Playing devil’s advocate is critical to success
/
Why should we do fire drills and pre-mortems? Because failure is an essential part of success. And no failure is cheaper or safer than the one that happens on a whiteboard or in your head.
I recently completed an Entrepreneurship course as part of my Masters. Each student created a business idea and did some presentations. My favorite was the pre-mortem. Here we assumed that despite lots of hard work, our startup had failed. We had to imagine all the things that went wrong and caused us to fail.
The exercise reminded me how much we struggle to play Devils Advocate. I also learnt that a Devils Advocate is a real job. It was established in 1587 by none other than the Catholic Church!
It was one who argued against the sainthood of a candidate to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization.
Interestingly, Pope John Paul II greatly reduced the power and changed the role of the office in 1983. The obvious result? During his reign the number of canonizations per year increased from less than ONE to EIGHTEEN.
Back to my failed imaginary business. The pre-mortem forced me to not just explain what went wrong, but also what I would do differently next time. This reveals the true power of playing “advocatus diaboli”.
Why should we do fire drills and pre-mortems? Because failure is an essential part of success. And no failure is cheaper or safer than the one that happens on a whiteboard or in your head.
The exercise reminded me how much we struggle to play Devils Advocate. I also learnt that a Devils Advocate is a real job. It was established in 1587 by none other than the Catholic Church!
It was one who argued against the sainthood of a candidate to uncover any character flaws or misrepresentation of the evidence favoring canonization.
Interestingly, Pope John Paul II greatly reduced the power and changed the role of the office in 1983. The obvious result? During his reign the number of canonizations per year increased from less than ONE to EIGHTEEN.
Back to my failed imaginary business. The pre-mortem forced me to not just explain what went wrong, but also what I would do differently next time. This reveals the true power of playing “advocatus diaboli”.
Why should we do fire drills and pre-mortems? Because failure is an essential part of success. And no failure is cheaper or safer than the one that happens on a whiteboard or in your head.