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Short diagnostic hints for the two Practice on your own problems in this chapter. Attempt each problem before opening the hint. Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.
Problem 1 — the pricing-change deck
Restated: A pricing PM asks you: «Can you put together a deck showing the impact of the January price change six months in?» Write the Crystallize question set. Then predict which two of your questions the PM will answer with «I don’t know — what do you recommend?» Explain how you would respond as the director rather than as the author.
Show a diagnostic hint
Diagnostic cue. Start with Crystallize: make audience, decision, question, comparison, time window, and success criterion answerable.
Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.
Problem 2 — the failure-triage retrospective
Restated: For an AI-directed artifact that missed the mark in the last quarter (yours or a colleague’s), diagnose which CSAR phase failed. Was Crystallize too shallow (missing question)? Did Scope skip past a drift signal? Did Assemble run against unstated deferrals? Was Refine perfunctory? Name the phase and the specific move that would have caught the failure.
Show a diagnostic hint
Diagnostic cue. Classify the failure by the CSAR move that would have prevented or caught it.
Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.
Related on this site
- Chapter 8 companion page — the CSAR dialog framework, worked examples, and further reading.
- Prompt library — the Crystallize, Scope, Assemble, and Refine prompt templates.
- All chapter companion pages.
- Feedback — share corrections and improvement opportunities across all chapters.
About the three-tier Practice format
Each chapter of the book closes with a three-tier Practice block adapted from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's course-adoption pattern in Storytelling with Data: Let's Practice!: Practice with us (one worked problem with full solution in the book), Practice on your own (open problems with complete answers in Appendix G of the Practice Workbook; this page offers short diagnostic hints), and Practice at work (an open-ended prompt to apply the chapter's move to a live artifact). This page hosts the middle tier.