The Advocacy/Approval Myth

Definition

Most organizations run decisions through an advocacy/approval process: a team is assigned to find and champion a single recommendation, which an approval body then interrogates and either accepts or rejects. This creates two linked illusions — the advocacy myth (mistaking effective persuasion for evidence the recommendation is good) and the approval myth (mistaking survival of tough questioning for proof the recommendation is high quality). Neither is true: "quality must be baked into the decision; it cannot be inspected in at the end." An advocate is structurally incentivized to select favorable data, suppress competing alternatives, and understate uncertainty; an approval body, no matter how sharp its questions, can only test whether the advocate has good answers — not whether better alternatives were ever considered.

In the Book

The book describes how this process degrades under its own incentives: because rejection feels like a loss, advocates hone persuasion skills rather than analytical honesty, and approval bodies hone interrogation skills rather than co-creation — the result is "a competition between individuals" instead of a competition between alternatives, which fosters "manipulative use of anchors, narrative fallacies, and misleading framing effects." The prescribed fix is structural, not behavioral: "shift from the inherent competition between advocate and approver to a competition among alternatives," which the book identifies as the design principle underlying the Dialogue Decision Process — decision boards and project teams jointly building and comparing multiple live alternatives across several working sessions, rather than one side selling and the other side vetting a single proposal.

Why It Matters

This names a specific way review processes fail even when everyone involved is diligent: a review gate tests confidence and preparedness, not whether the thing being reviewed is actually the best available option, because the underlying structure never generated real alternatives to compare against. It applies directly to any stage-gate process — code review, investment committees, academic peer review, procurement — where "did this survive scrutiny" quietly substitutes for "is this the best of what could have been proposed."