Here's why you're wrong!...

This prompt will search for your blind spots and mistakes and show you how to avoid risks you haven't thought of yet.

The figures suggest that 85 of new businesses fail within three years. But nearly 100% of business owners believe theirs is different and that their idea will beat the odds. If they didn’t they’d likely not start.

And for many of them, when they speak to their families, their friends, their mentors, they’ll get the reassuring sense that everyone seems to agree with them. It can be worse still in the corporate world where no-one wants to be the dissenting voice questioning the new initiative that seemingly everyone else is behind.

But if everyone agrees with you, how will you know if you’re missing something?

One experiment described on Steven Bartlett’s “Diary of a CEO” was a switch from thinking “how can we make this project succeed” to “why will this project fail?”

The negative tone is deliberate. Of course everyone wants the project to succeed, but by looking at why it won’t (or didn’t) succeed and working backwards a team that was enthusiastically supporting an idea a moment ago can find reasons now to be cautious.

The idea is not to hold back from doing the project but rather, having discovered why it will fail - to identify the risks and avoid them. Once you can see the dangers -whether those are commercial, personal, financial, legal or otherwise - you can plan for them and make sure you really do avoid the problems lying in wait for you. It beats blind optimism and is a situation where the cold, calculating impersonality of AI can actually be a benefit rather than a hinderance.

Let me know what you think.

The GPT is below but I’ll gladly share the prompt if you’d like it. You can find it in full in this week’s “AI for In House Lawyers” Newsletter” - available here