Before signing the big contract, submit it to the tribunal

When a team prepares a big decision, there is a structural bias that almost no one avoids, whoever proposes it is whoever defends it. And those who review it are usually too close to refute it seriously.

That is why bad big decisions are not detected in the meeting room. They are detected later, when it is already too late.

The bias of the proposer

If you spent three weeks preparing a proposal to sign a contract with a new supplier, you are not the best person to critically review it. You have emotional investment, you have tiredness, you have the internal logic of the proposal so internalized that you can no longer see it from outside. It is human.

The problem is that when the moment comes to review the decision before signing, normally whoever reviews is a colleague or superior with five more proposals waiting. They will not study it like you. They will ask two or three questions and approve.

That is the silent way to make bad decisions.

The Némesis tribunal

Némesis simulates a tribunal with three agents that do not share incentives.

• Defender. Defends the proposed decision. Builds the best possible case in favor.
• Prosecutor. Attacks the decision. Looks for contradictions, uncontemplated risks, weak assumptions, unfavorable comparisons.
• Judge. Listens to both, evaluates the solidity of the arguments, issues a verdict.

The verdict is not "approved" or "rejected". It is a structured analysis of which arguments stood, which risks had not been contemplated, and what information is missing to decide well. The final decision remains yours, but you make it knowing which attacks the proposal resisted and which it did not.

For what decisions

Némesis is not for all decisions. For most it is overkill. It is for decisions where the cost of being wrong is big:

• Signing a contract with a new supplier for significant amount.
• Approving an investment that commits relevant capex.
• Changing technology stack on something critical to operation.
• Launching a product in a new market.
• Firing or hiring in leadership positions.

For those decisions, an hour of tribunal deliberation saves months of problems. It does not replace the human who decides. It gives them context and arguments they could not produce alone.

The proposer should not be the validator. Némesis is the tribunal you do not share lunch with the signer.