In my version, the introducer of Doom Circles said something like: “You might do this with some people you know well and some people you don’t know well. The people you don’t know well will offer first or second impressions, and this can be useful too. But you are not obligated to accept any of the Dooms. In my experience, the people you know will have a “hit rate” of around 60% and the people you don’t will be around 30%.” It seems important that you should expect some of the Doom to just not feel particularly accurate, or to result from the Doom-Sayer’s own emotional state or weird takes or something. You’re there to gather information about what the particular people in the room would say under these exact conditions, not to discover the absolute truth about what everyone thinks of you.
In my case, the people I didn’t know that well said some things that I attributed to them just not knowing my field and disregarded.. But they also had surprising and overlapping negative aspects of their first impressions that were really helpful, that hadn’t been on my radar,and that I then put effort into fixing. I think I benefited a lot from this.
Sometimes, it will be really obvious to me that someone has a much better path to impact than the path they seem to be on, or they’re equivocating between a few but not choosing the one that’s their clear (to me) comparative advantage, but there is no social circumstance where it would be polite or normal to say this kind of thing to them. This is the kind of problem that Doom Circles are kind of meant to solve. But while you couldin theory frame “you’re not doing the clearly best thing for you” as a Doom, but somehow Doom Circles don’t tend to produce this kind of thing. I would be interested in supplementing (or sometimes replacing) Doom Circles with “Victory Circles,” where everyone goes in a circle and says “This is the path by which I think, if in 30 years [X] has accomplished all their goals, they will have done it.
In the settings where Doom Circles have been available to me, they were very much an opt-in process. To join, one would have to leave the default activity to go do it, and then organizers made efforts (I think successfully) to enable people to frictionlessly leave after hearing the description if they decided not to do it. I don’t think this is a foolproof way to remove all social pressure and agree that it sounds (partly because of the name) somewhat culty, but I think it’s not nearly as bad on these metrics as some of the other commenters say.
Possibly important or useful points:
In my version, the introducer of Doom Circles said something like: “You might do this with some people you know well and some people you don’t know well. The people you don’t know well will offer first or second impressions, and this can be useful too. But you are not obligated to accept any of the Dooms. In my experience, the people you know will have a “hit rate” of around 60% and the people you don’t will be around 30%.” It seems important that you should expect some of the Doom to just not feel particularly accurate, or to result from the Doom-Sayer’s own emotional state or weird takes or something. You’re there to gather information about what the particular people in the room would say under these exact conditions, not to discover the absolute truth about what everyone thinks of you.
In my case, the people I didn’t know that well said some things that I attributed to them just not knowing my field and disregarded.. But they also had surprising and overlapping negative aspects of their first impressions that were really helpful, that hadn’t been on my radar, and that I then put effort into fixing. I think I benefited a lot from this.
Sometimes, it will be really obvious to me that someone has a much better path to impact than the path they seem to be on, or they’re equivocating between a few but not choosing the one that’s their clear (to me) comparative advantage, but there is no social circumstance where it would be polite or normal to say this kind of thing to them. This is the kind of problem that Doom Circles are kind of meant to solve. But while you could in theory frame “you’re not doing the clearly best thing for you” as a Doom, but somehow Doom Circles don’t tend to produce this kind of thing. I would be interested in supplementing (or sometimes replacing) Doom Circles with “Victory Circles,” where everyone goes in a circle and says “This is the path by which I think, if in 30 years [X] has accomplished all their goals, they will have done it.
In the settings where Doom Circles have been available to me, they were very much an opt-in process. To join, one would have to leave the default activity to go do it, and then organizers made efforts (I think successfully) to enable people to frictionlessly leave after hearing the description if they decided not to do it. I don’t think this is a foolproof way to remove all social pressure and agree that it sounds (partly because of the name) somewhat culty, but I think it’s not nearly as bad on these metrics as some of the other commenters say.