I think there is a lot of cargo culting going on everywhere. The lucky ones pick the right cult. How do you know whether your model of how the world works is right?
You never know exactly to what exact extent your map matches the territory. But you can have a pretty good idea. Like, we know (to the extent that we can "know" anything) that models predicting the Sun will rise tomorrow match reality better than those which don't. We know that models which predict that turning on a switch will cause the lightbulb to emit light are more accurate that those who say that it's magic or mysterious.
To quote Feynman:
> We’ve learned from experience that the truth will out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in Cargo Cult Science.
I was more thinking about other areas like politics, management or software engineering issues. There it's often not possible to validate your model. It's even hard to tell if something goes well or not. And the feedback loop from decision to result can take years in many cases. So you pretty much are forced to do cargo culting.
In the matters that you're talking about, it may just be that we can't really know. Certain things take years to figure out (take Feynman's example of the Milikan value): people still −I assume− had to use some value while the "official" value was shifting.
I'm not sure I'd call that cargo culting necessarily. If the best case to be made right now is in favour of the majority position, then I think one should go with the majority position. I'd say that one should still keep a healthy dose of skepticism and be ready to change their mind if the balance of evidence changes… but then, it may be that managers/leaders need to feel committed and that a "healthy dose" for them is very, very little.
I see no benefit into falling onto the sword just to prove a theoretical point. Too much work to do.
The world, that's a little harder.