Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM OCTOBER 2026 30 I n 1587, the Vatican formalized one of history's more unusual assignments: arguing against saints. Before a candidate could be canonized, an official called the Promotor Fidei assembled the case against them, questioning miracles and challenging witnesses. History remembers the role by its livelier name: the Devil's Advocate. The instinct was sound. When everyone in the room wants the same answer, no one will keep looking for a better one. UC Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth tested whether the Vatican's fix actually works, comparing authentic dissent against three separate versions of assigned devil's advocacy. Every assigned version lost. The authentic dissenter generated more original solutions, prompted deeper consideration of the opposing view, and produced meaningful attitude change. None of the role-players came close. Our instincts can tell the difference between a person who means it and a person handed a role to play. One changes how people think; the other mostly makes them defend what they already believed, more elaborately. That doesn't retire three tools built for this exact problem. A red team attacks your plan the way a competitor would, hunting for every seam. A pre-mortem asks the team to imagine the project has already failed and reconstruct exactly how. In my "Put Us Out of Business" workshops, a leadership team spends an afternoon becoming its own most dangerous competitor. What Nemeth's finding tells you is what these tools are actually good for, and it isn't what most leaders assume. A leadership team was two hours into a pre-mortem when I asked each person to become the competitor for twenty minutes, full license to want the company gone. An operations lead who'd sat mostly silent said, in character: "I'd go straight at their marketing under-spend. Everyone in the building knows we don't invest enough, and nobody's fixed it." The room went still. Someone finally muttered, "Hear, hear." Then the real meeting started. That sentence had been orbiting the team all year. She added, "our marketing is dangerously under-invested in." At the follow-up meeting, the finance director asked why she hadn't raised it sooner. As the competitor, the sentence cost nothing. The insight was dangerous; the exposure to her wasn't. That's what a pre-mortem, or a red team, actually rents out: temporary cover for candor. Research shows imagining an outcome as already real, rather than merely possible, makes people substantially better at naming its true causes, nearly a 30 percent improvement over asking what might go wrong. Nobody disagrees with anybody. Everybody enters one fiction together and reports back what they found. The catch: the cover only holds while the exercise runs. A team can spend an afternoon attacking its own plan in character, then walk back into the office defending it exactly as before, the marketing comment filed under "good exercise" rather than "known problem." A better process starts earlier. Ask people to write their concerns independently before the loudest voices sway the room, and let the most senior people speak last. Run the red team, the pre-mortem, the role-play, whatever gets the concerns onto paper. Then ask the question that turns exercise into real conversation: Which of these do you personally believe? Which are we least willing to admit? What's at stake if we don't solve them? Someone may name the marketing issue. The deadline nobody thinks is realistic. The complaint recast as a marketing problem. The founder's favorite initiative everyone has learned to walk on egg- shells around. What the leader does next teaches the room what happens to a real concern. Defend the plan on the spot, and people learn to bring only the safe version next time. Or ask honest questions, sit with the discomfort, and make the changes the evidence calls for. Disagreement becomes something the organization uses to its benefit. A useful opponent is more than an assigned role. It's someone who cares enough about the outcome to risk the room's approval, and a leader steady enough to hear that without mistaking it for disloyalty. Run the exercises. Borrow the competitor's eyes. Imagine the failure before it happens. Then find out whether anyone in the room will say the same sentence again, unmasked, in their own voice. A USEFUL OPPONENT Steven Morris On Brand Steven Morris is a brand, culture and leadership advisor, author, and speaker. Over his 25+ years in business he's worked with 3,000+ business leaders at 250+ global and regional companies. Discover: https://matterco.co RO

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