One person in every review, rotating, whose job that session is to speak for whoever bears the consequence and is not present. Almost every decision that goes badly for somebody was made in a room they were not in.
The answer, in one line
A rotating role in every review, held by one person whose job that session is to speak for whoever is affected by the decision and not in the room.
Definition#
The absent user: a rotating role in every design or decision review, held by one person whose task that session is to argue from the position of whoever is affected and not there.
The problem it addresses#
Decisions are made by the people with standing to be in the room, and the consequences fall on people who have none. That is not usually malice. It is a property of how meetings are convened, and it holds even where everybody present is conscientious, because a conscientious person can only argue from what they can see.
Automated systems make it sharper. A rule set once is applied to millions of cases whose particulars nobody will ever see, and the person who wrote the rule may never encounter a single instance of it going wrong. That is the second question of the Principle Test, what compounds if this happens a thousand times, and the absent user is the standing version of asking it.
How the role works#
- One person, named at the start of the session. Not a shared responsibility, which is the same as none.
- Rotating. A permanent holder becomes a specialism, and a specialism becomes an obstacle to be routed around. Rotation also spreads the experience of having to argue from somebody else's position, which changes how people decide in the sessions where the role is not theirs.
- Briefed on who, specifically. The role fails when it becomes an abstraction. Not users, but the applicant whose file will not reach a human, or the customer contacted three weeks after a bereavement.
- Listened to. The failure mode is a junior holding the role in a room that has already decided, which produces the appearance of challenge and none of the substance.
Where it connects#
It is the live version of the fourth receipt. Heart records who bore the consequence after the fact, including those who never enter the system as data. The absent user puts somebody in the room to say it beforehand, while the decision can still change. Between them they cover the same question at both ends of the decision.
It also sits alongside the premortem as a device for licensing dissent, and the mechanism is the same: the objection becomes compliance with an exercise rather than an act of opposition, which is what makes it sayable.
What this has not been shown to do#
No trial exists. Nothing here shows that reviews with an absent user reach different decisions, and the role has an obvious performance failure available in a person who plays it formally and concedes at the first objection. It is a structural change with reasoning behind it and no measurement.
Source#
Rahim Hirji, SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI, Kogan Page, 2026, chapter six, in the core of the Integrity Loop.
Related SuperSkills research#
Essay · SS-2026-350
Hirji, R. (2026). The absent user. The SuperSkills evidence base, SS-2026-350. https://thesuperskills.com/research/the-absent-user. Last reviewed 26 September 2026.
An evidence review by Rahim Hirji, not peer-reviewed research. For a material claim, cite the underlying study as well; every study here carries its own permanent link.
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