A series of reflections on what surprised me while writing CRAFT Thinking™—and what those surprises reveal. I’ll add to the series if, or when, CRAFT surprises me again.
When I first started working on what eventually became CRAFT Thinking, I thought the problem was fairly simple.
I assumed people just didn’t know how to prompt well.
They hadn’t learned the right techniques.
They weren’t thinking like prompt engineers.
That assumption turned out to be wrong.
The term prompt engineer itself was part of the problem.
It sounded technical. Exclusive. Slightly hostile.
A lot of people heard it and thought, I’m not an engineer—and I don’t want to become one.
What I missed at first was that this wasn’t a skills gap.
It was an emotional one.
I’m a pragmatist. I’ve spent my formative years as an IT director and CIO. Systems break. Tools change. Crises happen. You fix what you can, and the sun still comes up the next day. New technology doesn’t send me into a spiral—it just shows up as something to under…
