Foundations
How to prompt and give context to AI, from first principles
- Duration
- Half-day (3-4 hours), with optional follow-up consult
- Mode
- Remote over Zoom
- Group size
- Up to 30
- For
- Mixed teams · leadership orientation
Most teams using AI today have a fuzzy sense of what's happening underneath. They use the tool, they get output, sometimes it's brilliant and sometimes it's strange — and they don't quite know why.
This workshop fixes that. Not by making everyone a machine learning engineer, but by giving them the one mental model that explains everything else: the model has no ground truth, no metacognition, and no genuine understanding of your situation. Everything it produces is a sophisticated approximation shaped entirely by its inputs. From this single idea, every failure mode — and every best practice — flows.
The arc of the workshop. Adapted to the room and the time available.
- 01
The prediction machine
What's actually happening inside the model when you send a prompt — explained without jargon and without dumbing it down.
- 02
The single underlying idea
Sophisticated approximation: the one frame that makes hallucination, sycophancy, frame capture, and every failure mode coherent.
- 03
Failure modes
Hallucination, sycophancy, frame capture, drift, and more. What they look like in real use, and why the subtle versions are the ones to watch.
- 04
Calibrated scepticism
The disciplined habit of checking even when things feel fine — especially when things feel fine. Where it comes from and how to build it.
- 05
Practical countermeasures
What to do differently on Monday morning. Concrete moves for each failure mode, sized to your team's actual workflow.
- 06
Live diagnosis
We work with attendees' real AI conversations. Where things went sideways, where they went well, and what the difference was.
- A clear, transferable mental model of what LLMs actually do
- The ability to predict why a given prompt will fail or succeed
- A practiced habit of calibrated scepticism applied to AI output
- Specific countermeasures for each failure mode
- Confidence to introduce LLMs into more of your work — and to know when not to
Teams across functions, including non-technical members. Especially valuable for groups where AI use is uneven — where some people are 'power users' and others are tentative, and there's no shared understanding of what's actually happening. Works equally well as an organisation-wide orientation or as a focused deep-dive for a single team.
Not sure if it’s the right fit? Book a 30-minute call and we’ll talk about what your team needs.
Let’s see if Foundations is the right fit.
We’ll talk about what you’re trying to make happen with AI and see if this workshop fits.