Put a Critic at the Table

3-min read

Here’s a new concept that can help make 2026 your breakout year. It’s about the power of having a critic at your planning table — by which I mean, deliberately designating someone on your team to be the critic, so that you don’t waste time and energy on ideas that don’t have commercial viability. It’s inspired by an article a friend sent me from the Stanford Medical Journal about a ground-breaking way they’re using AI, but it applies to human teams, too, and maybe even more so.

Stanford Medicine has been experimenting with “virtual labs,” where teams of AI agents working together replicate the processes their real research teams use. Here’s how it works: a human scientist gives an AI principal investigator (PI) a complex problem to solve. The AI PI figures out what kinds of experts it needs and “recruits” other AI agents — maybe one that knows immunology, another that handles computational biology, and a machine learning pro — to form a team. Then the virtual crew gets to work just like a real lab group, holding meetings to brainstorm and even having one-on-one check-ins with the AI PI. And of course, these AI teams can do in minutes what would take people hours or days — no bathroom breaks, no long debates!

But here’s the part that’s really stuck with me: no matter what the topic, no matter what the problem, the team always includes one agent who is assigned the role of the critic. That agent’s job is to poke holes, provide constructive criticism, and warn against possible pitfalls.

If you think about medical and scientific research, it takes so much time and money — billions of dollars of investment — to come up with a new vaccine or drug. If they waste time chasing a bad idea, it’s so expensive. They’ve got to catch bad ideas right out of the gate.

And so do we — in any business — and I feel like as business people, this isn’t an operating assumption that we surface as clearly as we should. It’s constructive, success-driving, and time-saving to challenge and poke holes in our collective thinking. It should be de rigueur as business people — on our teams and in our meetings — to always put a critic at the table. It’s one of those easy little levers that can very positively transform the effectiveness of team culture.

Deliberately putting a critic at the table depersonalizes criticism and makes the conversation about problem solving. It helps you root out bad ideas from the start so that you aren’t wasting time on them. And once those bad ideas are out of the way, you and your team can focus on iterating an idea until it’s really good and has a solid chance of success.

So, at your next meeting — point to someone at the table. “You’re the critic. Your job is to poke holes.”

And building on that, in the midst of 2026 planning, think about what can you do over the next handful of weeks, before the holidays, to small scale test. If you’ve come up with two directions your business could go in next year to make big revenue bets, figure out what you can do now to small scale test those ideas and get some data back on them. That way, you’ll have a better chance of picking the right one to focus on.

So as you plan for 2026, pressure test your ideas. Lock down your approach, but be flexible. And just like Stanford Medicine — put a critic at the table.

And as always, good luck!

Emily