How a Devil’s Advocate can change your business

A friend of mine is an ideas machine. He’s really quite incredible. Not only does he have lots of ideas, but he gets going on them too. As you’d expect he runs a pretty successful business, but that’s not always been the case. Until a few years ago Jack was famous for not much more than running out of cash.

About three years ago Jack’s business was at crisis point. He had a large portfolio of work-in-progress projects – good ideas that were being worked up – but few products actually generated revenue.

Jack kept having new ideas and getting started on them but each new project took resources away from existing projects, thereby delaying their launch date. He was running out of cash.

Jack understood that his problem was that he had too many ideas, but he found it hard to decide which ideas to pursue and which to shelve – he was passionate about them all!

The turning point for Jack was hiring Bob to his advisory board to play “Devil’s Advocate”.

The term Devil’s Advocate originates from the process the Catholic Church instituted to evaluate would-be saints. The Devil’s Advocate was a lawyer hired to argue against the canonisation of a candidate.

The lawyer wasn’t necessarily personally against the canonisation of the would-be saint but it was his job to be, so he took on the mantle of challenging miracles and uncovering character flaws.

When Jack asked Bob to take on the role of Devil’s Advocate he was looking for help to filter and discriminate between his ideas. It didn’t matter to Jack whether Bob personally liked his ideas or not, he wanted Bob to scrutinise and challenge them.

Because Bob felt empowered to really push back on every idea it made for some very interesting meetings but the result was great. The business green-lighted far fewer ideas and by spreading the resources over a smaller project portfolio it wasn’t long before the new ideas were generating revenue.

If you think you need a Devil’s Advocate you don’t need to hire someone especially into this role. The system works brilliantly when the management team take it in turns to play this part. Just remember that being the Devil’s Advocate is about taking on a scrutinising role and not about the individual’s personal opinion.

If you want a further anecdote about the success or otherwise of the Devil’s Advocate system the story of the Catholic Church is interesting. The Devil’s Advocate process worked pretty well for 400 years and the number of appointments to sainthood was kept tight.

Then in 1983 Pope John Paul II abolished the Devil’s Advocate system. Under his tenure there were 500 canonisations compared to 98 in the entire preceding 80 years! Makes you think doesn’t it?

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).