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# Departments of Doubt and Wisdom Councils
- URL: https://www.ashmann.co/departments-of-doubt-and-wisdom-councils/
- Published: 2026-08-26T07:01:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-26T07:01:25.000Z
- Description: Does your organisation have any structural mechanism for doubt at all? Somewhere that 'the plan' and core assumptions gets usefully challenged, by people who have no stake in defending them.
- Author: Ash Mann
- Tags: ways of thinking

[**John Knell** ](https://johnknell.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-precarity-and-why)[**recently**](https://johnknell.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-precarity-and-why)[**made what felt like a useful observation**](https://johnknell.substack.com/p/the-paradox-of-precarity-and-why), that a generation of cultural leaders are so consumed with firefighting and survival that they've lost the time and licence to do the bigger picture imaginative work that our current moment probably requires. That felt like a pretty true observation, but I'd add that it seems most organisations also have no formal mechanism for challenging their own assumptions, even when the necessary bandwidth and headspace does exist to do some imagining. 

In Simone Stolzoff's new book, [***How to Not Know***](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/481419/how-to-not-know-by-stolzoff-simone/9781529147599?ref=ashmann.co), he shared a story that felt...instructive.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the New York Federal Reserve spent a long time asking what it had missed. Part of the answer was that the institution had no real mechanism for doubt or checking its assumptions. The economists who worked there found it hard to seriously entertain possibilities beyond their initial hypotheses, and this group-think was baked into the organisation's culture.

An economist called [**Margaret McConnell**](https://som.yale.edu/faculty-research/faculty-directory/margaret-m-mcconnell?ref=ashmann.co) proposed a fix. She set up a small internal team whose job was specifically to challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and ask the difficult questions that the polite institutional culture tended to ignore. 

Formally this team was called the 'Applied Critical Thinking unit' but, internally, people called it the [**Department of Doubt**](https://www.charterworks.com/why-the-new-york-fed-created-a-department-of-doubt/?ref=ashmann.co) (which is a much better name).

Structured mechanisms for challenging assumptions like this exist across lots of different sectors - '[**red teams**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red%5Fteam?ref=ashmann.co)' in defence and cybersecurity, pre-mortems in product development ([**which I've written a bit about here**](https://www.ashmann.co/tools/why-a-pre-mortem-and-how-to-run-one/)), [**devil's advocate roles**](https://nationalsecurityjournal.nz/the-application-of-the-devils-advocacy-technique-to-intelligence-analysis/?ref=ashmann.co) in intelligence analysis etc. 

Elsewhere [**I recently saw**](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anne-kathrin-merkle-6926459a%5Finvitation-to-the-wwf-innovation-teams-wisdom-ugcPost-7484994695811457024-ehbF/?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=member%5Fdesktop&rcm=ACoAAARVv4wBlhUS%5FqfjfP2uGX5kXDRktBJ1uZw) that the WWF were looking for people to join a 'Wisdom Council' they were putting together:

"*We are looking for a group of people to help us expand our imagination and input into our work. We support 87 WWF offices to expand their innovation culture and apply innovation methods while also stewarding topics such as scaling, futures, AI.*"

I've been thinking about this stuff in relation to cultural organisations, which - in my observation - seem to face a version of the problem that was described in the book. Planning tends to involve the same people, with similar experiences, the same funding assumptions, the same beliefs about audiences, and the same instinct to protect existing relationships. Challenge sometimes happens, but usually informally or focused superficially at the edges of whatever is being discussed. 

This got me thinking about what a version of that challenge might actually look like in practice and it links back to something that came up repeatedly in my work looking into digital failure for [***Beyond the Promise***](https://www.ashmann.co/beyond-the-promise/). One of the clearest patterns that work highlighted in projects that went wrong was a failure to create deliberate space to think properly before committing - whether that was being clear about the problem that needed solving, or interrogating whether the solution being pursued was the right one. A 'Department of Doubt' would build that space in structurally, but at the level of strategy and planning rather than just for individual projects.

Over the last year I've been asked by a few organisations to do something close to this, with briefs that have been versions of 'we want you to tell us what you really see, ask difficult questions, and don't tell us what you think we want to hear'. So clearly other people can sense this absence of a proper challenge function too.

To be clear, whatever shape this might take, this is not a board. A board has governance responsibilities, which tend to shy away from genuine disruption - and in my experience of both sitting on and working with boards, they rarely perform a sharp, actionable 'challenge function' in reality (there are, of course, exceptions, and some boards do this well - but it's rarely what they're primarily there for). This thing would have a specific, non-governance remit and no statutory duties, which is what would actually make it useful.

There are obvious questions I haven't worked through yet - who appoints the people to the thing, how do you stop leadership from filling it with people they know will be sympathetic, what makes a decision big/important enough to be worth examining, how often the makeup should change, what does leadership do if they fundamentally disagree with the challenge, how do you make this useful rather than just a bikeshedding waste of time etc. 

But maybe a more basic and useful first question is - does your organisation have any structural mechanism for doubt at all? Somewhere that 'the plan' and core assumptions gets usefully challenged, by people who have no stake in defending them.