The Empty-Chair Veto

Give the absent person who absorbs consequences a seat, voice their strongest objection, and decide if it's a veto, floor, or question.

You've found your calling: a nonprofit for first-generation college students. The mission fills your calendar with evening events and weekend planning sessions. The person absorbing the cost is your nine-year-old, who is not in the room when you say yes to things and whose objection gets averaged away as "the family understands." The people most affected by a decision are often the easiest to leave out of it.

The Empty-Chair Veto puts them back in. The cue: someone who absorbs the consequences is absent, low-power, in the future, or easy to average away. The move: put an empty chair in the decision, state the strongest legitimate objection from that seat ("you promised bedtime three nights a week, and helping strangers is being funded by breaking that"), then decide what the objection is: a veto that blocks the plan, a floor the plan must preserve, or a question requiring a direct conversation with the actual person. What changes: hidden costs to voiceless stakeholders become explicit constraints. The safeguard the spec is firm about: the chair is a prompt for contact, not permission to impersonate someone's view and call it consultation.