How do you play dreamer, realist and critic, without losing yourself?

The value of playing a role

The opening question in the video was a different one: is an optimistic, a pessimistic or a realistic view the best? My first answer was realistic, and it is wrong. Almost no attribute is right in every situation. Back then three words sat as wallpaper on my screen: hard working, kind and self aware. If I were always hard working, I would have no time for the people I love. If I were always kind, I would stay with anyone who drags me down. The skill sits one level higher: switching roles, depending on what the situation asks for.

you can use your mind and your emotions as a tool to tap into different roles to solve that problem

Play is the serious part here, not the loose one. Someone playing chess or playing pirates steps into a set of rules and goes all the way inside it. The more seriously you take the game, the more it gives you. That is the split between player and figure from Are you the player or the character? The figure may dream, calculate or tear things apart. The player stays the same.

The sequence in three rounds

Disney had three rooms, you need three chairs. Changing place is the trick, not decoration. As long as you stay seated the roles blend, and the critic talks over the dreamer before the first sentence is finished.

this is the place of the dreamer this is where I dream this is where I don’t bind myself into one box

To send an idea of your own through the three rounds right away, start here.

• Round one, the dreamer. Take the first seat and let everything stand. What would be possible if nothing were in the way? What does the largest version of this idea look like? No objection, no number, no but.
• Round two, the realist. Change seats and turn round one into a plan. How might we realistically do this? Who does what by when? What does it cost, and how do we measure in eight weeks whether it holds?
• Round three, the critic. Change seats again and tear the plan from round two apart. Where does it break first? Who will be against it, and with what right? The critic attacks the plan, not the dream and not the person.
• Then you decide, from a fourth seat. A decision that has heard all three voices lasts longer than the best single opinion.

When a role leads unnoticed

The real point stands at the end of the video. We switch between these states all the time anyway, only unconsciously. A dreamer with no way back builds castles in the air and wonders about the impact. A critic with no way back talks himself into a dead end and calls it realism. The procedure does not change which roles live in you. It changes who calls them and when they leave.

don’t let yourself run off the rails when you are in a state of being a dreamer

What it turned into in the company

The third round is a fixed institution with us. Once a year the team sits for two to three hours in a red-team and attacks its own assumptions, with the explicit job of hunting for counterevidence. After that a rule applies that separates the critic from the scaremonger: if an objection holds up from first principles, it gets built in. If it is only fear, it is taken seriously and answered precisely. The realist round has a fixed form too, a test chain of ten questions whose most uncomfortable one demands a date. Both stand in When is criticism a gift and when is it just fear?

Three models instead of three chairs

The same line-up suggests itself in the work with AI. My model team today is sorted by difficulty and not by attitude: one thinks, one works, one executes, see How do you build a team of AI models? Two parts of the method are in there already. The same model serves me sometimes as a planner and sometimes as a reviewer over a finished result, which is two rounds on the same thing. And the critic sits permanently in the kontext: a line of its own in my core instructions demands the uncomfortable truth before the agreeable answer, see Do you have to teach an AI to tell uncomfortable truths?

The next step would be to cast the three roles openly: one model as the dreamer with a wide brief, one as the realist with numbers and dates, one as the critic with the job of taking the plan apart, each in its own session so none of them knows the round before. I have not written this down as a fixed procedure yet, so it stands here as a proposal and not as practice. In a ki-department it is a question of line-up, and testing whether it beats the current way is itself round three.

Three chairs, one card

Dreamer, realist and critic as three columns, with their questions and room to write. PDF · A4, 1 pages, , as of 3 September 2026.

Sources and links

This note keeps growing

2026-09-03: Planted from my own video about the Disney method, 2019.