These are trying times to be a leader. As a leader, once you acknowledge that fact, you can feel like you’re standing in a strange town before one of those tall and cluttered signposts with dozens of arrows pointing everywhere and nowhere all at once. While you’re lost in that self-focused image, know this: Your employees feel those same pressures, too. They share something else: a kneejerk tendency to look towards the positive.

To be sure, there’s a lot of good that can come from leaning toward one’s strengths and the bright side. Tilting our thoughts in this direction, we’re told, can increase our productivity, make us feel more confident and even enable us to make better decisions. It’s all true; it’s just not the whole truth. 

The fact is that a multi-directional signpost in a strange town is the new abnormal. The world is full of uncertainty — not the once-in-a-while kind, but a form of uncertainty that every leader, every team and every organization must constantly contend with. That uncertainty falls into two broad categories: all the stuff “out there” that makes work uncertain and those “internal” factors, both good and bad, that define how an organization can respond. You simply can’t control that “out there” part. Influence it? Absolutely. Pin it down into a predictable operating plan? Not so much. The internal, however, is far more within your control and can even turn into an asset — if your assessment of it is honest, shared and built on.

Many organizations begin with this intent, but most turn rapidly and often disproportionately to focusing on the positives and seeking to build on those. It’s natural. Focusing on our strengths feels good — like having the star quarterback or a secret ingredient that makes us believe that this alone will be enough to conquer any negatives that might stand in our way. As both teams and individuals, we love this feeling. We take comfort in it. 

We also vastly overstate it and infrequently check its perceived advantage. In an ever-shifting world, it’s not just an oversight; it’s an error. It’s precisely why we ought to periodically do the opposite, briefly setting aside the bubbly good and indulging in cheering on the bad. It sounds counterintuitive, which is precisely the point. There is tremendous power in a temporary pursuit of the things that can lead to our undoing — not from our typical vantage point from inside our organization, but from the perspective of those outside of it who would gladly undo us. 

The tactic is, in fact, a known and even trusted one, just one regularly forgotten, in part because it feels unnatural to invest in the negative, even temporarily. In the corporate world, it’s been called the “Kill the Company” exercise. The military version is known as Red Teaming. No matter what you call it, the idea is the same: What could you learn if you looked at those weaknesses and points of exposure like a competitor would, one who wanted to undo you?

There are enormous untapped advantages to this. Here are three key ones. 

1. Putting truth on the table

Just the act of choosing to do such an exercise is a truth-telling release rarely invited in any organization. By engaging in it honestly and openly, you’re allowing everyone who already knows what’s wrong to no longer hide the truth for fear of retribution. You get it on the table, and you get more than full facts. You give a gift to everyone in the form of a needed release of a well-known hindrance to productivity. In an uncertain world like this truth-telling alone is one of the best management tools a company has for mitigating uncertainty.

2. Stepping out of your box

A second undervalued advantage of looking at the not-so-bright side is that it allows a team to see everything with a different lens. It’s a human flaw that we too often succumb to in our marketing. We take the hopeful image we’ve been striving towards or striving to maintain, and assume it’s still true, but fail to double check that the assumptions made in a different time still hold. In the highly volatile environment, this is, at best, unwise and, at worst, fatal. Looking at one’s faults lets you step outside the box you imagine you live in and see it for what it really is.

3. Embracing the new abnormal

Perhaps most critical, taking such a counter view and doing it as a collective embraces the greatest truth of all: We are all standing in front of the same multidirectional signpost — not just sometimes, but always. If we fail to embrace this, we can’t prepare or adapt. If we don’t do that together, the likelihood we choose different directions rises, and instead of somewhere we end up nowhere. Maybe, just for a moment or two, it’s time you looked on the dark side.