation from "same mission, fewer people" to "same people, 10x mission." Identifies the markets, products, and opportunities that become accessible when your strike teams operate at AI-augmented capacity.
When to use: At a leadership offsite, a board prep session, or any strategic planning conversation where the default framing is cost efficiency. This is the prompt that forces the bigger question: what would you pursue if headcount were no longer the constraint?
What you'll get: A strategic reframe document showing your current mission scope versus what becomes possible with AI-augmented strike teams. Specific new fronts — markets, products, customer segments, capabilities — with a rough feasibility assessment. The ambition gap quantified. And the competitive threat: who's smaller and faster and already closing it.
What the AI will ask you: Your current business (products, markets, customers, headcount, rough revenue), what you've historically said no to because you couldn't staff it, and what your competitors are doing that you've been unable to match.