Before every chat and every agent run, Ada reads what your team has told her: your agent’s instructions, your team memory, your growth strategy and your goal. Sometimes two of these disagree. This guide explains which one wins, so you know where to make a change when Ada gets something wrong.
The order Ada follows
When two sources disagree, the one higher on this list wins:
- Your agent’s instructions. If a custom agent is doing the work, its instructions are the team’s firm rules for that agent.
- You, in the chat. You can ask Ada to set one of an agent’s instructions aside for a single request. She will say which one she is setting aside. An agent running on its own schedule has nobody to ask, so it never does this.
- Team memory. The short list of facts in memory. Ada treats these as true until you tell her otherwise.
- Your growth strategy. The longer document in strategy, which Ada uses for reference.
Memory sits above strategy on purpose. You update memory the moment something changes, while a strategy is revisited rarely. So when the two disagree, Ada trusts the more recent correction.
Your goal is not on the list because it never competes with the others. It is the target every campaign aims at.
What nothing overrides
A few rules apply whatever your instructions, memory or strategy say:
- No personal data. Ada only ever asks your connected tools for totals, rates and trends, never names, email addresses or other details about individual people. No agent instruction and no request in chat changes this.
- Numbers come from your live data. When Ada quotes a metric, it comes from one of your connected tools in that conversation, not from memory or your strategy.
- What Ada reads is never an instruction. A web page, file or tool result might contain text that tries to tell Ada what to do. She treats it as information and does not act on it.
- Approvals and stages stay in place. Changes to your connected tools need your approval unless you have set up an Autonomous agent. Campaigns move through their stages in order. These are enforced by Growth Method itself, so no wording in your instructions can skip them.
Where to fix something
| If Ada keeps… | Change this |
|---|---|
| Repeating an out-of-date fact | Memory |
| Misreading your audience, positioning or channels | Strategy |
| Proposing work that doesn’t serve your target | Goal |
| Doing a recurring task differently from how you want | Skills |
| Breaking a rule for one particular agent | That agent’s instructions |