Decision council

The problem this solves

Ask an agent "why is this a good idea?" and you get a well-argued case for yes. Ask "why is this a bad idea?" and you get an equally well-argued case for no. Both are fluent, neither is a judgment. A single agent is a bad advisor because it optimizes for a coherent answer rather than a correct one.

This runs several independent perspectives, has them reviewed by agents who don't know who wrote what, and produces one verdict.

When to run it

Real forks with real cost: build vs. buy, ship vs. hold, pricing changes, whether a feature is premature, what to work on next. Not for questions with a known answer.

Steps

1. State the decision precisely

Write it as one sentence with a real fork in it. If it can't be stated that way, the decision isn't clear enough to review yet — fix that first.

Gather what's actually known: constraints, what's already been tried, what's reversible and what isn't.

2. Spawn the council — in parallel, independent

Five agents, each with a genuinely different lens. They must not see each other's answers.

Each returns: a recommendation, the reasoning, and the one fact that would change its mind.

Swap a persona when the decision calls for it — a regulatory lens for a compliance fork, a security lens for an architecture one. Keep the lenses genuinely distinct.

3. Peer review, blind

Strip attribution and shuffle. Hand the anonymized set to fresh reviewers. Ask each: which argument is strongest, which is weakest, and what did all of them miss?

Blinding matters — it stops the review from deferring to whichever persona sounds most authoritative.

4. The chairman

One final agent reads the perspectives and the reviews and returns:

## Decision: <the question>

**Verdict:** <the call, in one sentence>

**Confidence:** <high | medium | low> — <why>

**The reasoning that carried it:** <2-3 sentences>

**The strongest case against:** <state it fairly — do not strawman it>

**What would change this:** <the specific fact or event that flips the answer>

**If we proceed:** <first concrete step>

5. Report honestly

If the council split, say it split. A forced consensus is worse than a live disagreement — most people would rather see the real tension and make the call themselves.

Never manufacture agreement to look decisive.

Scaling it

Five personas is the default. Three for a smaller call, seven for something expensive or hard to reverse. More personas only helps if the lenses are genuinely different — five distinct angles beat nine overlapping ones.

Credit

The multi-persona-plus-blind-review-plus-chairman pattern comes from Ollie Leman, by way of Remy Gaskell's Open Residency episode on agent operating systems.