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Your Company Needs A Chief Dissent Officer

75 点作者 ohmmmy超过 12 年前

17 条评论

danso超过 12 年前
When I first saw the OP title, I immediately thought Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" in which he describes the "pre-mortem" process, in which doubt and dissent are <i>rewarded</i>, rather than seen as joy-kills: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-1-daniel-kahneman.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/bias-blindness-and-...</a><p>&#62;&#62; <i>Klein’s proposal, which he calls the “premortem,” is simple: When the organization has almost come to an important decision but hasn’t committed itself, it should gather a group of people knowledgeable about the decision to listen to a brief speech: “Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists. The outcome has been a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.”</i> <i>As a team converges on a decision, public doubts about the wisdom of the planned move are gradually suppressed and eventually come to be treated as evidence of flawed loyalty. The suppression of doubt contributes to overconfidence in a group where only supporters of the decision have a voice. The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts.</i> <i>Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats not considered earlier. The premortem isn’t a panacea and doesn’t provide complete protection against nasty surprises, but it goes some way toward reducing the damage of plans that are subject to the biases of uncritical optimism.</i>
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Eliezer超过 12 年前
The Center for Applied Rationality's in-practice corporate culture, by virtue of literally every person in the building being an explicit rationalist, has an even more powerful and valuable property - people know they won't be punished for changing their minds or admitting they were wrong. Plus you can say "Value of information!" to justify trying-at-least-once something that most people think won't work, since nobody's going to stick to it due to the sunk cost fallacy afterward.<p>Despite everything I knew in theory about the virtue of being able to change one's mind, including having written a major blog post Sequence about it, my ability to do so in practice took a substantial leap after the Center for Applied Rationality came together, I spent a lot of time coworking with some of the people, and my monkey brain got to see that other people actually <i>were</i> implementing that thing I'd written about where people were allowed to change their minds, and they <i>were</i> getting high-fives and <i>not</i> being punished for it.
briandoll超过 12 年前
The fatal flaw both in a "chief culture officer" and a "chief dissent officer" is the assumption that this is one person's job, who sits on high, vs. being _everyone's_ job.<p>A job title with "culture" in it doth not a culture make.
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hermannj314超过 12 年前
What is the estimated probability that we have good vs bad ideas? What is the probability that we think ideas are good vs think they are bad? How often do we misclassify a good idea as bad or a bad idea good? What is the benefit vs. cost of misclassifications(false positive, false negative) and the value of true positives/true negatives? How much does the chief dissent officer want to get paid? What would those probabilities look like with a CDO in place?<p>I'm glad FastCompany has done the calculations and knows definitely, that regardless of any of the answers to any of those questions, your industry, size, or strategic plans - your company needs a chief dissent officer.
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projectileboy超过 12 年前
Interesting and possibly very dangerous idea. The devil's in the details - namely, <i>who</i> is the CDO, and <i>what</i> do they have the power to do? Steve Jobs as the CDO could make a powerful company; Carly Fiorina as CDO will drive you off a cliff.
Alex3917超过 12 年前
I've thought about offering devil's advocate consulting services for a while. Not sure how popular this sort of thing would actually be though, because in general people don't like being told they're wrong even if it benefits them.
mef超过 12 年前
While this role is most definitely necessary, I've found it's no fun to be that person, even when others value the dissent.<p>I've voluntarily taken on this role in the past when I've joined a company or project where nobody else was shooting down bad ideas or playing devil's advocate. After a while it feels like you're always on defense while others are bringing ideas to the table.<p>But of course those are minor issues when the alternative is every crazy idea making it past the filter, and someone's got to do it.
dredmorbius超过 12 年前
Everything old is new again: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate#Origin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate#Origin</a>
nico超过 12 年前
Since you cannot predict the future, supporting or contradicting ideas/projects blindly is very dangerous.<p>In spite of the above, I think there's value to someone who opposes new ideas/projects, but only in a very directed and specific way: to stay focused.<p>I've seen many startups get really distracted with side projects and non important stuff, this is incredibly dangerous to the company, so having some sort of system to minimize distractions could be something very valuable.
ahallerberg超过 12 年前
Trying to think of specific examples of this - I guess Steve Jobs is the obvious/most prominent choice here (although he was already CEO). Any others?
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stretchwithme超过 12 年前
Out in the larger world, when we come across a bad idea, we avoid getting involved.<p>Give people choice about what they work on. And who they work with. Bad ideas will have a more difficult time.<p>Yes, some people will pick fashionable projects and people to work with. And they will learn from these experiences.<p>And you can gradually increase choice as people gain knowledge. Let people fail small and you get smarter people making better choices later.
munyukim超过 12 年前
The idea of killing bad ideas might save a company from wasted resources and effort, but one would need to exercise caution or end up discouraging innovation. One would need to communicate effectively and subtly about the reasons why an idea is not good enough.
jff超过 12 年前
CDO: The guy getting all the worst performance reviews, because when he successfully turns the company away from a bad decision there's no real proof of it. Yeah, maybe he just saved $20 million from being dumped in a rathole, but we'll never know.
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rexreed超过 12 年前
In a functional company / organization, isn't this supposed to be the role of a constructive/ functional board of directors or board of advisors, assuming that they meet with regularity or are involved in more of the decision-vetting process?
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ispep超过 12 年前
Isn't all management's job to not allow bad ideas out the door?<p>How would this person's role differ from all other managements (maybe outside marketing)?
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robot超过 12 年前
its the job of the founders and management
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dsr_超过 12 年前
Congress could use this.
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