Today we’ll be exploring a trend that unites NFL coaches, tech unicorns, and Emmy-winning screenwriters—and learn how their approach is being reinvented in the age of AI.

You’ll also find a free course at the end that teaches you how to take advantage of this new system for yourself.

Before we dive in, thank you to everyone who applied for an AI Workflow Strategy Session last week. Special shoutout to Klaudia for this unsolicited testimonial:

“My 45 minutes with you just now saved me about 50 hours of work.“

Building on the success of last week, we’re running another 3x one-to-one strategy sessions exclusively for Action Digest readers. If you think you would benefit from blocking off some time on your calendar to think strategically about how to better integrate AI in your work or business then you can learn more and apply for a slot here.

Now let’s, in the immortal words of will.i.am, “bring the action”…

P.s. More action awaits you in our archives, including how Steve Jobs cultivated great taste, the personality trait shared by 1381 millionaires, and the study that revealed what successful founders, scientists, and terrorists, have in common.

Elite performers have always loved war rooms

On April 15, 2000, NFL coach Bill Belichick gathered alongside his top advisors inside of “the war room” to make perhaps the single most pivotal decision in the history of American football.

It was time for Belichick’s first ever draft as the head coach of the New England Patriots: the 2-3 day event held each year where coaches attempt to secure the best players they can for their teams.

The focal point of Belichick’s war room was the draft board.

Over the past few months, Belichick had acquired copious data on the season’s players. He had refined his own unique collection of metrics to focus on, including a player’s intelligence, versatility, decision-making under pressure, and raw love for the game—often prioritizing these “softer” traits over pure athletic stats (an approach many were skeptical of). 

For each player, all of that data added up to a single proprietary grade. Players were then pinned up on the wall, grouped horizontally on the draft board by position, but ranked vertically from top to bottom based on that internal grade.

As the frenetic selections unfolded, the board was the single source of truth. Over the next two days, Belichick and his staff were in constant dialogue, cross-referencing their proprietary grades against the live draft and using their data to make calculated decisions.

Late on the second day, with the 199th pick approaching, a high-stakes discussion began. A skinny quarterback from Michigan, who had a less-than-stellar combine performance, was graded far higher than his draft stock suggested. Despite having three quarterbacks on the roster, Belichick trusted his data and used the late-round pick on a player many had written off. 

That player was Tom Brady.

This single decision was the beginning of a 20-year partnership that would see Belichick lead the Patriots to six Super Bowls victories, the most of any football coach in history.

What stands out to me from this story is the power of the war room.

It shows that by bringing a focused collection of useful knowledge into a single room—and then using that knowledge as the basis for querying, discussion, and debate—you can achieve truly transformational decision-making.

Beyond sport, this classic war room setup has led to victories in wide-ranging fields:

• Business: At Uber the “War Room” (also its actual name, at first) was an always-on space with dark-wood walls, a large conference table, world clocks, and a giant grid of cities displayed on large TVs. Travis Kalanick, leadership, and team members frequently gathered in the war room to scan hyperlocal metrics—surge %, ETAs, week-over-week trips, driver referrals—and used this data as the basis to rapidly acquire and retain market share in a growing number of cities.

• Actual war: Winston Churchill’s underground “Map Room” was the command center of the British World War effort. A secretive team of analysts worked 24/7 on rotation for six years straight (the lights were never turned off once during this period) to process a constant influx of global intelligence. This information was visualized on massive maps, with pins tracking the movements of naval convoys and troop advancements, enabling Churchill’s war cabinet to debate strategies and make the critical decisions that would ultimately shape the future of the world.

• Creativity: The plot of Walter White’s rise and fall was mapped out using four essential tools inside of the Breaking Bad writer’s room: cork boards, push pins, magic markers, and index cards. On one board writers pinned index cards with possible “big ideas” for the season. On another, they wrote one scene idea per index card and tried to arrange them in terms of where they fit inside an episode structure, starting with the teaser and progressing through four acts. Given the dense chemistry at the heart of the narrative, there was plenty of scientific research on hand too.

Whether you’re engaging in the art of war, or the war of art, a war room is where the magic happens.

Why are war rooms so ubiquitous throughout history and across domains?

The most obvious thing that sets war rooms apart from simple meeting spaces is that they are dedicated to a specific project or goal. They have a singular purpose.

War rooms are also unique in that they contain, organize, distill, and display vast quantities of information. This knowledge is relevant to the room's specific mission and is pivotal to its success.

This information also stays in the room at all times (where security isn’t a concern), is often pinned or projected on the walls, and is laid out for quick reference and query.

One term I’ve seen used in academia to define what happens inside of a war room is “task-structured context curation.” It’s a fancy way of saying: put all the info you need to succeed with a task in one place.

We need war rooms because grand missions and great ideas are often built on a mountain of context that is too vast to keep inside of one person’s brain or fit on a laptop screen. A war room simply makes it easy to traverse this mountain of information and see the bigger picture as you work and make decisions.

Despite their power, most people do not create war rooms for their goals or projects, even when they’d benefit from one, because these rooms take up precious space and require a lot of effort to create and maintain.

Now they’re building them with AI

But while the “cool factor” of a physical war room is hard to beat, we are now seeing the rise of digital, AI-powered war rooms. AI war rooms are much faster to create than their physical counterparts and are in many ways much more transformative.

Here are a few examples I’ve found…

1. Sam Parr’s Business War Room

Sam is the founder of The Hustle and more recently, Hampton, and he replicated the setup of a war room by using ChatGPT’s “Projects” feature. Sam uploaded several key business documents to his project—the equivalent of pinning this information up on the wall. These documents include:

• Books that have had a big influence on him

• Feedback from peer surveys

• His goals, priorities, and challenges

• Details about his company

• Business financial statements

• Key Performance Indicators (metrics)

No longer having to tell ChatGPT his life story every time he starts a new chat, Sam has been able to get hyper targeted advice on everything from increasing the conversion rate on his website, dealing with team issues, and keeping his mindset sharp.

2. Andrew Wilkinson’s Financial War Room

As the co-founder of a holding company that now owns over three dozen companies, Andrew Wilkinson’s finances are tough to keep straight. That’s why Andrew decided to upload all of his financial statements for his holding company and his own personal tax filings to a Claude Project (the equivalent of what Sam did in ChatGPT). He now has the ability to get hyper-specific financial advice anytime within seconds, which already includes one strategy that is saving him $100,000 a year (overlooked by human accountants!).

3. Tal Raviv’s Product Management War Room

Tal Raviv is a product leader at Riverside and has created what he calls a product management “copilot,” again with a Claude project. Tal has thrown a huge number of documents up on his wall, including quarterly plans, customer research, his company's org chart, and his performance reviews. He uses it for an equally wide-ranging number of tasks including prioritizing his day, brainstorming new product ideas, and drafting key documents.

What’s the pattern?

All of the examples I’ve seen so far rely on the “Projects” feature in ChatGPT or Claude, the “Gems” feature in Google’s Gemini, or the “Notebook” feature inside Microsoft 365 (I’m sure there are more but these are the main ones people are using).

Regardless of what platform you use, AI war rooms have the same three core features in common. The first two mirror physical war rooms but the third is where AI really turbocharges things:

1. They let you create a focused workspace with custom instructions (the equivalent of defining the singular purpose that a war room is built for).
   

2. They allow you to upload and save documents related to this specific purpose (the equivalent of pinning project-related info up on the wall and keeping it there).
   

3. They allow you to chat with an AI that has access to all of this specific knowledge (the equivalent of bringing your team into the room and asking them questions—if your team were capable of speed reading 20 documents in 30 seconds and were all super geniuses).

By letting an LLM enter, AI war rooms put the traditional principle of task structured context curation on steroids. Imagine if Churchill had the ability to ask his war room to model 10 different battle plan simulations and it did so within seconds. Or imagine if Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad creator) had the ability to ask his war room to critique the plot structure of an episode or ask it to brainstorm ways to add even more tension to the finale. AI can soak up all of the info on the walls in seconds and uncover insights that a human team may miss even after hours of research. The result is hyper-targeted outputs in seconds.

This is also just a more efficient way of using AI.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that, for a long time, I would explain all of the details of my goals and projects from scratch whenever I wanted advice from AI. This is the equivalent of setting up a brand new war room every time you have a question. This was of course a giant waste of time and I often just wouldn’t bother.

Once you’ve uploaded key info to an AI war room, you’re done, that knowledge is permanently accessible. You become much more likely to use AI and actually harness its benefits when you don’t have to repeat yourself ad nauseam.

Now you might be thinking, but hold on, doesn’t ChatGPT already have a memory feature?

Yes, but a study published in July of this year found that even a single random fact about cats (“cats sleep most of their lives“) was enough to degrade the performance of even smart reasoning models by 200% on math problems. Distracting AI with unrelated info leads to bad outputs.

And I don’t know about you but my ChatGPT’s memory is a junk drawer of random facts including an 18th century novel my friend read, details about a cold email I sent months ago, and my Mom’s birthday (apparently it’s “today,” always).

There’s no way I’m getting targeted business advice like Sam Parr by relying on general-purpose memory in its current state.

This is why we’re seeing the rise of AI powered war rooms: high quality, hyper-specific outputs, in an instant.

Do you need an AI war room?

Are any of your goals or projects missing out on the power of an AI war room?

One way I like to think about this is by filling in the blanks of the following sentence…

If my AI had access to ___, I could ask it ___.

For example, if an AI had access to [all previous editions of the Action Digest and examples of viral tweets], I could ask it [to help me repurpose content for social media].

For Andrew Wilkinson, he asked himself something like, if AI had access to [my tax returns], I could ask it [for optimization strategies to save money].

You can back into ideas in two ways:

1. Think about what precious context you have or could curate (e.g., market research data, content templates, sales call transcripts, etc) and then ask what AI could help you with if it had permanent access to that info.

2. Think about what you need help with or what goals you’re working on (e.g., write a book, launch a new side hustle, get a promotion, etc) and then ask what information an AI would need in order to help you achieve that goal.

And if you’re looking for some step-by-step help and best practices for creating an AI war room (or building an “AI copilot” as I also like to call it—a term inspired by Tal Raviv), we created a free 4-day email course with everything you need to get started.

All you have to do to unlock the course is recommend the Action Digest to one person you know. The ideal candidate is someone who has good ideas and would appreciate some inspiration on how to make them happen…

P.s. if you have any issues viewing or using the above referral widget then please reach out to [email protected] so we can help.

Final Calls To Action

• Want to understand the implications of recent advances in tech, culture, and product design? If so, Scott Belsky’s monthly analysis is essential reading. In his latest edition, Scott explores the implications of AI freeing up our time and attention along with how the sway of “branding” is evolving.

• Looking for a way to elevate your creative process using good ol’ fashioned Pen and (80lb Via Vellum Cool White) Paper? Replenish your supply of Action Method notebooks and journals—the essential toolkit that thousands of creatives rely on to work with a bias toward action.

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