Food for thought
The Operating Rhythm, AI-Native
The same rhythm, on AI-native rails.
The original three parts of this guide were written tool-agnostic on purpose. Pen and paper, docs, calendar, Slack. The operating rhythm runs on whatever your team already uses. In recent years the tools have been shifting under all of us: every block of the day now has an AI version waiting to be installed. The principles still hold. What changes is where the friction lives.
Replicate: the five principles, AI-native
Every principle below maps to a small AI workflow. Call it a skill, a prompt template, a custom GPT, a Gem, whatever your tool calls “reusable instructions you save and call by name.” The goal isn’t one giant agent that does your job; it’s five small tools you reach for at predictable moments. The examples below are illustrative, not canonical. Start there, edit for your context, write your own once you see the pattern.
1 · Day 1 Answer, as a skill
The principle: write the answer you’d give if forced to deliver today, in one paragraph, before doing the work. The AI move is a small skill that takes your draft and stress-tests it: three alternative hypotheses you didn’t pick, the strongest counter-argument to the one you did. You write the paragraph; the skill does the breaking. Don’t let the AI write your draft, or you skip the part that makes you trusted.
Example: Day 1 Answer stress test
2 · Ghost deck, as a prompt
The principle: draft the final artifact first, titles only, in delivery order. Then plan the work to fill it. The AI move is a one-shot prompt: you supply the project and a one-line success criterion; the model returns eight to twelve slide titles, in order. You edit the result, not a blank page. The slide your audience will fight over is the one you write yourself, by hand, before any other.
Example: Ghost deck
3 · “So what?” as a check
The principle: an observation isn’t an insight. Ask “so what?” of every sentence until the answer either elevates or you cut. The AI move is a check on any draft before sending: paste, run, get a line-by-line readout. The friction that drops is the editing pass. The friction that stays is deciding which so-what matters most to this reader, this decision. The model gives you a plausible implication for every line; your job is choosing.
Example: So-what check
4 · MECE, as a check
The principle: when you break a problem into pieces, the pieces shouldn’t overlap, and together they should cover the space. The AI move is a short check against any structure you’ve drafted, looking for the overlap and the missing fourth. This one is underrated for one reason: you wrote three; you’ve stared at three; you can’t see the fourth. The model hasn’t bonded to your structure yet. Run the check before the structure leaves your machine.
Example: MECE check
5 · BLUF, as a rewrite
The principle: lead with the answer. Then the reasons. Then the supporting detail. The AI move is a rewrite skill: paste any draft and ask for the three-sentence BLUF version. If the rewrite is shorter than yours and still says what you meant, the draft was buried; ship the rewrite. If the rewrite reads weaker, your answer is weaker than you think. You can compress an answer you have; you can’t compress one you’re still avoiding.
Example: BLUF rewrite
Mutate: what’s actually shifting
If “Replicate” answered can the rhythm survive the new tooling, “Mutate” answers what changes in the underlying disciplines when it does. Five shifts, one per principle.
- Day 1 Answer goes from “pick a hypothesis” to “choose among ten.” Generating hypotheses used to be the slow, expensive part. Now the slow part is curating. The skill that matters is not creativity; it’s judgment about which of ten plausible answers fits this reader, this decision, this week.
- The ghost deck stops being a forcing function and becomes the default unit of work. When drafting the final artifact costs nothing, every project starts with one, no exceptions. The discipline shifts from remember to ghost-deck to spend the saved time on the slide that matters.
- “So what?” stops being a discipline and becomes the entire job. Observations are infinite and free; insights still aren’t. Most of what made a junior analyst valuable just got automated. What didn’t is the leap to so what for this audience, this decision, this week. That leap is now where seniority shows.
- MECE externalizes from your head into the loop. You no longer have to hold the structure in your head and audit it cognitively. You write a draft, run the check, fix what comes back. The locus of discipline moves from habit to system. The operators who’ll be MECE in five years are the ones who built it into their workflow now.
- BLUF becomes a filter, not just a writing rule. When the world produces infinite words, the operator who can compress what they’re hearing into three sentences wins by default. Compression is the only filter that scales. The people who can do it in real time, on what’s said to them as well as what they write, are the ones senior people will protect, promote, and rely on.
Two common takes both miss. AI changes everything; throw out the playbook. AI changes nothing; the tools are toys. The principles were always about judgment, not typing speed. AI raised the floor on output volume by the same amount it raised the ceiling on judgment. The rhythm is what closes the gap.
AI didn’t kill the McKinsey playbook. It made it the only thing separating signal from slop.
About the author
Eric Tribe is a strategic advisor and operator. Works with Pioneer Square Labs. Former CRO at Flashfood, with over a decade at BCG before and McKinsey after.