Roman generals had a protocol that modern leadership has abandoned. Before every decision, one person was appointed to argue against the plan. Not for them particularly to be “right,” but to stress-test their thinking. They called it “advocatus diaboli.” The advocate had full immunity for disagreeing. No punishment could be levied against them for disagreeing with those in power. It was their JOB to disagree and force the decision maker to come up with the best plan, not just the decision-maker’s first plan. Historians estimate this practice alone prevented more failures than any tactical advantage Rome held on the battlefield.
In 2014, McKinsey quietly adopted a similar version. Before any $100M+ recommendation, a separate team was assigned to destroy the proposal. Internal data showed decisions surviving this process had 380% higher success over 5 years. The method stayed internal.
Disagreement isn’t dysfunction. It’s a cognitive upgrade
But, many modern leaders still make billion-dollar calls without a single structured challenge in the room. Most don’t even know this framework exists.
Neuroscience confirms why.
When a group agrees fast, the prefrontal cortex enters “coherence bias” — your brain literally stops looking for flaws. It shifts into execution mode prematurely. One single dissenting voice reactivates critical evaluation. Stanford measured it: groups with a designated contrarian made 48% fewer errors than groups reaching consensus naturally. Disagreement isn’t dysfunction. It’s a cognitive upgrade most teams never install.
Jeff Bezos understood this before the research. He required teams to write six-page memos arguing against their own proposals before presenting them to management. He said: “If you can’t destroy your idea, someone else will – after you’ve spent the money.” Amazon’s failure rate on major initiatives dropped by half within three years. This method filtered out weak thinking before it ever reached execution stage.
The Romans solved what modern boardrooms still get wrong: agreement feels safe but builds fragile outcomes.
Disagreement feels dangerous but creates antifragile decisions. Every company that rewards consensus and punishes dissent is repeating an error the ancients fixed 2,000 years ago. The data supports it. The framework exists. It isn’t standard because leaders confuse being challenged with being disrespected.
That’s enough thinking for anyone for one day. I hope you have something to ponder, especially in light of daily news and events. I’ll be back again tomorrow and we’ll delve into something else. In the meantime be kind to yourself and take care of your loved ones. :-)
There are things I really don’t understand about the way Capitalism works. Take maintenance for example.
In my own limited experience; that is, just one lifetime, now 77 years long, taking care of small problems before they become big ones has always been the cheapest and most effective approach to longterm wear. A small leak is easier to fix than a big one. When something bends, it’s best to fix it before it breaks and has to be replaced.
But along comes “useful product life” and everything gets turned on its head. Designed obsolescence is great for manufacturers — it assures that you’ll always have a market for your product if your product doesn’t last forever. Keep the factories putting out product, year after year after year. But all those throwaway products have to go somewhere, and in general people would be happier if a product just did what it was supposed to do and that was the last time you had to think about it.
Milwaukee is a city that is currently struggling to maintain city services. Among the most notably deficient city services is the network of streets and roads. When I grew up we always saw small crews with a hot tank of tar and a dump truck full of gravel making their way up and down the city streets filling cracks with tar and small holes with tar poured over enough gravel to fill-in the hole and flatten out the road. Yeah — there was the cost of city workers, but the cost of tar and gravel wasn’t all that great and by taking care of those things early the holes never got to be “vehicle threatening” and the roads lasted a good long while. Yeah — that was before the ascendancy of the automobile in America, and roads were a lot less busy. Perhaps there’s a serious issue with city workers being run over by crazy drivers but I can’t think that it’s easier, cheaper, and better for anyone other than construction company owners to let the roads deteriorate until hitting a pothole is enough to cause major damage to your car AND you have to end up tearing up the entire street, and rebuilding a road from scratch.
American cities are caught in your classic Catch-22. We expanded a lot because we had a lot of land. We never considered — as a nation — that if we put in lots of roads because people all wanted “their own space” — that creating a culture with lots of services would mean having to maintain all those services forever — or at least for a very long time.
We spread out because we had the space and we were an independent bunch of citizens, but never thought about the tax base that it takes to generate enough revenue to provide all the goods and services that sparsely spread population were going to require. Not just roads and water. People spread out means doctors and hospitals need to be scattered through the population. And schools. And groceries. And if people are spread out over miles of land, instead of compactly housed in multi-family properties then we need more and more roads, and more and more parking lots to park those added vechicles and the problem exacerbates itself. It’s a self feeing disaster.
A look at European or Asian communities and you’ll see better infrastructure because the population base is dense enough that the population supports maintenance of that lifestyle. Here in the U.S. with space galore we can’t afford to maintain any of the infrastructure that we require, not only because we grew like a cancer, without boundaries, but also because we have a wealth class that doesn’t contribute their share into the community kitty to fund the necessary maintenance. The U.S. is a sort of cultural cancer that is eating itself from within.
That’s my say for the morning. Take care of yourself. I’ll be back soon to chat some more.
There are really times when talking is best avoided — at least so it seems to me — at THIS stage of my life. I have gradually realized that over the past several years I have been increasingly been less interested in conversation than I had been in the past. ( I know that’s a backwards sort of sentence, “increasingly less interested,” but “decreasingly interested” doesn’t seem to cut the mustard)
I used to wonder about old people who sat on park benches not talking to anyone. I won’t say I thought it weird about not talking; I thought it weird that they were just SITTING there not doing anything. Now I realize that “doing something” has nothing to do with body movement. :-) But, seriously, I find myself just sitting with my mind going a million miles an hour — and I do that quite often. Partly because my body doesn’t seem to want to DO things as much as it used to. The desire is there, but the energy, not so much. Yesterday I had it in mind to take a 2 day driving trip. I had a couple ideas in mind, but after a bad night with not much sleep I woke this morning with minus zero energy and went BACK to bed at 5 a.m. got up after a couple hours of fitful sleep, had breakfast and puttered around for 2 hours and then laid down again for another hour nap. Finally I feel ready for the day and it’s 11 a.m., but too late to leave for any kind of trip I had in mind.
I could blame my lack of interest in conversation on bad sleep, but if I’m honest it’s not about that at all. Even though Peg and I chat a lot about a lot of topics and I find our conversations welcome and worthwhile, when it comes to other people the effort to truly communicate simply doesn’t seem worth the reward.
Let me share this little snippet:
Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
By: Olivia Laing
No doubt it was ridiculous to be so sensitive. But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can’t you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much? It wasn’t hard to see why someone in this position might come to mistrust language, doubting its ability to bridge the gap between bodies, traumatised by the revealed gulf, the potentially lethal abyss that lurks beneath each carefully proffered sentence. Dumbness in this context might be a way of evading hurt, dodging the pain of failed communication by refusing to participate in it at all. That’s how I explained my growing silence, anyway; as an aversion akin to someone wishing to avoid a repeated electric shock.
I am truly glad that there are all sorts of people in this world. Please, never misunderstand when I talk about relationships. I’m glad there are sociable people. I’m glad there are sports fanatics, and music buffs, and gear heads, and dancers and surfers. And, when I am around them I am almost always happy to watch them and hear them. I love the sounds of people having a good time. I may not be quite so happy to have to LISTEN (intently) to what they are talking about, as frequently their conversations have little interest. I’d rather talk about philosophy, or ethics, or the universe, or nature — but I rarely find people in my circle of acquaintances who are interested in those things. But I’m glad that they are in the world doing things that make this life exciting and fulfilling for themselves.
I will admit that I increasingly am aware that a great many conversations have only the vaguest connection to reality. People have ideas — or sometimes “memories” — that depart from the real world. People are willing, eager even, to be misled, and lied to. We humans love to complain, but I quickly tire of complaints and fantasy worlds. I know that a great many people want to escape from the world they live in — otherwise alcohol and drugs wouldn’t be in high demand — but for all my weirdness I happen to like the world we live in and though I cannot fix things I find lacking I would still rather live in the world as it is than in a figment of my imagination.
And so we come to the feature image. I have no idea if this was said by anyone of note, or if it was two lines from some movie or whatever but boy, do I understand the attitude! Somethings are just not worthwhile engaging in.
I don’t know whether if I had more energy I would feel the same. Time was when I loved the ins and outs of a lively debate. That being said, I do find that today people SEEM TO BE more interested in winning a disagreement than in understanding one another, or furthering their understanding of the world. Lively debate about ideas, not about who’s right, doesn’t seem to be in vogue. The lines are already drawn between sides and it’s not about finding common ground, it’s about winning. Winning. The ultimate goal of a society that values sport more than philosophy. Combat more than compassion. You can fill a stadium with enthusiasts who want to see a car crash or a wrestler bashed around or the favorite team beat the visitors, but host a debate about greenhouse gases and I dare say your active audience will be slim or non-existent.
I don’t think I’m depressed and I don’t think I’m being ridiculous. There was a time when the things I remember happened. It’s not all in my head, a figment of imagination. But just because other people aren’t interested doesn’t mean I have to change to accommodate their newer, better, more wholesome way of being.
That’s it for today. Take care of yourself and your loved ones and I’ll be back soon to chat again. :-)
I found this “poem” — not sure if it really fits the definition, but I thought the message was important.
You are awakening to the same country you fell asleep to. The very same country. Pull yourself together. And, when you see me, do not ask me “What do we do now? How do we get through the next four years?” Some of my Ancestors dealt with at least 400 years of this under worse conditions.
Continue to do the good work. Continue to build bridges not walls. Continue to lead with compassion. Continue the demanding work of liberation for all. Continue to dismantle broken systems, large and small. Continue to set the best example for the children. Continue to be a vessel of nourishing joy. Continue right where you are. Right where you live into your days.
Do so in the name of The Creator who expects nothing less from each of us. And if you are not “continuing” ALL of the above, in community, partnership, collaboration? What is it you have been doing? What is it you are waiting for?
Just because things are bad, doesn’t mean they are the worst things have ever been, and certainly no matter who you are reading the blog you already aren’t among those who are being treated the worst in this world, nor among those in dire fear for their lives at this instant.
No matter how bad things are that doesn’t relieve us as individuals from the obligation to ourselves and our family/friends/neighbors/community to do the best we can with what we have. The one lesson I learned from my travels in this crazy world is that most often it’s the poorest and the must humble who are the most generous and most sincere.
I’ve written at least once about the movement of money from the public school system into private/charter schools. I guess this is a follow-on from those thoughts….
Rich kids should go to public schools.
The mayor should ride the subway to work.
When wealthy people get sick, they should be sent to public hospitals.
Business executives should have to stand in the same airport security lines as everyone else.
The very fact that people want to buy their way out of all of these experiences points to the reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to.
Private schools
Private limos
Private doctors
Private security
These are all pressure release valves which eliminate the friction that would cause powerful people to call for all of these bad things to get better.
The degree to which we allow the rich to insulate themselves from the unpleasant reality that the rest of us are forced to experience is directly related to how long that reality is allowed to stay unpleasant. When they are left with no other option, rich people will force improvement in public systems.
Their public spirit will be infinitely less urgent when they are contemplating these things from afar than when they are sitting in a hot ER waiting room for six hours themselves.
Democracy is about government of the people, by the people, and for the people. When the rich get special treatment it’s no longer democracy.
That’s my bit for today. That’s enough. I’ll be back soon to chat again. :-)
Often our suppositions and beliefs push us beyond reason or experience. If we believe one nationality or group to be inferior or superior then all of our thoughts will try to enforce that opinion.
It’s hard to find people who truly want truth for authority rather than authorities to decide what is true. And what I mean by “truth” is those things that can be substantively verified or proven.
I came across this quotation from B.F. Skinner (for more about him see the Wiki article about him)
Considering free will to be an illusion, Skinner saw human action as dependent on consequences of previous actions, a theory he would articulate as the principle of reinforcement: If the consequences to an action are bad, there is a high chance the action will not be repeated; if the consequences are good, the probability of the action being repeated becomes stronger.
Skinner developed behavior analysis, especially the philosophy of radical behaviorism, and founded the experimental analysis of behavior, a school of experimental research psychology. He also used operant conditioning to strengthen behavior, considering the rate of response to be the most effective measure of response strength. To study operant conditioning, he invented the operant conditioning chamber (aka the Skinner box), and to measure rate he invented the cumulative recorder. Using these tools, he and Charles Ferster produced Skinner’s most influential experimental work, outlined in their 1957 book Schedules of Reinforcement.
Wikipedia “B F Skinner”
I really struggle with this idea. Historically there have been times when punishment has improved the lives of many, and other times when punishment has done nothing more than foment dissatisfaction and rebellion. I suppose on some levels, it’s the degree of punishment that is the difference. “Punishing” a child’s misbehavior or disrespect can produce an adult who understands the basics of human interaction and refrains from needlessly offending others. Conversely, if someone steals food to fill an empty belly or a child’s belly, and then confining them among thieves and murderers who will take advantage of a relatively pure heart — well, the results of that are probably more likely to corrupt one than to improve one. And, society has struggled for centuries to know what to do with people who flaunt the laws. Whether “serious” or trivial — there seem to be a limited number of solutions available and too often those who make the rules don’t want to be bothered dealing with those who don’t and would just as soon bundle them off to a place where they aren’t any trouble. NO wonder Britain populated Australia with convicts and prisons dot the rural maps of the U.S.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is all about whether individuals are able to see a shadow projected onto a wall, without seeing the source of the projection, and deduce that there is something going on that is more real than the shadow on the wall. It seems a simple concept, but in reality, and in application it speaks to a group of people who are unable to make such connections.
The U.S. election of November 2025 demonstrates the reality perfectly. Given all that was known about candidates before the election, the outcome demonstrates the some are capable of making the connection between idea and reality.
Yes, there are some people for whom punishment is nothing more than a lesson in how to avoid punishment — but in the election situation the “punishment” the population was enduring because of a President from a certain party has been proven to be far less of a pain than the release from that president’s punishing power than being released into the hands of the Orange Buffoon.
There was a time when public discussion could entertain multiple ideas, sort them out, and arrive at solutions that suited multiple interest group. In that sense “punishment” or enduring various social settings, situations, biases, behaviors have been able to teach lessons far more important than just how to avoid the situation — they have enabled society to move beyond social problems so that everyone received some benefit and no one was an outcast.
I sometimes wonder about things like “national pride” or “regimental pride”. One would think that being proud of something is a good thing. But the question needs answering, “is it?”
If you have ever watched or been part of a regional or national heritage celebration it’s clear that to some degree there is always a feeling that we are somehow just a little bit better than them. If we were all the same, and our accomplishments were no better than anyone else’s accomplishment what reason would there be to have a special event marking our “accomplishments”? In daily life we have Polish events (yeah, I’m mostly Polish) and Irish celebrations (my wife is mostly Irish) and gay celebrations and sport team celebrations to herald the winning of who knows what, and so on and so forth. They all celebrate something the celebrants think makes them particularly worthy of recognition. Certainly military celebrations are the most scary because they are celebrating their victory in battle, their ability to subjugate or destroy others, and while they hide the ugly by talking about honor and the flag and this and that it really comes down to the fact that they are proud to have whupped the ass of whomever they went against. Basically, it’s good to be a bully.
I know that’s not a popular opinion. But the problem is that when we begin seeing ourselves as more noteworthy of celebration than others that pride rises up and men and women do terrible things to save their pride and prevent embarrassment. Or, to be punished. How many common crimes are committed so as to avoid reprisals for other crimes. How many social offenses are committed so as to avoid the disapproval of others… It’s a great big Round Robin of a mess. And we get into it because we feel the need to be better than someone else.
I don’t know how to change anything. I do know that we have seen better climates for the exchange of ideas. But in a time when national treasures are being plundered by the few while the populace stands silently beside it’s clear that Plato was right about some people not being able to draw conclusions based upon concepts and that we aren’t in for a smooth ride anytime in the near future.
I guess I better stop here, for now. I’ll be back soon to chat again. In the meantime take care of yourself and your loved ones. :-)
I’ve been thinking about something other than problems — solutions! We always focus on the problems and it’s a rare individual who actually says, “sod the problems, we want something better than fighting what’s wrong, how do we make something that’s right?”
I’ve been lucky to have lived in a time when the world was about ideas and ideals. Oh, maybe not the WHOLE world, but ideas were at least out in the public view and spoken about openly. I mourn for a world that has been gobbled up by expediency and greed.
One voice doesn’t change the world — at least not very often. So, I guess we are each forced to do our own little bit in the part of the universe where we have any influence at all.
Milwaukee Wisconsin, as I learned in grade school sits on the convergence of three rivers: the Root, the Menominee, and the Milwaukee. I was told as a child, and never bothered to question it, that the original First People’s name for the area meant “Stinking Waters” because the confluence resulted in sitting, stagnant water that, frankly, stank! In the areas further outlying the convergence the city is built on a lot clay soil. Not great for digging in, or for drainage.
The water problems were such that when the city began developing it was quickly realized that the soil beneath the central business district needed a lot of shoring up in order to achieve a stable building platform. Buildings, factories, stores, etc., were built atop tall trees cut into large posts that were pile driven dozens of feet and more below the surface and formed the foundation. That’s part of the reason that Milwaukee’s downtown never had skyscrapers even though the city was built and rebuilt in eras when tall buildings were the new thing. The instability of the ground being the blame.
the view 320 feet below the surface in a pump cistern, showing one of the feeder lines emptying into the reservoir.
Our new “skyscrapers” are built EAST of the convergence and on a rock base that speaks to an underground fault line not understood in the days of the city’s origins. Recently we have had a few taller buildings join our relatively low-lying silhouette.
As I write this we are engaged in a Water Drop Alert. Milwaukee was sued by the City of Chicago because our three rivers and our city run-off were claimed to be polluting Lake Michigan. And, they were. Whether they were doing more than the City of Chicago I highly doubt, but that’s the way the legal cookie crumbles, and this city was required by the courts to dig deep, deep, deep tunnels into which the surplus run-off could be channelled until collected water could be processed for release into the lake. So, it is that today we have billion gallon man-made reservoirs below the metro area.
Near my home on this morning’s social media I see that two major intersections are closed due to flooding. Other posts speak to half a dozen places along the Interstate highway where either the highway is closed or the ramps leading to or from have been flooded.
You can guess the. public outcry. Blah, blah, blah.
The thing is:
this city has never been without flooding
the city has for decades been hiding natural tributaries to the three primary rivers so as to make them less intrusive on the built up part of the city. Of course trying to contain a creek that turns into a river depending on water flow creates problems if the volume of water exceeds the “planned for” capacity.
Year after year we insist on putting down more and more concrete and asphalt to make room for cars, and for parking, and for buildings — so that every year we reduce the amount of earth surface that can absorb water — even though water doesn’t quickly absorb into clay soil.
And on top of all that is the still highly argued about question of global warming and how that is affecting our rainwater/snow downfalls
People have one trait that seems universal. We all love to complain. And when we complain we feel better if we have someone to blame for whatever it is that we are complaining ABOUT. So, it’s government, or some particular politician, or the engineer who signed off on the project or the commission that approved the idea, or, or, or, or.
But no one offers a solution. At least not among those who are complaining. And the problem lingers until someone in a position of authority has the guts to stand up and say, “why don’t we try something different?”
One of the reasons I don’t spend much time on the popular social media is because there is only so much whinging and complaining that a person can take without it affecting you. I have always been about finding a solution for my problems to that they stop being a problem. My recent blog about projects around the house being an example. I’m wanting to get things done and not finding a means to accomplish that end. Well, in the bigger world there are a lot of similar situations and we need people who are willing to consider solutions, not just problems.
Ok, that’s it from me from soggy Milwaukee. I hope you’re well and dealing with the world around you as best you can. Stay safe and I’ll be back again soon. Cheers. :-)
From the Far Side of '70 
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