Devil’s Advocate
The book Billion Dollar Lessons is making the business press rounds this month. I don’t have a copy, but that has never stopped me from writing about a book. Especially when a review in Canadian Business does a nice job of summarizing things.
It’s this often-demonstrated absence of sober second thought in the boardroom that has Carroll and Mui proposing a formula to build disagreement into the corporate strategic process — what they call the devil’s advocate review.
According to the review, this devil’s advocacy process is the key to the success of business. Just having someone there challenging ideas is not enough though. It has be ingrained in to the culture of the organization.
Carroll and Mui don’t propose such a review as an alternative method for setting strategy, nor do they suggest that it should override a business’s top executives. But they want executives, senior managers, and board members to “expect, accept, and even demand frank discussion and robust analysis whenever ‘bet the company’ moves are on the table.”
In other words, even though the ego likes it, don’t surround yourself with ‘yes men’.
And in the testing community I belong to we also ‘expect, accept and even demand’ our ideas to be challenged and discussed. It’s how CAST operates, and is in fact embodied in the guiding principles of the AST. I think in both cases it makes for better ideas as a result, though I agree that sometimes the ‘frank discussion’ seems more unfriendly and personal at times.
Is your test group the devil’s advocate? And does test leadership, and those up the chain from them also take up that mantle as well? A muted devil’s advocate isn’t a very effective one.
Oh, and a bit of cool linguistic history. The term devil’s advocate comes from the Catholic Church’s promotor fidel whose job is to question sainthood appointments.
And if you are interested in the strategies that companies pursue at their peril without serious devil’s advocacy, this presentation lists.