File 06 · Converge
Seats, not costumes.
"Act as an expert" returns the field's average: a costume.
Real expertise lives on the fringe closest to reality. Write down how a real expert thinks, then consult it on its own, without the other advisors' answers: a seat.
01 · The costume
"Act as an expert" returns the field's average. It wears the uniform, and there is no one inside it.
02 · The fringe
Real expertise lives on the fringe closest to reality: the expert's questions, thresholds and corrected beliefs.
03 · Write it down
Write down how a real expert thinks: the questions they ask first, their thresholds, the beliefs they had to correct.
04 · A seat
What you wrote down is a seat. It holds the expert's way of judging. The costume only ever held the average.
05 · Consult it alone
Then consult the seat on its own, without the other advisors' answers. Each seat answers from behind its own wall.
Councils
A council is a set of weighted seats.
Each seat holds one real constraint or goal, so the tensions stay live instead of collapsing into one view.
Choosing the seats is the highest-leverage decision.
A seat counts more when more of the other decisions depend on it. Each small dot is a decision resting on that seat.
Replication is the floor
Matching expert work is the minimum.
Going beyond it is the goal.
A seat that only matches the expert has reached the floor, not the goal.
How much to trust each advisor
Learned, not guessed.
How much to trust each advisor is learned from their track record, not guessed upfront.
Scroll to add cases. Before the first one, no weight is set.
What it allows
Advice from the edge of a field, not its middle.
The same move, in reverse
Sit in the receiver's seat.
Write down how the receiver judges, the same way you'd write down an expert. Then you can read any gatekeeper's criteria before you face them.
FILE 08 · TRANSLATE →ANNEX A · LIMITSWHERE IT BREAKS
- Experts tell after-the-fact stories. What an expert says drives their judgment can differ from what actually does. Test a seat on cases it hasn't seen, not just for sounding right.
- Redundant where practice already is the consensus. Then the seat just reproduces the floor. That isn't wrong, only redundant.
- Tacit knowledge resists writing down. Some judgment only exists in the doing.
- Seat against costume is untested. Whether a seat beats plain "act as an expert" has not been cleanly tested yet.
COUNCILS AND TRUST
- The wrong seats. Seats picked by topic instead of by the goal's real ways of failing, or one seat quietly dominating.
- Too little feedback. With too few cases to learn from, guessed weights creep back in.