How it works — 3 of 7

Committees

When an institution has more than one decision-maker, talking to it can convene a selected set of members — a committee. The set is capped by configuration rather than guaranteed to include every person attached to the institution. By default the meeting follows a staged protocol designed to resist groupthink: three stages with deliberate information boundaries between them.

Stage one — isolated positions. Selected members answer in parallel, each with its own persona and research, without seeing what the others are saying. Successful replies come back as structured positions: stance, arguments, recommendation, confidence and rationale; a failed member call can drop out of that meeting rather than becoming a fabricated position.

Stage two — blinded red-team critique. One member, chosen by rotation, is asked to attack the entire set of positions from stage one. The authorship of each position is hidden behind a neutral label ("Advisor A", "Advisor B", …) so the critique engages with the argument, not with who made it.

Stage three — vote and synthesis. The positions are clustered into a small number of options, every member votes, and whoever is speaking for the committee writes up the official outcome. The synthesis prompt requires a dedicated minority position whenever there is dissent, and structured dissent is stored alongside the result. This is a prompt-level requirement today, not a post-generation validator that can guarantee verbatim reproduction. The winning option is whichever got the most successful votes; a tie is broken by summing the confidence members expressed in their choice.

The persisted committee record keeps the final position, clustered options, successful votes, dissent and red-team critique. It does not currently persist every Stage-one reply as a durable first-class field; “full record” should therefore not be read as a universal transcript. There is also a quiet quality check running underneath all three stages: if a member's answer drifts too far from its own persona, that member is asked the same question again once, with the persona reinforced, before its answer counts toward the outcome.

This staged structure is the default. An older, simpler protocol still exists behind a setting — fixed rounds around a shared scratchpad, with one member synthesizing a common answer — but it does not carry the isolation, the red-team stage, or the mandatory minority position.

sequenceDiagram
    accTitle: Three-stage committee protocol
    accDescr: Members first answer independently, a blinded critic challenges the positions, and the committee votes before a speaker records the outcome and any minority position.
    participant M as Committee members
    participant C as Red-team critic
    participant S as Speaker

    Note over M: Stage 1 - Isolated positions
    M->>M: Each member answers alone, without seeing the others
    Note over M,C: Stage 2 - Blinded red-team critique
    M->>C: All positions, author labels hidden
    C->>M: Critique attacking the full set of positions
    Note over M,S: Stage 3 - Vote and synthesis
    M->>S: Vote on the clustered options
    S->>S: Write the official position, with a mandatory minority position section