Find the assumption your plan is resting on
My plan looks fine to me, which is the problem.
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A plan you wrote is a plan you already believe
By the time a plan is written down, the arguing has already happened inside your head and you won. Every assumption in it looked reasonable to you at the moment you made it, which is why it is in there.
Handing that to a single critic gives you a list of objections and leaves the hardest task with you: deciding which of them matters. You are the worst available person for that job, because the objections that would cost you the most to accept are the ones you have the strongest reason to dismiss.
The useful question is not which objections exist. It is which of your assumptions two reasonable people would price differently, because that is the one where being wrong is expensive and where you currently have no signal at all.
Three priorities that do not reconcile
The advisers are not interchangeable critics. Each is optimising for something different and each will accept a risk the others will not. One will take an operational risk to protect the cash. One will spend the cash to stop the system falling over. One will do neither if it means losing the route to the customer.
Where all three object to the same thing, that objection has survived three different value functions and you can stop wondering whether it is real. Where two of them argue with each other, they have found the assumption underneath, and that argument is the output.
Each carries a published blind spot, so the others have something true to attack. The room decides who holds the floor and you can cut in at any point, so the assumption gets tested rather than narrated.
The written plan brief
Anyone holding a plan that nobody has argued with, who would rather find the weak assumption now than after committing to it.
- The plan itself, or the part of it you want attacked, in a few paragraphs.
- The decision this plan commits you to, and how reversible it is.
- Three assumptions the plan rests on, named as assumptions.
- What you would have to see to abandon it.
- The constraint you have been treating as fixed.
The useful output is rarely the verdict. It is the assumption two advisers price differently, because that is the one carrying the weight of the plan. Expect them to argue with each other about it rather than with you, and expect the transcript to be the artefact you take away.
Not yet produced
The strip for this use case, cut from a session about this kind of problem. No session of any kind has been recorded, so there is nothing to cut, and a reconstruction of a use case we have never seen anyone attempt would be an invention rather than an illustration.
Before you start
A session is one room, from brief to transcript, and it is the unit everything is priced in. End your first one inside 5 minutes and we refund it in full. If your plan survives it intact, that is a useful thing to have learned in 45 minutes.
Why disagreement between advisers carries more than criticism from one