And you would want the subordinate to do that openly/vocally in front of your customers, even when the subordinate may not know all the facts of the situation, and when your customers almost certainly do not know all the facts of the situation?

If your answer is "yes", then I guess you and I just have fundamentally different approaches to business operations and customer engagement.

I literally just got off the phone with a couple people who were in disagreement about how to proceed with a customer. The manager made a decision during a meeting, their team member thought it was a bad idea, they talked about it privately, and then they escalated it to me to figure out. We came to an agreement on what to do and they both went back to the customer aligned on their talking points. Customer has no idea there was internal disagreement and for all they know we simply came into new information that resulted in us adjusting our approach. IMO, that's how you're supposed to handle internal disagreements. Obviously in the situation OP described, this could be done in a matter of seconds or minutes vs. the series of phone calls across different locations/timezones I was engaged in for the past 45 minutes, but the same principles apply.