The decision you describe at the start of a rehearsal shapes everything that follows. MAIA uses your description to detect your industry, identify dependencies, generate disruption scenarios, and build the entire analysis. A specific description produces a sharp rehearsal. A vague one produces a generic one.
What Makes a Strong Description
A strong decision description has three elements:
- The specific action you're considering. What would you actually do? Acquire a company, launch a product, restructure a team, exit a market?
- The context that constrains it. What's your timeline, budget, competitive situation, regulatory environment?
- What's at stake if you get it wrong. Revenue, market position, team trust, regulatory standing?
Examples
Strong: "We're evaluating whether to acquire CompanyX, a $200M revenue SaaS platform in the healthcare space, to expand our clinical data capabilities. The deal would close in Q3. Our board is split on whether the integration risk justifies the strategic gain given our current 18-month runway."
Strong: "Should we move our core banking platform from on-premise to cloud-native architecture? We handle 2M daily transactions, have regulatory exams every 18 months, and our current vendor contract expires in 14 months."
Weak: "Growth strategy" — Too vague. MAIA can't identify what you're actually deciding.
Weak: "Should we do something about costs?" — No specific action, no context, no stakes.
Weak: "Digital transformation" — This is a category, not a decision. What specifically would you change, and why now?
Why Specificity Matters
Every downstream stage builds on your description. The dependency map, disruption scenarios, cascade chains, and countermeasures are all generated from what you describe. If your input is "improve things," the analysis will be correspondingly shallow. If your input names the decision, the players, the timeline, and the stakes — MAIA has material to work with.
You don't need to write a memo. Three to five sentences with real specifics is enough. Think of it as the way you'd describe the decision to a trusted board advisor who has never heard of it before.
You Can Add More Context Later
Your initial description gets the pipeline started, but it's not your only chance to provide information. During the data discovery stages, you can upload documents, connect data sources, and respond to MAIA's gap resolution prompts with additional context. The description sets the direction — the rest of the rehearsal fills in the detail.