How do I get a second opinion on a business decision?

An earlier post looked at the idea of a sanity check for a decision. In everyday conversation, "sanity check" and "second opinion" often get used to mean much the same thing, and that's fine - the label matters less than what you actually do. But it's worth pulling them apart, because they do two different jobs.

A sanity check asks: before I do this, have I missed something?
A second opinion asks: would someone else see this differently?

The first is mostly about what might be missing inside the decision you're about to make. The second is about getting outside your own view of it altogether. Not handing the decision to someone else to make - asking them to look at how you're seeing it, and whether a different angle would change where you land.

⚡ A second opinion should help you see the decision differently.

And "differently" means more than a different answer. A useful second opinion might show you that you framed the problem too narrowly, or treated one option as safer than it really is. It might show that you assumed the goal was fixed when it wasn't. That you've made the decision about cost when it's really about capacity, about hiring when it's really about process, or about growth when it's really about margins or the pressure the business is under.

Take a common one. A founder asks, "should I hire someone to take pressure off the team?"

A weak second opinion just picks a side: "yes, hire" or "no, stay lean." A useful one asks a different question back: "what kind of pressure are you actually trying to remove?" Because the real issue might have nothing to do with headcount. It could be unclear ownership, too many low-value clients, a workflow that keeps breaking, poor prioritisation, or work that shouldn't exist at all. Hiring into any of those just adds a person to a problem that was never about people.

The value isn't that someone hands you a better yes or no. It's that they change what you're looking at.

⚡ The value of a second opinion is the angle you couldn't see from inside your own reasoning, not whether someone agrees (or not) with your decision.

That also changes how you ask for one. "What would you do?" is the weakest version of the question, because it pulls the other person straight to a verdict and skips the part that actually helps. The more useful prompts point them at your thinking instead: How would you look at this? What would you question first? What looks over-weighted? What looks under-examined? What would make you see this differently?

A second opinion shouldn't just confirm what you already think, and it shouldn't be a quiet way to hand off the judgment to someone else. Done well, it gives you a clearer view of the decision before you act on it.

By the way, our Decision Diagnostic is called Second Look for exactly this reason - its goal is to look at the decision in a systematic way, as machines do, and tell you if there are things to look at differently or something missing. A second opinion, that is.

🚀 What to do next

If this feels familiar, start here:

👉 Run the Second Look Decision Diagnostic to check your decision
👉Read about checking business decisions

👉 📖 Read more on Second Look blog