Robert A. Lovett, President Harry S. Truman’s defense secretary during much of the Korean War, observed, “Good judgment is usually the result of experience. And experience is frequently the result of bad judgment.”

Throughout Billion-Dollar Lessons, we strive to help shorten the normal managerial learning cycle by reporting on the bad judgment of otherwise talented executives at good, and sometimes great, companies. Our hope is that awareness of common mistakes can help managers avoid them, without having to live them firsthand.

Unfortunately, telling someone to be more aware of a potential problem is not much of a remedy. Thus we also offer methods for changing how organizations assess big strategic moves, primarily by instituting safeguards against process failures that make even the best organizations susceptible to bad strategies.

In doing so, we try to be both pragmatic and revolutionary.

We try to be pragmatic by suggesting techniques that don’t depend on fundamental rewiring of how individuals think or how organizations make strategy. That’s not to say that some fundamental rewiring might not be appropriate in some cases, but we don’t depend on it because, quite frankly, it probably won’t happen. Our suggestions are, instead, designed to be overlaid on current processes.

At the same time, we hope our pragmatic techniques will spark several revolutionary changes. First, we hope to revolutionize the decision making process at the very top. Rather than driving for consensus, we hope to provoke chief executives, senior managers and board members to expect, accept and even demand frank discussion and robust analysis whenever bet-the-company moves are on the table. To help this happen, and to safeguard the organization when it doesn’t, we believe independent Devil’s Advocate reviews of such strategic moves should always be conducted before adoption. We think that such reviews can be powerful tools for clear-headed assessment, and that their mere presence in the planning process will serve to make the prior planning sharper.

We also hope to foment and legitimize a revolution in middle management. We’re willing to bet that in every failure that we studied, there were critical thinkers in the heart of the organization who saw the clear and present dangers of the proposed strategy. We hope to legitimize their voices to question and, when appropriate, to quash doomed strategies while they are still on the drawing board.