I think you are on the right track. Positivity and Negativity are useful tools for discovering the truth. Favoring either very strongly has significant downsi

I think you are on the right track. Positivity and Negativity are useful tools for discovering the truth. Favoring either very strongly has significant downsides. The problem with Negativity is it can obsess over problems while not doing the harder work of actually coming up with a plausible solution. If a project is truly screwed, then maybe "tell the stakeholders that we need 9 more months instead of 3 (instead of pretending we only need 3 more months for the next 2 months)" might qualify as a positive solution. Or "3 months is obviously wrong. It might take 6. It might take 12. Let's invest 2 days in figuring out where we are immediately."