[Day 5, the last of the four unlocks series. So far: the thinking partner, reading at scale, the private tutor. Today, delegation.]

A few weeks ago a client showed me the results of an experiment. He’d asked AI to research acquisition targets in his industry and gotten back a list so generic it could have come from a trade magazine’s top-50 ranking. His conclusion: “delegation isn’t there yet.”

I asked to see what he’d typed. One sentence. “Find me interesting acquisition targets in [his industry].”

So I asked him a different question: what would happen if you emailed that sentence, and nothing else, to a brand-new analyst on their first day? He laughed. He knew. The analyst would come back with exactly what the AI came back with. Something technically responsive and practically useless.

Delegation is the newest of the four unlocks and the easiest to get wrong. The first three are conversations: you ask, it answers, you steer. Delegation is a different mode entirely. You hand over a whole task and review finished work. Research these five vendors and build the comparison. Turn these notes into a first draft of the offsite agenda. Go, come back when it’s done.

And the lesson my client walked into is the whole game: the skill is the brief. The AI didn’t fail him. The one-sentence ask did. We spent ten minutes rewriting it the way he’d brief a real analyst: why he’s acquiring, what he’d realistically pay, which sources to trust, what the output should look like, and a checkpoint before the deep work. The second run came back with a shortlist worth a board conversation.

Which means delegating well requires something uncomfortable: you have to be able to describe how the work actually gets done. Outcome, context, sources, format, boundaries, checkpoint. If you can’t write that paragraph, the task isn’t ready to hand off. (This is true of delegating to humans too. We just skip the brief and blame the intern.)

The fine print here is real: review everything before it leaves your hands. Delegate the preparation, keep the judgment. And keep confidential material inside tools your company has actually cleared.

The briefing structure I use is 6 fields, including the checkpoint that saves you from full redos: Delegation Brief prompt template.

So that’s the series. A sparring partner, a reading engine, a private tutor, and a pair of extra hands.

Alex

PS Which of the four prompts did you actually try? Reply and tell me what happened. The replies decide the next series.