Article
August 5, 2025 · Last updated on June 12, 2026
Run a prompt challenge
# ChatGPT
# Deployment & Adoption
# Work
# Workplace & Business
# Awareness
# Activators
# Leaders & Admins
Help teams try AI in real work, share what works, and turn strong prompts into reusable workflow examples.
Most organizations include a mix of AI experience levels.
Some people are curious but have not yet used ChatGPT in their work. Others have experimented but have not found a reason to return. Some people use ChatGPT regularly, but their strongest approaches remain personal and are not visible to the rest of the team.
A prompt challenge is a great way to give each group a practical next step:
- New users receive a clear, relevant starting point.
- Occasional users have a structured reason to try ChatGPT again.
- Active users can share what is working and learn from others.
- Activators can identify examples that may be worth testing, packaging, or adapting for broader use.
The goal is to help people apply ChatGPT to familiar work, identify prompts that produce useful results, and turn the strongest examples into repeatable practices the team can continue using.
When to Run a Prompt Challenge
Use a prompt challenge when:
- People are interested in AI but need a practical reason to try it.
- Teams have completed training but are still not consistently using AI capabilities.
- Strong individual examples exist but are not visible to others.
- You want to discover where ChatGPT is already helping with real work.
- A team needs low-friction examples before moving into more structured workflow design.
- You want to build a small library of tested prompts organized around relevant tasks.
A prompt challenge is less useful if:
- Users do not have the required product access yet.
- The team does not have a clear or relevant task to explore yet.
- The primary barrier is governance, permissions, manager support, or unreliable output quality.
- You already know the workflow and need to test or deploy a more structured solution.
In those cases, address the underlying barrier rather than using a challenge as a substitute.
How to Run the Challenge
A simple prompt challenge has three phases:
- Prepare: Choose the task, structure the request, and make participation easy.
- Activate: Encourage participation and curate submissions.
- Reuse: Share, test, and reinforce the examples that show continued value.
Phase 1: Prepare
Choose a Relevant Challenge
Prompt challenges work best when they are scoped around familiar work.
Do not ask people to submit any prompt they have ever used. Frame the challenge around a task the audience already recognizes.
Examples:
- Drafting a first version of a document, slide, summary, or plan.
- Synthesizing notes into themes, decisions, or next steps.
- Rewriting content for a specific audience or tone.
- Preparing for a recurring meeting.
- Reviewing a draft for gaps or risks.
- Clarifying priorities or next steps.
Choose a theme that is relevant to the team’s priorities, broad enough for several people to participate, and specific enough that submissions can be compared and reused.
A strong challenge prompt might look like:
Share one prompt you used to make progress on a real work task. Tell us what you were trying to do, what you asked ChatGPT, what changed, and when someone else might use it.
Engage Leadership Support
Before launching, coordinate with a Leader or Executive Sponsor on one specific form of support. The goal is for leadership to connect the challenge to work that matters and create the conditions for people to participate.
- Connect the challenge to a business priority: explain why the challenge is happening and how it supports a team or organizational goal
- Make time for participation: encourage managers to give people permission to spend a few minutes contributing and reviewing example
- Reinforce when the strongest examples should be reused: highlight useful submissions, encourage teams to adapt them, and help make successful examples visible after the challenge ends
A specific ask is usually more effective than a general request to “support the challenge.”
Make It Easy to Contribute
Use a collection method that fits how the team already collaborates, such as a message thread, form, shared document, or short live session. The best format is the one people will actually use and that makes strong examples easy to find later.
Ask contributors to use one simple format:
Task | What were you trying to accomplish? |
Audience or Context | Who was the work for, and what did ChatGPT need to understand? |
Prompt | What did you ask ChatGPT? |
Result | What did it help improve, such as speed, clarity, structure, quality, or decision-making? |
Human Review | What did you check, change, or decide after receiving the output? |
When to Use It | When might another person use or adapt this prompt? |
Contributing should take less than 10 minutes.
Seed the Challenge
Provide two or three examples that show the level of detail you want. Use tasks relevant to the audience rather than generic examples. You can also ask a few active users to contribute early so others can see how to participate.
Tip: Use ChatGPT to help run the challenge.
ChatGPT can help draft the announcement, generate seed examples, reformat submissions, cluster entries by theme, identify missing context, and draft the recap. Use it to reduce administrative effort, but review the curation decisions yourself.
Phase 2: Activate
Encourage Participation in Context
A single launch announcement is rarely enough. Remind people about the challenge where the relevant work is already happening.
For example:
- Share a relevant prompt when a similar task appears in a team channel.
- Ask a manager to mention the challenge in a team meeting.
- Post a mid-challenge example that demonstrates a useful result.
- Invite people who are already doing relevant work to contribute.
- Focus on relevance rather than volume.
Curate and Share the Best Examples
Once submissions arrive, the Champion's role shifts from collecting to curating.
Look for examples that:
- Support frequent or important tasks.
- Have been tried and produced a useful result in real work.
- Include enough context for another person to understand and adapt.
- Clearly describe where human judgment and review are needed
- Are useful enough to test with another person or team.
Reactions and comments can be useful signs of interest, but popularity alone does not show that a prompt is effective.
When highlighting an example, you can use the same format contributors used to ensure examples are easy to scan, test, and connect to real work.
Phase 3: Reuse
Share Examples Where People Work
Strong examples are more likely to be reused when they appear in context.
Use:
- A short challenge recap
- Replies in relevant work threads
- Quick demos during existing meetings
- Team onboarding or starter resources
- Manager updates that explain when an example is useful
Avoid creating a large repository people must remember to visit. Put the example where the relevant task occurs.
Reinforce Continued Use
Closing the challenge is not the same as completing the work.
Make reuse visible by:
- Sharing where a prompt was used again.
- Highlighting an adaptation by another team.
- Naming the contributor and the value created.
- Asking managers to remind teams when a validated example is relevant.
Next Steps
For Champions
- Choose one relevant task or theme.
- Coordinate with the relevant leader or your Executive Sponsor on one specific form of support.
- Select a simple collection format and create two or three seed examples.
- Run the challenge (Tip: Keep it short. Three to five working days is usually enough.)
- Curate the strongest examples based on real use and reuse potential.
- Share what was reused, adapted, or learned.
For Leaders and Executive Sponsors
Support the challenge by choosing one or more concrete actions:
- Connect the challenge to a business priority.
- Give people time and permission to participate.
- Reinforce when the strongest examples should be reused.
- Help remove access, ownership, or process barriers.
- Recognize contributors and continued reuse, not only participation.
The challenge is the starting point. The longer-term value comes from testing the examples, packaging what holds up, and helping teams reuse those approaches in the work they already do.
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