Personal Board Advice Filter
Use simulated advice to widen your thinking, then select what fits
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 96%
The Personal Board Advice Filter treats advisory output as structured cognitive stimulation rather than an answer key. The decision owner begins by recognizing an information asymmetry: advisers may contribute valuable experience, but the owner knows more about the immediate situation, constraints, and stakes. Each recommendation is therefore assessed for relevance, novelty, and fit. Advice that reveals a neglected angle or promising question earns a deeper investigation; advice that is generic, inapplicable, or based on a weak simulation is set aside. Disagreement is useful because the board exists to disrupt a narrow framing, not to manufacture false certainty. The mechanism produces a better-considered decision by combining external perspectives with the owner's superior situational context and final accountability.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain as the host explains how to interpret a simulated board's uneven recommendations without expecting perfect advice.
Core principles
- 01Advice is an input rather than a command
- 02The decision owner possesses context the advisers lack
- 03Different perspectives matter more than unanimous agreement
- 04Relevance varies with each adviser's lived experience
- 05A useful answer can be valuable without being complete
How to run it
- 1
Recognize the context gap
Acknowledge that the decision owner has more situational context than any board member or AI persona. Treat this context as essential to evaluating each recommendation.
Pro tip Write down constraints and facts that the generated advisers may not have considered.
Watch out Prestige can make a named persona's recommendation feel more informed than it actually is.
- 2
Extract the underlying lens
For each response, identify the question, principle, risk, or opportunity it introduces. Evaluate the lens separately from the persona's specific recommendation.
Pro tip A weak recommendation may still contain a strong diagnostic question.
Watch out Do not reject an entire response merely because one tactical suggestion is unsuitable.
- 3
Select what deserves depth
Choose the few recommendations that are both relevant and capable of changing the decision. Investigate those ideas with follow-up prompts, evidence, or experiments.
Pro tip Prioritize advice that reveals an assumption you had not noticed.
Watch out Trying to implement every recommendation creates contradiction and loss of focus.
- 4
Own the final judgment
Combine the useful perspectives with your direct knowledge of the situation. Decide what to adopt, adapt, test, or discard.
Pro tip Record why you accepted or rejected each material recommendation.
Watch out Do not outsource accountability to the simulated board.
In the wild
The host receives recommendations attributed to several famous business figures. Instead of expecting all of them to be equally useful, he highlights Dyson's testing lens, Zell's overlooked-niche lens, and Winfrey's authenticity lens as relevant to YouTube growth while acknowledging that other responses may be less useful for this particular problem.
→ The board's uneven output becomes a shortlist of productive strategic questions rather than a set of commands.
A founder asks an AI board about reducing customer churn. One simulated adviser produces generic branding advice, while another identifies an onboarding experiment tied to observed cancellation behavior. The founder discards the generic response and tests the evidence-linked recommendation.
→ The founder benefits from the board without assuming that every persona deserves equal weight.
Common mistakes
Expecting perfect advice
The board's purpose is to expand the user's thinking, not to produce universally correct recommendations. Expecting perfection obscures the method's actual value.
Giving every voice equal weight
Some advisers' experience will align much more closely with the current problem. Weight recommendations according to relevance rather than fame or presentation quality.
Following advice without a deep dive
Interesting high-level guidance often needs evidence, clarification, or an experiment before implementation. Use it as the start of analysis, not the end.
Is it for you?
Best for
It is best for people using AI personas, mentors, consultants, or formal boards to broaden their judgment on ambiguous decisions.
Not ideal for
It is not ideal when a decision has a single externally verifiable answer that should be resolved through direct evidence.
From the transcript
“You, as the individual, the CEO, whomever in this situation who has a board of directors, are always going to have more context.”
“I'm going to get this really interesting advice, and then have to decide what I'm going to listen to and what I'm not going to…”
“The purpose of having any board of directors is to get your brain thinking in a different way, get yourself seeing angles to the problem…”
From the episode
How to Think Like Steve Jobs in 10 Minutes [FREE Prompt]