Leadership in Practice

The Value of a Good Argument

A Growth Diagnostic, two AI tools, and an unexpected business lesson.

By Dave Slovin | Big Wheel Performance · 2026-07-28

I was working on a Growth Diagnostic for a professional services firm. Good work, great team, happy clients, but growth wasn’t keeping pace with the quality of the business. Like most growth problems, a number of issues were working together to hold the firm back. The project was going well. I had a strong first draft of the Diagnostic, a practical set of recommendations, and a report I would have been comfortable presenting to the client. Then I made the project harder. I asked a couple of AI tools to review the Growth Diagnostic. Each returned some excellent feedback, providing ideas to clarify and refine the report and recommendations. I’d make updates from one tool and then share the revised version with the other for another review. About half the time the tools disagreed, and the back-and-forth was getting frustrating. I started wondering why I hadn't just trusted the first draft and moved on. After taking a break and reading it again, I realized the Growth Diagnostic was much stronger than the original draft. The real value was that the two tools were looking at the same report from different angles. The approach felt inefficient and created tension, but it was also the reason the report got better. The best leadership teams I've worked with rarely produce their best thinking from the first idea. Someone asks a question nobody else considered. Someone else builds on the idea. Another points out a practical problem. The team disagrees, discusses, and refines until the result is stronger than where it started. I've also sat through plenty of meetings where disagreement accomplished nothing. People defended their ideas, left frustrated, and nothing improved. The teams in both situations disagreed, but only one left with a better recommendation. Someone has to keep asking the question: Are we making the work better, or are we just talking longer? Disagreement is constructive until it’s time to make a decision and move on. You probably won’t get everyone to agree with each other. You’re more likely to get them to agree on what’s best for the business. So back to my Growth Diagnostic. By the time the report was finished, the recommendations were clearer, easier to implement, and easier to measure. Looking back, the strongest recommendations all had one thing in common. They'd been challenged, refined, and challenged again before they were finished.That's why Big Wheel Performance begins every engagement by diagnosing the business before recommending solutions. The best recommendations rarely come from the first answers. They come from understanding the problems well enough to solve the right ones.Dave Slovin is a Partner at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://bigwheelperformance.com/">Big Wheel Performance</a>. He helps founders and professional services firms build the systems behind sustainable growth by aligning marketing, sales, client experience, operations, and technology.