When I first started using AI seriously, I built myself four advanced prompts to support the development of consultation documents. I was pretty impressed with what they could do. However, when I sat down to write two consultation documents for a client project this month, I only used two of these prompts.

At first it didn’t feel right to not use what I had to its full potential. But, after reflecting on it while writing this newsletter, I’ve realised that working with AI is like stepping into a fast-flowing river.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” – Heraclitus

Three things are different from when I last updated my set of Consultation Document Prompts in October 2025:

1)      Things have moved on with AI models – so I received a much more comprehensive outcome from using my first prompt than I did nine months ago.

2)     I’m different too – I’ve had nine months of new experiences with using AI in different ways, and spent many hours learning from people who are further ahead than me and applying their ideas.

3)     The landscape of what a consultation document needs to achieve and what we bring to consultation documents both vary greatly and affect what’s required to write an interesting consultation document. In this case I had feedback from an informal engagement process, a deliberations report recording lots of my thinking, and a draft action plan in place. So, my job was to repurpose and refine my existing content rather than to create new issue statements and options to consult on.

I have now made my peace with the ever-changing river – and realised there’s a wonderful creative tension in having both structure of existing AI prompts AND the freedom to freewheel my approach to AI when completing any particular project.

Why rich AI prompts are worth keeping (even when you don’t use them all)

Even though I didn’t use half of my prompt sequence this time around, all four of the prompts (and the background knowledge they connect with) are worth keeping. I’ll save them all in a prompt library to consider using during future projects.

But I won’t expect to use all of these prompts for every future consultation document I work on. Instead, I’ll treat them as options to select from.

The best of both worlds is to have an existing methodology in the form of prompt steps supported by examples, and then to go off script with new prompts as needed. And I always do lots of human-only editing to fully own my content.

Being the decision maker, with AI doing the legwork

In the world before AI, I would be in the weeds from the start. But this time around I was able to take a step back and focus on making decisions about what was working well and what needed to be changed or deleted.

I was the decision maker, with my AI assistant doing more of the moving around of the words for me. Being in this role is a lot of fun!

The biggest advantage was being able to contemplate big changes with a light heart. For example, partway through the process I realised I needed two consultation documents rather than one, for two distinct audiences. It would have been harder to make a decision to do twice the drafting, in two different writing styles, if it was all on me. But because I had help, I could focus on what each document needed to achieve.

I still edited both documents many times over. But the thing that was different was I was still enjoying the process by the time I got to the finish line … rather than reaching that point of being desperate to get these documents done and dusted!

The full story, warts and all

Not everyone has the time or the appetite to wrangle AI through a consultation document themselves. Writing these documents for councils is one of the things I do through my strategic planning documents service, so if you’d rather hand yours over, please get in touch.

I’ve written this project up as a detailed case study. If you’d like to read it, email me or send me a message on LinkedIn and I’ll send it to you.