Have a document read for what is missing from it
A workflow for contracts, proposals and reports: the obligations it creates, and then an adversarial pass over what it is quietly not saying.
The problem
Reading a document for what it says is the easy half. What costs money is what it does not say — the clause that is absent, the assumption nobody wrote down, the number with no definition attached.
The workflow
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1
The obligations, the exposure and the terms that carry consequences.
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2
Then the adversarial pass: which claims rest on nothing, and what a careful reader would ask next.
What you put in
A PDF, a spreadsheet or pasted text. This is the workflow most worth attaching to a Dropbox, so other people can submit a document and get the review back without an account.
What you get back
The last step answers under these headings. They are read from Challenge the Story itself, so this list changes when the template does — it is not a transcript of a run.
- What claims are made and what evidence supports them?
- Are there logical fallacies or biases present?
- What important questions remain unanswered?
- What alternative perspectives should be considered?
Setting it up
- Open the workflow builder and start a new workflow with the two templates above.
- Save it, then open a Dropbox and choose that workflow as what reads submissions.
- On the Dropbox, allow file upload and pick the formats you will actually receive.
- Send the link to whoever is submitting. They need no account and see nothing but their own result.
If it does not work
A scanned PDF comes back empty.
A scan is an image. There is no text to extract, so there is nothing to read — and inventing a reading from a filename would be worse than the empty answer.
It reviews the document rather than the deal.
That is the scope. It reads what was submitted; the commercial context lives in your profile, and filling that in moves the reading closer to your situation.