Knowhere | Be wrong

A few weeks back, I had been engaging with my CTO at work, about some or the other new system that my team was considering building.
At some point, we were at his desk hashing out the details when I noticed a shift in his posture as he began explaining some of the legalities that he was thinking about.
I very quickly realized that he was shifting the conversation into a teaching opportunity; to provide me with the much-needed context that had been informing his perspective.
See, I had been trying to argue a certain decision, whilst missing the context behind why he held a different opinion.
At that moment I realized that my view was pretty much just plain wrong.

Now, this could be a lesson in the empowerment that arises from having high EQ and empathy, as he had. And most certainly so, it was refreshing to have experienced such natural leadership. But I want to dive a bit deeper into the fact that I was wrong.

What struck me at the moment that I had realized that I was wrong, was the fact that I didn't feel embarrassed, anxious or incompetent. I was in a high-rank meeting about something rather important, operating in a leadership role that I had only gotten into two months prior - so you would expect some internal talk along the lines of “oh crap, I've just messed up in front of the CTO. I've made myself look like an amateur that doesn’t know what he's doing.”

And yet, despite the fact that I am no stranger to overthinking, social anxiety and imposter syndrome, I felt completely neutral.

It bothered me for a while. “Shouldn’t I have felt bad?”

Yet when I reflected on my journey to the position that I now hold, I realized that I'd gotten here precisely because I was willing to be wrong.

See, you tend to get paid for the quality of the decisions that you make. Yet the irony of jobs in the decision sciences, is that decisions are seldom taken in isolation - there is always a series of decisions that need to be taken to achieve anything of significance.

And when you're dealing with a series of decisions over time, your ability to take a decision quickly, evaluate it, and take another decision to correct the trajectory, all while managing the chaos and complexity of the situation, is far more important than the correctness of any single decision taken in isolation.

Since we have finite energy, time and resources, we need to figure out how to spend them wisely enough across all the decisions we need to make. The real work is in weaving those decisions together.

Now, this isn’t an excuse to not do your due diligence to make accurate decisions. But it is a call to consider what’s holding you back from being willing to make bad ones, and correct course once you realize they're bad.

I don't think this ever really ends no matter what you do or at what level you operate. As a junior engineer, I enjoyed troubleshooting programmatic errors using tests and compilers more than researching the theory or consulting the documentation. I was willing to be wrong about decisions I made in the design of my code.
As a technical lead, I enjoy arguing about how large new systems plug into our department’s architectural strategy with people that have to inevitably step back and teach me things I never imagined of considering.
The stuff has changed but the willingness to be wrong has not.

Thanks for reading
Delano