Having a Devil’s Advocate is an invaluable asset to your business.  It is a process where a person advocates an opposing or unpopular cause for the sake of argument or to expose Red Flags to a thorough examination.  The Devil’s Advocate is by no means the devil. The devil is the negative person that quashes fledging ideas and offers no valuable ideas or advice. The Devil’s Advocate role is a means of challenging business owners and employees to look at the issues or concepts from a different perspective and sharpen their thinking and test their assumptions.  The Devil’s Advocate can be used to test the quality of a strategy, plan or proposal and identify the problems and weakness in its structure allowing solutions to be derived to overcome the issues and challenges that are brought up.  If the Devil’s Advocate is more of an advocate than the devil, then this persona can push your concept or issue to a new level or prepare you for the naysayer’s in the market.

Traditionally business owners and employees enjoy hearing praise and words of encouragement, but in the final analysis a lot more is learned when a Devil’s Advocate has questioned motives and poked holes overlooked in a seemingly foolproof plan.  The contrarian view in a discussion of the merits of an idea should not immediately be seen as being negative; rather it should be acknowledged as another perspective that a complete unfolding of the idea must address