I enjoyed this entry immensely and would like permission to use it for a reading comprehension activity for my students. One of their tasks is to have a conversation with a colleague who goes too far in playing the devil’s advocate at meetings.

Pamela

You are right. I guess i got a bit carried awa by bashing the Devil’s advocate too much. I agree it can be useful sometimes. The problem I am trying to point out is – today people assume this persona in a more destructive fashion than a constructive one. Also, I believe Kris Bordessa’s method that i linked to helps the constructive contrarian – that of constructively modifying the idea presented to overcome the problem that the devil’s advoacte in you is able to come up with.

The “and” and “but” thing applies to other areas of management too – such as a manager providing feedback/review to his/her employees. If a +ve feedback, is always followed by a “but”, the employee keeps waiting for the “but” in the conversation, and all +ve feedback is washed under.

w.r.t devil’s advocate – I believe it has its time and place. It can be used as a technique to generate more ideas. Provocation, for example, can be used as a tool to get one out of his/her comfort zone to generate new ideas. For more on this read Edward De Bono’s book/articles on Lateral Thinking.

I understand your point about group thinking variant – a group hijacking an idea and modifying it. However, a constructive contrarian view never hurts, especially if it leads to generation of more ideas or honing of existing one.

Ganesh