Research shows power degrades empathy, making leaders less objective. A practical system to counteract this is to formally assign a team member the role of 'devil's advocate' for major decisions. This institutionalizes dissent as a process, removing the personal and career risk of challenging authority.
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Leaders are often trapped "inside the box" of their own assumptions when making critical decisions. By providing AI with context and assigning it an expert role (e.g., "world-class chief product officer"), you can prompt it to ask probing questions that reveal your biases and lead to more objective, defensible outcomes.
To improve decision-making, BlackRock's investment committee, guided by a behavioral scientist, uses autonomous voting to prevent peer pressure. It also mandates a non-voting "challenger" to play devil's advocate and champion a pre-mortem perspective, ensuring dissent is valued.
Since power naturally diminishes empathy, leaders must create formal systems to stay grounded. These include mandatory perspective checks with trusted truth-tellers and structural check-ins with those most affected by their decisions to maintain calibration with reality.
Instead of directly opposing a decision, surface the inherent dilemma. Acknowledge the desired goal (e.g., speed), then clearly state the cost ('If we do X, we trade off Y'). Then ask, 'Is that a tradeoff we are comfortable making?' This shifts the conversation from confrontation to collaborative risk assessment.
To counteract the unconscious changes that come with power, leaders should pre-commit to their values. Identify two or three mentors or peers who will tell you the uncomfortable truth and hold you accountable to a written list of personal red lines you create before your values begin to shift.
To avoid influencing their team's feedback, leaders should adopt the practice of being the last person to share their opinion. This creates a psychologically safe environment where ideas are judged on merit, not on alignment with the leader's preconceived notions, often making the best decision obvious.
Citing a story where Martin Luther King Jr. reprimanded an advisor for not challenging him enough, the insight is that top leaders must actively cultivate dissent. They must create an environment where their team feels obligated to point out when an idea is "crazy" to prevent the organization from making catastrophic errors.
To get truthful feedback, leaders should criticize their own ideas first. By openly pointing out a flaw in their plan (the "ugly baby"), they signal that criticism is safe and desired, preventing subordinates from just offering praise out of fear or deference.
Meetings often suffer from groupthink, where consensus is prioritized over critical thinking. AI can be used to disrupt this by introducing alternative perspectives and challenging assumptions. Even if the AI's points are not perfect, they serve the crucial function of breaking the gravitational pull toward premature agreement.
To prevent conflict from becoming personal or chaotic, first, explicitly state the disagreement out loud. Then, assign individuals to argue each side to ensure all perspectives are fully explored. This depersonalizes the debate and focuses it on the problem, not the people involved.
