Case study · AI-enabled course design · Live & public, no confidentiality
Leading Through the Unknown: An AI Leadership Story
A narrative-driven leadership course with a live, generative AI coaching simulator built in—designed, built, and deployed end to end by a single instructional designer.
The learner writes what they’d actually say in a difficult 1:1 conversation, in their own words—then gets personalized coaching back, generated live by an LLM grounded in the scenario, not a bank of pre-written branches.
The problem
Mid-level managers were being told to "lead through AI disruption" with no concrete model for what that meant day to day—just anxiety about job security and vague mandates to "adopt AI." The gap wasn’t technical literacy; it was a leadership framework for making decisions under genuine uncertainty, with AI as the specific catalyst.
Audience: people managers, not individual contributors—so the course needed to teach judgment and change leadership, not tool tutorials.
Narrative and structure
Voice: second person, StoryBrand structure—the learner is the hero, P3 is the guide, not the hero of its own course. Content is sequenced to Bloom’s levels 2–5 (Understand through Evaluate) and Depth of Knowledge 1–3, so the course moves from comprehension into applied judgment rather than stalling at recall.
Citations are woven conversationally into the prose rather than dropped as a reference list at the end—keeping the tone consistent with the StoryBrand voice instead of breaking into an academic register.
Build
Built as a hand-coded HTML/CSS/JS course library (not an Articulate or Rise export), giving full control over the interaction design and page performance. The centerpiece is a live coaching simulator: a serverless function calls the Anthropic API with the scenario context and the learner’s own written response, and returns personalized, generative coaching—a genuinely different mechanism from a pre-scripted branching scenario, where every possible learner input already has an author-written reply waiting for it.
Deployment
Deployed via Netlify Drop to a public course library, with a per-module structure and the coaching simulator running live in production via a Netlify serverless function—confirmed working, not a demo stub.
What this demonstrates
This case study exists to show range beyond a template-based authoring tool: narrative and instructional design, front-end build, generative-AI integration, and deployment—the full stack of what "solo delivery at team scale" actually looks like in practice. It's also the one artifact here you don't have to take my word for: click through and coach Renee yourself.