How to create a great strategic profile
Your Strategic Profile is incredibly important for Portage. It is a structured way of telling the platform about your organisation, goals, challenges and other things that can help the underlying AI models better target their advice, recommendations and analysis.
This page will guide you through the best practices for setting up your Strategic Profile.
Portage provides guided access to the world's most intelligent AI models. These models have been trained on vast datasets cover a wide range of topics, but due to their nature they should not be treated as "databases" but rather as "reasoning engines". This mismatch in expectations is what causes a lot of people to find that the outputs from AI models are underwhelming.
Without some information to focus their analysis and output, the AI models can only use generic and common information, which is sampled from their training data. The AI models can then also confabulate information (i.e. hallucinate) to fill in any blanks because they are primarily trained to be "helpful assistants".
The strategic profile provides the AI with what is called "grounding". This means that the AI uses the information in the profile as a lens with which to look through when generating content. So rather than outputting generic steps to achieve a goal, it can tailor those steps to suit the information contained in the profile.
The quality of information held in the strategic profile can greatly impact the quality of outputs across many aspects of Portage.
It is well worth your time taking care to craft a high-quality profile.
This section has key information about your organisation:
Each of the following sections has a button which will re-write your input to be structured in the way that will provide best outputs from the AI.
Just enter your information and then click this button to re-write the section.
In this section, detail the goals that your organisation is pursuing. These should be in SMART-style format where you provide specifics about the goal, when it should be attained and what success looks like.
Good sources for information for this section are your corporate or divisional strategy, or equivalent document. These should be long term goals.
This section outlines the key challenges which are impacting your organisation, either directly or indirectly.
Format these items in a style similar to: [Challenge] due to [Reason] leading to [Impact].
Take the time to think about the true underlying causes of these challenges.
This section lists the key factors, both internal and external, which are relevant for your strategy. These can be good things and/or bad things.
For internal factors this could be things like recent leadership or personnel changes, organisational restructures, etc.
For external factors these could be things like changes to government regulations, supply chain or geopolitical issues, or workfocre availability.
Again, it is best to articulate these in a format like: [Factor] impacting [impact] because [reason]
This section is where you can detail the unwritten truths about your organisation. Why do projects fail? How do people show up? What is the leadership style of the CEO and how does that flow to the rest of the organisation? These can be good and bad things.
The oft-quoted "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" is why this section is important.
Articulate items in this section as: [Truth] that comes from [reason] causes [impact]
This section outlines the major initiatives underway and planned for the near future. This helps the AI understand what constraints you may face today and what your roadmap for future change looks like.
Articulate items in this format: [Initiative] to achieve [goal/metric] by [when]