You have made up your mind. You know which direction the company should go. You "just need to validate" with a few calls.

Three calls later, you have spoken to three people who agreed with you. You feel vindicated. You move forward. Six months later, the plan fails — and in the post-mortem you realize: the three people you spoke to were all friends, all predisposed to agree, all answering leading questions you did not realize you were asking.

This is the Confirmation Trap. The tell is that you went looking for validation, not information. The questions you asked were open in form ("what do you think about X?") but closed in spirit (you only called people likely to agree).

The exit is to make the validation step adversarial. Before each call, write down the specific prediction you want to be wrong. If you cannot come up with a prediction you would like to be wrong about, you are not doing research — you are doing confirmation.

Then, when you make the call, ask the question that would falsify your belief. If you are right, the answer will surprise you. If you are wrong, you saved yourself six months.

The deeper move is to talk to the people who chose the other path. Not the people who failed and validated your choice. The people who succeeded at the alternative. Their reasons are the most useful information you will get.

Lumina's pattern detection catches this. When you write a decision into the analyzer and the same word keeps coming up in your justification, that is the trap. The system is built to surface it.