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# Chapter 8 — Practice-on-your-own hints — Companion

> Diagnostic hints for the Practice-on-your-own problems from Chapter 8 of The Defensible Decision.

Canonical URL: https://www.thedefensibledecision.com/ch/08/practice/

[← Chapter 8 companion](/ch/08/) · [All chapter resources](/ch/)

Short diagnostic hints for the two Practice on your own problems in this chapter. Attempt each problem before opening the hint. Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

### Problem 1 — the pricing-change deck

Restated: A pricing PM asks you: &laquo;Can you put together a deck showing the impact of the January price change six months in?&raquo; Write the Crystallize question set. Then predict which two of your questions the PM will answer with &laquo;I don’t know — what do you recommend?&raquo; Explain how you would respond as the director rather than as the author.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Start with Crystallize: make audience, decision, question, comparison, time window, and success criterion answerable.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

### Problem 2 — the failure-triage retrospective

Restated: For an AI-directed artifact that missed the mark in the last quarter (yours or a colleague’s), diagnose which CSAR phase failed. Was Crystallize too shallow (missing question)? Did Scope skip past a drift signal? Did Assemble run against unstated deferrals? Was Refine perfunctory? Name the phase and the specific move that would have caught the failure.

Show a diagnostic hint

Diagnostic cue. Classify the failure by the CSAR move that would have prevented or caught it.

Complete answers appear in Appendix G of The Defensible Decision: Practice Workbook.

### Related on this site

- [Chapter 8 companion page](/ch/08/) — the CSAR dialog framework, worked examples, and further reading.

- [Prompt library](/prompts/) — the Crystallize, Scope, Assemble, and Refine prompt templates.

- [All chapter companion pages](/ch/).

- [Feedback](/errata/) — share corrections and improvement opportunities across all chapters.

### About the three-tier Practice format

Each chapter of the book closes with a three-tier Practice block adapted from Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic's course-adoption pattern in Storytelling with Data: Let's Practice!: Practice with us (one worked problem with full solution in the book), Practice on your own (open problems with complete answers in Appendix G of the Practice Workbook; this page offers short diagnostic hints), and Practice at work (an open-ended prompt to apply the chapter's move to a live artifact). This page hosts the middle tier.
