The Flare Test

What your peers notice before you do

A flare only does two things. It either blazes the sky and is visible for miles. Or it arcs sideways over the rail, draws a short red line across the water, and disappears. Same device. Same person holding it. The difference is how it's aimed and whether the person firing it actually meant it.

That's what I keep seeing with AI right now. Two people. Same technology. Same problems. One of them is producing work that lights up the room. Their manager notices. Their peers notice. The quality is different, the speed is different, and the questions they're asking are different in a way that's hard to fake. The other one is producing the shrug. Technically using it. Dashboard says active. Output looks fine. Nobody remembers any of it by Friday.

Week 1, we named the shrug. Week 2, we named the pause, the thirty-second gap before the prompt where everything is decided. This week I want to give you a way to test which kind of flare you're shooting.

Four questions. One minute. Brutal honesty required.

1. Do you believe your work is creative?

Not graphic-design creative. Not artistic creative. Creative in the way that matters: the questions you ask, the angles you see, the judgment you bring that nobody else on your team would bring.

Most people have spent their entire career in environments where the way they think wasn't the point. The point was the template. The SOP. The approved process. The way they think was, at best, irrelevant. At worst, it was the variable being engineered out.

Then AI shows up. And for the first time, the way you think is the whole game. Your questions. Your angles. Your judgment. Not just welcomed in the work, but required by it. Maybe for the first time ever, you've got skin in the game. And that feels different. Not just useful. Exhilarating.

If the way you think has never felt welcome in your work before, and AI just changed that, you're holding a lit flare. Aim it at the sky.

If your answer is still "my work isn't creative, it's complicated," the shrug has you. Not because you're wrong about the complexity. Because nobody's shown you that the complexity is exactly where your fingerprint lives.

2. When was the last time you asked AI a real question instead of handing it a default request?

There's a difference between "summarize this report" and "which of these findings would change a skeptic's mind." The first is a request. The second is a crafted question. It has your fingerprint on it before AI ever sees it. It carries intent: who the work is for, what would make it matter, what the obvious answer would miss.

Most people never make this shift because nobody teaches it. The training program shows you how to use the interface. The prompt library gives you sentences to copy. Neither one asks you to stop and think about what you actually want before you type. So you don't. You hand AI a default request, get a default output, and confirm the suspicion you already had: this thing is fine, I guess. The shrug.

The crafted question is what happens when the pause is real. When the thirty seconds before typing are spent deciding what matters, who cares, and what the obvious approach would miss. That's not a skill you learn from a prompt library. It's a practice you develop by doing it, and it changes the quality of everything that comes back. If you can't remember the last time you asked one, the flare is still pointed at the water.

3. Have you taken AI to the work you're already proud of?

Everyone talks about using AI to solve problems. To fix friction. To tackle the stuff that's been sitting on your plate because it's too tedious or too complex. And that's real. But it's not where the flare gets brightest.

The people who catch fire do something most training programs never suggest: they take AI to the work they've already mastered. The subject matter where they have zero frustration. The deliverable they've been producing for years and are genuinely proud of. The thing they know so well that they'd bet their reputation on it. And they test it there.

That's where the improvement is unmistakable. Not because AI found a problem you missed, but because you know the terrain so well that you can see the elevation change clearly. Your confidence is already there. You're not comparing against frustration. You're comparing against your personal best. And when your personal best gets visibly better, something shifts inside you that can't be undone. You stop seeing AI as a rescue plan for hard days and start seeing it as an amplifier for your strongest work. That's the compounding moment. That's when you start going back to old problems too, not because you gave up on them, but because you now know what your fingerprint looks like when it's fully in the work.

If your AI use is still limited to the tasks on your to-do list, the compounding hasn't started. The flare is a single point of light. It hasn't become a pattern yet.

4. Has anyone asked you what you're doing differently?

This is the real test. Not because it's the hardest question, but because you can't manufacture the answer.

When your work gets good enough that the people sitting next to you can see the difference without being told, something has shifted that no training program can produce. They notice the speed first. Then the quality. Then the questions you're asking in meetings that you weren't asking three months ago. And at some point, someone leans over and says, "What are you doing differently?" That's the flare blazing the sky. Visible for miles.

What happens next is the part no adoption playbook accounts for. You show them. Not because your manager asked you to be a champion. Not because there's a program for it. Because you can't help it. The work is too good not to share, and the person asking is too curious not to listen. That's how real adoption spreads. Person to person. Desk to desk. Because one person's work got undeniably better and the people around them couldn't ignore it.

If nobody's asked yet, two things are worth examining. Either the work hasn't changed enough to be visible, which means the pause and the crafted questions haven't become a pattern yet. Or the work has changed, but you've been keeping it quiet. Both are fixable. But only if you're honest about which one it is.

Reading Your Results

If you said yes to all four, your practice has caught fire. You're not producing the shrug. You're producing the flare. The people around you are starting to feel the heat, and the adoption is spreading the only way it ever really spreads: person to person, because the work spoke for itself.

If you said no to two or more, you're probably still operating inside the approved-prompt box your company built for you. That's not a judgment. It's a diagnostic. And the fix starts with thirty seconds of silence before you type. That's the pause. That's where the fingerprint enters the work. That's where the flare gets aimed at the sky instead of over the rail.

If you're a leader reading this, the more important version of these four questions isn't the one you just answered about yourself. It's the one you answer about your people. How many of them would say yes to all four? How many of them would say yes to even one? That number is the real adoption metric. Not the dashboard. Not the login count. Not the prompt volume. The number of people on your team whose flare is visible to the person sitting next to them. That's the number that decides whether your AI investment compounds or quietly dies.

What's Next

Next Tuesday: we've spent three weeks on the people who are in the game. But in every organization, there's another group. The ones who haven't started yet. They're not refusing. They're not resisting. They're just not there yet. And the distance between them and the people shooting flares is getting wider every week, in ways neither side can see.

See you then.

Q.

Know someone who needs the flare test? Forward this. They can find the rest at belowthesurface.anchor11.com