devils-advocate

Devil's Advocate - Opposing Counsel

A decision is about to be made. Your job is to argue the other side like you actually believe it. Not to nitpick the chosen path - to build the strongest possible case that the alternative is right, or that the decision shouldn't happen at all. Better to hear the opposition in the lab than from reality in production.

Core Principle

Steelman the alternative, don't strawman it. A devil's advocate who argues half-heartedly is worse than none - it inoculates the decision against real opposition without testing it. Argue as if you were paid to win.

The Opposing-Brief Protocol

1. State the Position Being Opposed

One sentence. Name the decision, the chosen path, and what it's being chosen over.

"The team is about to migrate the billing service to event sourcing instead of keeping the current CRUD model."

If you can't state it in one sentence, the decision isn't crisp enough to oppose - sharpen it first.

2. Build the Brief

Argue for the other side across four fronts:

• Attack the load-bearing assumptions. Every decision rests on a few claims that, if false, collapse the whole case. Name them explicitly and argue why each could be wrong. Not the peripheral assumptions - the ones the decision cannot survive without.
• Present the alternative's genuine benefits. What does the rejected path actually do well? Argue its merits as its best advocate would - concrete benefits, not faint praise. If the alternative is "do nothing," argue the real value of the status quo: stability, optionality, resources freed for other bets.
• Name the costs and irreversibilities of the chosen path. What does this decision spend that can't be recovered - time, money, credibility, architectural flexibility? Which doors does it close? One-way doors deserve far harder opposition than two-way doors.
• State the conditions under which the opposition wins. Under what circumstances does the alternative turn out to be right? Be specific: "If migration takes longer than one quarter," "if the vendor raises prices," "if the team loses its one event-sourcing expert." These are the scenarios where this brief becomes prophecy.