Do You Have a Tenth Man? The Problem with Consensus

Elie Jacobs:

In the 2013 movie “World War Z,” the zombie apocalypse is already underway when Brad Pitt’s character arrives in Jerusalem and finds it strangely intact. Somehow the Israelis saw what was coming and built a wall to protect the population. An Israeli official explains that they institutionalized a rule after the intelligence failure of the 1973 Yom Kippur War:\

“If nine of us look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it’s the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging on the assumption that the other nine are wrong.”

The film dubs this the “Tenth Man.” It is a standing obligation to assume the consensus is mistaken. Ensuring that dissent is mandatory, and no one has to be brave to voice it because it is simply someone’s job. Max Brooks invented the term, but the failure that inspired it was real, and has a name: Ha-Conceptzia, the Concept.

In the years preceding the October 7, 2023 attacks, the same term was used to describe Israel’s bet that letting Qatari money flow to Hamas was safer than confronting Hamas directly. The Concept in that case was that as long as the money kept arriving, Hamas would not attack. What actually happened after the intelligence failure of the Yom Kippur war is that Israel stood up something called Ipcha Mistabra. Only in Israel does a military unit take its name from a Talmudic phrase that translates roughly as “the opposite is reasonable.” 

How many communications functions run on a Concept of their own: settled beliefs about how the organization is seen. Advocates will stay advocates. The relationship with the journalist is so strong that they’d never write a negative story. The model gets written down every planning cycle under friendlier names like a stakeholder map, a reputation tracker, or a crisis playbook. No one dies when it’s wrong (we hope). But hand the Concept a fact that should alarm it, and it’ll hand back an explanation, quick and plausible, that files the fact under something already understood. The skeptical reporter is chasing a byline. The unfavorable NGO report is a fundraising document. Each reading holds up on its own. 

The dangerous thing about an organizational “Concept” isn’t that it prevents you from seeing contrary evidence. It’s that it gives you a plausible explanation for every piece of contrary evidence you do see. In a prior piece, I told communicators to ask “What if we’re wrong?”; what I underestimated is that a strong Concept can answer that question without ever examining it.

A quarterly red team exercise helps, as would an outside team brought in to stress-test a strategy before a launch. Both are bounded in time and easy to skip when the calendar or the budget tightens. A permanent Tenth Man forces an assignment after a consensus. It’s not about a specific person, which means  no one becomes the house pessimist or Cassandra. A deliverable should be produced and there should be time on a calendar that forces people to read and respond to it. If dissent is the assignment, the person dissenting has nothing to risk. 

In the fall of 2024, Cracker Barrel’s most persistent shareholder critic put the warning in writing, twice: a seven-page letter and a 120-page presentation arguing the board was embracing “obvious folly.” The board dismissed the warning four separate times. The explanation was ready: an activist with an agenda. Then the new logo launched in August 2025, stripped of the old timer and his barrel. The loyalists the plan was counting on revolted, the stock shed roughly $100 million in market value in days, and the company reversed itself inside a week. The CEO who ran the transformation was gone within the year. The warning had sat on the desk for ten months. The answer to it was already drafted.

Strategic warning asks one question above all others: What assumptions are you making about your stakeholders, the regulatory environment, or your own reputation that you haven’t recently tested because nothing has forced you to? That is the Tenth Man question. You assume the goodwill you’ve accumulated will hold under pressure. You assume your strongest advocates will stay advocates when the story turns. You assume the regulatory environment is stable because it has been stable. None of those assumptions may be wrong. But when did you last try to prove them wrong? What would it take to break them?

Not that any of this idea is new. For four centuries the Vatican had the advocatus diaboli, the devil’s advocate, whose job was to argue against every candidate for sainthood. In 1983 the role was weakened by edict and canonizations promptly multiplied. Micah Zenko must-read book: Red Team reached the conclusion you would expect: a red team is only as good as the leader who agrees to be bothered by it. 

We’re communications professionals, we’re not running a military intelligence directorate, and the stakes on our desk are smaller. That doesn’t change the value of standing up a Tenth Man in your communications function. 

In World War Z, Jerusalem falls anyway. Foresight will never guarantee the right outcome, nor will the Tenth Man save your company from every mistake it’s about to make. It only buys time to see the story turning before the public does, and to say so while saying so can still change something.

+++

Elie Jacobs is a strategic communications and public affairs advisor with more than two decades of experience helping organizations build credibility, navigate risk, prepare and respond to crises and communicate with clarity.