Coaching practices for Adversarial Review

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Adversarial Review, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I want someone to come at this plan with the explicit job of tearing it apart
• Nobody around me will actually push back
• Every time I review how I acted today I catch myself building a defense
• When I disagree with someone I go straight for the rebuttal, and even when I’m right it makes them defensive and nothing changes
• When I do this alone in my head it’s too easy to let myself off the hook and skate past the uncomfortable parts

Practices that may help

1. Red-team your plan with a formal adversarial review
   Assign someone the explicit role of finding every way your plan could be wrong or fail.
   Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See
2. Invite an adversarial collaborator
   Find someone whose genuine prior is the opposite of yours, and work together on the same evidence.
   Confirmation Bias: Seeing What You Expect to See
3. Seneca’s evening court — judge the day as an honest prosecutor
   Review the day as a fair judge would: what was the evidence, what was the verdict, what is the sentence?
   The Pythagorean Evening Review
4. Apply Dennett’s four rules for critical commentary
   Before criticizing: restate charitably, list agreements, name what you’ve learned, then — and only then — rebut.
   Steelmanning
5. Share the review with someone who will ask honest questions
   A review held privately is easier to fudge; one shared with an honest questioner is harder to rationalize.
   The Annual Review (Tim Ferriss Method)
6. Separate judgment from analysis in the debrief
   The AAR only produces learning when the analysis phase is free of performance judgments.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
7. Include a trusted other in high-stakes AARs
   Self-conducted AARs have blind spots; a peer or coach who was not inside the event sees the causal story differently.
   After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning
8. Affirm before receiving critical feedback
   Do a brief values reflection before reading a critical evaluation so you can take in the information rather than defend against it.
   Self-Affirmation Theory, Made Practical
9. Apply the double-standard check: would I accept this reasoning if it pointed the other way?
   Test whether you are holding your team’s arguments to a lower bar than the other side’s.
   The Scout Mindset
10. Apply the AAR to successes, not only setbacks
    Reviewing what actually caused a win produces replicable insight; reviewing only failures produces only loss-avoidance.
    After-Action Review: The US Army’s Tool for Continuous Learning

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.