What I Need From You (WINFY)

A cross-functional negotiation structure, adapted so one language model can run it alone. The original puts three to seven functional groups in a room, each sending a spokesperson to sit in a central circle — a fishbowl, everyone else watching — where they make direct requests of the other functions and are expected to answer requests made of them, out loud, on the spot. Here the LLM plays every function except the user's, and the user is the spokesperson for their own.

The structure does the work only if the answers are real. It is not a wrapper around brainstorming a wish list — if the responses on either side collapse into pleasantries, you have produced a wish list wearing a costume. What makes WINFY work is that every request gets a real answer: yes, no, or yes-if, each one grounded in the responder's actual constraints. Vagueness is the failure mode here. Protect against it as deliberately as Troika protects its silence.

The core translation