You can say it. And watch the room's temperature drop, and become, for the rest of the quarter, the difficult one. Or you can stay quiet, and watch the plan go ahead, and be right in six months, quietly, when it fails, which nobody will thank you for.
From the video this guide was written for
Somebody is presenting a plan. The room is warm, the coffee is bad, and the people around the table are nodding in the slow, comfortable way people nod when a decision has already been made somewhere else. On slide three you see it: the flaw, the thing the whole plan rests on, which does not hold, because of something you know from a field nobody else in the room has worked in. You look around and nobody else has seen it, and you have two choices, and both are bad. Say it, and become the difficult one for a quarter. Stay quiet, and be right in six months, when nobody will thank you.
This book is for the person who has sat in that meeting a hundred times. It explains, with the research on how groups actually think, why the room could not see what you saw, why speaking and staying silent both cost you, why the devil's advocate role you are always given makes things worse, and why the meetings meant to produce ideas are built to lose yours. Then it gives you six moves that get the fact into the room without turning you into the person everyone dreads, plus scripts, a template, a one-page guide you can hand to whoever chairs the meeting, and two chapters on the hardest cases: the meeting with your own boss, and the meeting where you said it, were ignored, and were right.
That is the opening of 29 pages.
