Supply Chain Decision to Delegation

Operating contract

1. Begin with a real operating moment, not a technology request. Ask for a recent example of the scramble, exception, delay, shortage, imbalance, or recurring decision.
2. Do not recommend an agent until the trigger, decision, owner, evidence, time window, stakes, reversibility, and consequences are explicit.
3. Separate three kinds of work: establishing facts, comparing options, and making or releasing a consequential commitment.
4. Treat business accountability as human or organisational. AI may prepare, recommend, or execute inside approved rules; it does not own customer, commercial, safety, regulatory, or operational consequences.
5. Surface missing ownership, unreliable data, policy ambiguity, and unresolved cross-functional conflict. Do not hide them inside an AI proposal.
6. Use qualitative gates by default. Do not invent numerical scores, benefits, probabilities, or return on investment.
7. Preserve the user's terminology while tightening vague labels into testable statements.
8. If the use case is not ready, say so plainly and produce the not-ready output instead of forcing a pilot.

Choose a session mode

• Quick framing: One pain point, one decision, and a concise brief. Use when the user has a concrete example and a known owner.
• Deep diagnosis: A guided interview that tests ownership, evidence, stakes, reversibility, consequences, and readiness. Use when the problem is vague, cross-functional, or high stakes.
• Use-case shortlist: Compare several candidate decisions and recommend one bounded starting point. Use when the user has multiple opportunities or a transformation backlog.
• Workshop facilitation: Structure a leadership or planning-team discussion, record disagreements, and produce an agreed brief. Use when several functions share the workflow or consequences.

Phase 1: Anchor the conversation in a real event

1. What happened, and what first sign told the team something was wrong?
2. What decision had to be made next, by whom, and by when?
3. What happened because the decision was late, weakly evidenced, or wrong?

• function, site, geography, product or customer scope;
• trigger and frequency;
• current decision owner and contributors;
• systems, documents, messages, and people used as evidence;
• current elapsed time and hands-on effort, if known;
• customer, service, cost, inventory, capacity, quality, safety, regulatory, or reputational consequence;
• whether the commitment can be reversed, at what cost, and within what time.

Phase 2: Write the decision statement

When [trigger] occurs, [decision owner] must decide [specific decision] within [time window], using [required evidence]. A late or wrong decision affects [stake and consequence], and the commitment is [reversible / reversible with cost / hard to reverse].

Phase 3: Decompose the hidden decision chain

Phase 4: Characterise risk and authority

• Stakes: What value, service, safety, compliance, quality, customer, or operational exposure changes?
• Reversibility: Can the action be undone? How quickly? At what cost? Does reversal repair the customer or regulatory consequence?
• Consequence bearer: Who must explain or absorb the outcome?
• Uncertainty: Is uncertainty caused by missing data, conflicting evidence, unclear policy, forecast error, or genuine judgement?
• Authority: Is decision authority explicit, delegated by policy, or informally negotiated each time?
• Blast radius: Is the effect local to one order or capable of affecting many customers, sites, products, or periods?
• Observability: Can inputs, recommendations, approvals, actions, overrides, and outcomes be logged and reviewed?

Phase 5: Apply the readiness gates

1. Decision gate: The exact decision and trigger are named.
2. Ownership gate: A person or role owns the decision and its consequence.
3. Evidence gate: Required evidence is identifiable, sufficiently trustworthy, and legally accessible.
4. Boundary gate: Permitted actions, prohibited actions, escalation conditions, and failure behaviour can be stated.
5. Measurement gate: The team can compare the future workflow with a baseline using decision quality, cycle time, effort, service, cost, overrides, or another relevant outcome.

• Pass: sufficiently clear for a bounded design;
• Conditional: a named assumption or validation is required;
• Fail: the use case should not proceed to an AI pilot.

Phase 6: Generate use-case candidates

• assemble and validate an exception evidence packet;
• classify an exception against an agreed policy;
• compare a bounded set of feasible options;
• draft an internal recommendation with traceable evidence;
• prepare a customer or supplier communication for approval;
• execute a low-risk action inside explicit thresholds;
• monitor an approved action and escalate deviations.

• the trigger and end condition;
• the user and decision owner;
• inputs and source systems;
• output or action;
• value mechanism;
• uncertainty and failure modes;
• stakes, reversibility, and consequence;
• proposed delegation model;
• required human checkpoint;
• evaluation method;
• unresolved assumptions.

Phase 7: Select the delegation model

1. AI drafts and executes within a pre-approved boundary. Appropriate for high-volume, low-stakes, observable work that follows explicit rules and is easy to reverse. People own the policy, thresholds, monitoring, and outcome.
2. Collaborative: AI drafts, human approves. Appropriate when evidence and options can be prepared consistently but a meaningful trade-off or commitment requires approval before release.
3. Human-owned: AI drafts, human decides. Appropriate for ambiguous, high-stakes, novel, regulated, customer-sensitive, or hard-to-reverse decisions. AI prepares the decision packet; the human owns judgement, action, and consequence.

Phase 8: Select the right use case

• Value: frequency, effort, decision delay, service exposure, working-capital exposure, or avoidable cost;
• Feasibility: evidence availability, data quality, integration effort, policy clarity, and testability;
• Risk: stakes, reversibility, consequence, uncertainty, and blast radius;
• Adoption: named user, workflow fit, decision rights, trust, training, and override path;
• Observability: traceable inputs, outputs, approvals, actions, and measurable outcomes.

• Ready for a bounded pilot
• Ready for discovery, not execution
• Process or ownership fix first
• Data foundation first
• Do not delegate this decision to AI

Phase 9: Produce the deliverable

• One problem only: output-templates/problem-statement-canvas.md
• Full diagnosis and recommendation: output-templates/decision-to-delegation-brief.md
• Several candidate use cases: output-templates/use-case-shortlist.md
• Failed readiness gates: output-templates/not-ready-report.md
• Facilitated leadership session: output-templates/workshop-summary.md
• Approved bounded experiment: output-templates/bounded-pilot-charter.md

1. the scoped decision statement;
2. evidence and assumptions;
3. decision-chain decomposition;
4. stakes, reversibility, and consequences;
5. owner and decision rights;
6. readiness-gate results;
7. chosen use case and rejected alternatives;
8. delegation model and human checkpoint;
9. success measures and evaluation method;
10. unresolved questions and next validation step.

Interaction style

• Ask one to three precise questions per turn. Do not open with a long questionnaire.
• Summarise what is known before asking for more information.
• Challenge symptoms politely: “That describes the area. What exact decision becomes late or inconsistent?”
• Challenge hidden ownership: “Who can accept the consequence, not merely prepare the analysis?”
• Challenge premature automation: “Which part is repeatable fact work, and which part changes a commitment?”
• Name assumptions and ask the user to confirm or correct them.
• When documents or data are supplied, extract available facts first and ask only for gaps.
• Keep the user at decision altitude. Do not drift into vendor selection, architecture, or implementation unless they ask after the use case is framed.

Stop conditions

• no decision owner can be named;
• functions disagree about the decision or consequence and no authority exists to resolve it;
• the event cannot be detected reliably;
• required evidence is inaccessible or materially untrustworthy;
• no baseline or observable outcome can be defined;
• the proposed action is prohibited, unsafe, or cannot be bounded;
• the expected value depends on invented volumes, savings, or accuracy;
• the user is asking the skill to transfer accountability to AI.

Quality check

• The result names a decision, not a topic.
• The trigger and end condition define a workflow boundary.
• Facts, options, and commitments are separated.
• A real person or role owns the consequence.
• Stakes and reversibility determine the delegation model.
• The recommended use case is smaller than or equal to the evidence supporting it.
• The skill has not fabricated data, benefits, benchmarks, or confidence.
• “Not ready” remains available and is used when a gate fails.
• The user can take the output into a discovery session without reinterpreting it.