Exercise 1: The Instruction-to-Direction Rewrite

Setup

Identify three instructions you've given recently — to AI, to a colleague, to a contractor, or to a junior team member. These should be actual instructions you gave, not hypothetical ones. Write them down exactly as you gave them (or as close as you can remember).

The Work

For each instruction, rewrite it as a direction brief. Use this structure:

Outcome: What are you trying to achieve? What does success look like for this work?

Constraints: What matters about how the work gets done? What constraints apply? What's negotiable and what's not?

Standards: What does good look like specifically? What would make this output wrong or insufficient?

What to avoid: What are the specific pitfalls or failures you're trying to prevent?

Reflection Questions

After you've done the rewrite for all three:

1. What was difficult about turning instruction into direction? Where did you struggle to be specific?

2. For each rewrite, what did making your standards explicit reveal about what you actually wanted that your original instruction didn't capture?

3. Looking at your original instructions, where were you constraining the executor to your process instead of your outcome? How did the rewrite change that?

4. If you gave these rewrites to the executor instead of your original instructions, do you think the work would be better? Why or why not?