The beauty of being wrong

Wrong

Let’s be honest, no one likes to be wrong.  From early schooling and continuing through our careers we’ve been ingrained to do our best to be right.  It keeps us out of trouble, builds our self-esteem and helps us progress.

But what if our views on being wrong were, well, wrong?

There is growing research from a number of disciplines that in order to improve, grow, innovate and lead you need to be able to question your own thinking – allowing for different ideas and views to be heard and essentially being humble enough to admit that you might be wrong about what you think you know.

To illustrate this point of view, consider Julia Galef, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, who asks a beautiful, metaphorical question, “Are you a soldier or a scout?

Soldiers defend and protect. Scouts, in contrast, seek and try to understand.  In her view and a number of others, this worldview shapes how you process information, develop ideas and guides your ability to change.

The mindset of a scout is anchored in curiosity. They love to learn, feel intrigued when something new contradicts their previous views and they are also extremely grounded: their self-worth as a person or team mate isn’t tied to how right or wrong they are about a specific topic.

Scouts have what many refer to as “intellectual humility” – a term that has been popularized in the past several years by a number of influential folks including Google’s Lazlo Block and University of Virginia Professor Edward Hess, who even penned a brilliant book entitled, “Humility is the new smart”.  According to Hess, in order to compete you need to assume the role of lifelong humble inquirer.

Intellectual humility is loosely defined as “a state of openness to new ideas, and a willingness to be receptive to new sources of evidence”.  At the heart of intellectual humility are questions.  Scouts ask lots of questions and are comfortable with all sorts of answers.

In short, scouts have a completely different view about being wrong.  They’re actually cool with it.  They embrace it.  And understand that being wrong is as important as being right – since they understand that being wrong helps you learn, change, iterate and, ultimately, make breakthroughs.

While you might feel a tad uncomfortable with this assertion, I would contend that virtually every major innovation, change or scientific breakthrough started out, at some point, being “wrong”.

While I’m not sure I’d consider myself a scout (though I do like the term and metaphor), I can surely confess I’ve been wrong a lot.  Maybe even more often than I’ve been right.

As just one example, a few years ago I was on a team working to achieve inventory accuracy in stores.  We’d followed a sensible approach that we’ve outlined in previous newsletters – frequently counting a control group of items to uncover and correct the root causes of the errors.

The team had surfaced and resolved some important discipline and housekeeping errors and consistently had the control group of products between 92-94% accurate.  Unfortunately, I helped to convince the team that we needed to get to virtually 100% accurate before we could roll it out to all stores.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

A couple of years ago I was talking to a colleague who has more experience and, importantly, a different view.  He asked me why I thought that we needed to be 100% accurate and, during the discussion, politely reminded me that “perfection is the enemy of great”.  According to him, what we’d done could have been rolled out to all stores, instead of only rolling out minor procedural changes.

Here’s a great example of why I think being wrong is actually pretty instructive.  This learning helped me change my perspective on change and altered my thinking and approach.  Now “perfection” will never be the goal and good enough truly is – since good enough gets done (implemented) and done can be built on and improved.

Now, I’m not saying you should try to be wrong.  It’s just that being wrong has gotten a bad rap. Innovation and change require that you get good and comfortable with the notion of being wrong.  Wrong leads to right.

Of course, that’s my view and, well, I could be wrong.