For three of the teams, one member was secretly pulled aside
and told to disagree with the other team members and to chal-
lenge their conclusions at every turn. Neither the judges nor
any of the other team members knew this had happened.
For each of the many problems presented, the judges always se-
lected one of the teams with the secret devil’s advocate as hav-
ing the superior solution. Remember, the judges had no idea the
secret devil’s advocate existed. They were simply choosing the
team which, in their opinion, had the best solution.
For round two, each team got to eject their least valuable
member – and yes, you guessed it, on the three teams with the
secret devil’s advocate, they each expelled the devil’s advocate.
Without realizing it, each team had just ejected their comple-
tive advantage!
True, conflict isn’t fun. But it’s generally held that for any group
pursuing a goal, if someone doesn’t need to apologize to others
in the group every so often, then the group is underachieving.
Ruffling some feathers can be a key to excellence!
So let’s learn to appreciate the devil’s advocate view in any dis-
cussion, and allow for a contrary view, because that contrary
view could be just what’s needed to drive our thinking outside
the box and lead to a superior solution.
No, trying to deliberately be disagreeable and contrary should
not be business as usual, but if everyone’s always in agreement,
the alarm bells should go off because that isn’t healthy either.
We could be missing something that might lead to an even bet-
ter solution if someone would just challenge our thinking.
So learn to see a contrary devil’s advocate discussion as a-ok
and even healthy when talking about how we better pursue our
great hobby of model railroading!
