Volkswagen is right to hire the devil and not his advocate
The recruitment of a grumbling Green faces some potential bumps in the road, though
When the Vatican was wondering whether to beatify Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003, it called some unlikely witnesses: writers Aroup Chatterjee and Christopher Hitchens, arch-critics of the Catholic missionary.
Another reputationally challenged, cultish global institution, Volkswagen, heralded something similar last week when Herbert Diess, its chief executive, told the Financial Times he planned to recruit a young climate activist to spar with him and other senior executives about its environmental policies.
VW already has a sustainability council, populated by “renowned experts” such as the former EU commissioner for climate action and the founding director of the UN Global Compact. This group has “extensive rights of information, consultation and initiative” and wide access to senior managers. What would a single young grumbling Green add?
Actually, quite a lot, according to research that takes me back to the Vatican, initiator of the centuries-old idea of the “devil’s advocate”.
The hiring of a Greta Thunberg figure, despite its superficial attractions — no need to set aside a parking space at headquarters in Wolfsburg, for instance — faces some potential bumps in the road, though.
“Aggressive” internal challenge could speed up the VW hierarchy, Mr Diess believes, as he tries to steer a €33bn drive towards battery-powered vehicles. Yet a campaigner could also throw a spanner into the process if he or she took every opportunity to clog VW’s decision-making with single-issue objections.
At the other extreme, the climate activist could turn passive and sink comfortably into the VW bureaucracy. The carmaker still bears the wounds of the scandals of the early 2000s after the cosy working relationship between VW managers and workers — part of Germany’s famed co-determination system — went rotten. That episode raised questions about VW corporate culture that prefigured the later Dieselgate emissions cheating crisis, from which it is still recovering.
The most recent precedents for inviting critics into a German boardroom are also ill-omened. In January, Mr Diess’s counterpart at Siemens, Joe Kaeser, offered activist Luisa Neubauer a seat on the supervisory board, as he faced protests about the group’s involvement in the development of an Australian coal mine. Ms Neubauer, a leading figure in Ms Thunberg’s Fridays for Future movement, took the free publicity but unsurprisingly rejected the chance to spend days of her young life discussing compensation, succession, and the internet of things with her elders.
Appointing a spokesperson for the opposing view — or, in the modish “red teaming” approach, a whole squad of opponents — is often suggested as a way of mitigating bias and groupthink. The Catholic Church used it from the 16th century to sharpen its discussions on candidates for sainthood, and the technique does work, but only compared with no challenge at all.
Over nearly four centuries, devil’s advocacy has turned into a sort of protest cosplay, with sober consensual directors dressing up as dissenters, in part to make their colleagues feel better about decisions they are likely to take anyway. (In these febrile times, “just to play devil’s advocate for a moment” has also, incidentally, become a signal that someone round the table is about to advance their honestly held but potentially unpopular opinion, without really risking their reputation.)
Berkeley psychologist Charlan Nemeth has long been suspicious of “role-playing” dissent. She is convinced well-meaning attempts to avoid confrontation undermine the quality of problem-solving.
Her research adds some weight to Mr Diess’s idea of bringing in an “authentic dissenter” to juice up discussion of VW’s eco-initiatives. Dissent, she told me, “hits you in the face and it annoys you and it will make you mad — and it’s rough on the person doing the dissenting — but study after study shows that dissent, even when it’s wrong, stimulates that kind of thinking where the mind opens”.
As she writes in No! The Power of Disagreement in a World That Wants to Get Along, “it is when you face a dissenter who believes his position, has the courage to say so, and does so persistently that you confront the possibility that you may be wrong”.
Prof Nemeth has a few qualms about the VW plan. Employing and paying the activist may compromise his or her willingness to speak truth to power, for instance. The principle, though, is sound. It also comes with the tacit endorsement of the Vatican. The church ditched its devil’s advocate approach in time for Mother, now Saint, Teresa’s beatification — hence the invitation to critics to testify about the nun’s work — just as businesses were rolling it out everywhere.