Benefits of Becoming a Devil's Advocate Auditor

Becoming a Devil's Advocate Auditor is a great way to launch a new career or to distinguish an existing consulting practice. With a fast-paced training curriculum, you can soon be on your way to building a successful Devil's Advocate Auditor's practice. And at a fraction of the cost of buying a franchise or obtaining an MBA.

Successful Devil's Advocate Auditors may play an instrumental role in advising executives at the highest echelons of power at critical junctures.

The following are among the scenarios in which Devil's Advocate Auditors can enhance the quality of their clients' or employers' decision making:

  • Determining the soundness of business models of contemplated business partners or investment targets.
  • Assessing how much of the success of the superstar your client is considering partnering with is due to skill versus luck.
  • Benchmarking the integrity of the data under review in the context of launching a new product.
  • Gauging the point at which the acquisition of additional data represents diminishing marginal returns.
  • Pointing out decision making traps in consideration of contemplated acquisitions.
  • Recommending methods to ensure that sufficient discussion and debate precedes proposed corporate transactions.
  • Designing a process of scrutinizing potential hires to smoke out disingenuous candidates.
  • Imparting lessons as to how insufficiently raised cultural antennae can be fatal when entering new markets.
  • Running business proposals through a gauntlet of risk management tools.
  • Ensuring that business plans are vetted with appropriate precedents as well as against both analogs and antilogs.

The following are a few of the practical skills and tools that Devil's Advocate Auditors will be trained to use:

  • Adoption Chain Analysis
  • Assessing Analogs and Antilogs
  • Business Model Analysis Grid
  • Calibration Curves
  • Competition Value-Added Matrix
  • Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
  • James-Stein Estimator
  • Positive Deviance
  • Project Attractiveness Score Sheet
  • Risk Calculators and Risk Matrices
  • SERVO Analysis
  • Vulnerability Assessment

As a Devil's Advocate Auditor you will learn how to help clients avoid falling into decision making pitfalls such as:

  • Balanced Selection
  • Confirmation Bias
  • Conjunction Fallacy
  • The Delusion of Rigorous Research
  • The Delusion of Single Explanations
  • The Dogma of Efficiency
  • The Dogma of Hardness
  • Egocentrism
  • Fundamental Attribution Error
  • Groupthink
  • Hawthorne Effect
  • The Illusion of Brian Plasticity
  • Illusory Correlation
  • Just World Hypothesis
  • Munchausen Management Syndrome
  • Probabilistic Contamination
  • Risk Homeostasis
  • Shreckenberg's Self-Destroying Prognosis
  • Strategy Paradox
  • Survivorship Bias