Definitely Wrong: How Fear of Mistakes Makes Us Worse at Our Jobs
Person with head in hands in a gesture of distress or despair, rendered in black and white sketch style.
Like many (most?) of you, I was brought up to think there was a right and a wrong. A good and a bad. A hero and a villain. It’s fair to say that the world generally agrees that things, ideas, approaches, people can be right ... and they can be wrong.
This right vs wrong binary doesn’t just live in our heads — it’s baked into how our organisations work. It’s evident in the language we use everyday at work. We can meet or not meet expectations, Our projects are deemed successes or failures, solutions are either fit for purpose or not fit for purpose.
Except it’s really not that simple is it?
If you want to work with any amount of complexity, you are going to spend an inordinate amount of time being wrong. Or at the very very least, you aren’t going to spend a ton of time being right. For every decision, there’s no right choice, just 10 options each with it’s own risks, benefits, and costs. You can find things wrong with almost any option you’re considering, and often your job is to help find the least wrong among them.
Which of course doesn’t itself guarantee that it is actually the right option in hindsight.
Being right is an insanely small target and being wrong is essentially a given.
Which is why the concepts of right and wrong are a pretty poor way to view the world. Most things, especially those with some complexity, don’t fit comfortably into such a simple binary.
Of course that doesn’t stop us trying.
But when you really think about it, the attempt to be right — some or all of the time — is a sort of comical fantasy left over from childhood. One that — unfortunately — makes us much, much worse at our jobs.
Let’s talk about being wrong. And how we get being wrong so very wrong.
Wrong is a whole vibe
We’ve all experienced being wrong.
When you have pronounced someone’s name incorrectly (and you hear yourself doing it). When you realise that an obvious spelling error has made it into the report that has now gone to the board. You might feel embarrassed. A bit stupid. Your face might flush. If you’re like me your throat will have gotten a bit tight and your sentences will be harder to finish.
These are the everyday wrongs. The kind you quickly get used to in any fast-paced environment. Little errors like these happen everyday.
On the other end is being really terribly wrong.
Most of us have experienced this at least once.
This is when there’s that horrible sinking feeling as you realise that you’re not just a bit off track, but you’re in a different country. When it’s the kind of wrong in which your brain starts spinning through all the terrible implications — both realistic and unrealistic — at lightning speed while simultaneously trying to figure out if there’s any thing you can recover from all your efforts. Oh no what about all those documents with your name on them that will need to be reviewed? What will Francis say? Is my career over? How could I have been so sure? How did I miss this?
How did you mess this up so badly?
First comes panic. Then comes shame. For me, I can literally hear the blood pumping in my ears from the adrenaline hitting my system.
Being wrong is never terribly fun.
But this is behaviour we’ve been taught. It is a learned response. Like the monkeys in the experiment or the dog being trained with treats — we’ve instilled the pattern that wrong is bad to be avoided. And we’ve learned this lesson very, very well — to the point where our physical bodies reinforce the pattern with a stress response.
As a casual example, I am still able to recall vividly the time I sent that email to my boss with defiantly rather than definitely, which I think we can all agree is an amusing mistake — I mean when was the last time you defiantly did anything? But instead of rational amusement, I felt shame and I honestly can’t stop myself from wincing even now.
In stark contrast, my nieces and nephews aren’t taught spelling in the same way that I was. Back when I learnt to read and write, there was a right way and a wrong way to spell words — and gold stars and red crosses to prove it. Nowadays, they’re simply encouraged to sound it out as best they can (which, if you’ve spent any time with the English language, you’ll know is a recipe for misspellings galore!).
And so, merrily they go on about their days, never once cringing that they spelt berthday wrong on their homemade birthday card. They simply don’t categorise it as wrong.
My shameful response to email-gate isn’t necessary. It’s learnt. And it has also has been just outright unhelpful as my main takeaway from the incident has been to avoid using the words defiantly and definitely because they are clearly dangerous.
It’s a trap
Our emotional response to being wrong is a deeply unhelpful trap. And our learned response is, too. Our response to being wrong — this completely understandable, entirely human response — makes us worse at our jobs. Because when we’re in that state — when our throat is tight and our brain is spinning — we don’t think clearly. We can’t. Our brains go full lizard and we lose critical thinking and creativity.
Lizard brain is not analytical. Lizard brain focuses on outputs. It doubles down, goes to ground, is fight or flight. When being wrong is painful, then the safest move is to not make moves at all. Let someone else stick their neck out. Keep your head down. Don’t volunteer. Ping a snarky comment to your workmate over chat but don’t talk in the meeting.
Given the primary value of us being in the room is the fact that we bring critical thinking to the table — well you can see the problem here.
I’ve watched analysts clam up in meetings after being burnt. I’ve been that analyst. We’ve all done it.
Wrong is on the way to being right
The problem with clamming up and being scared to put a foot wrong (hah) is that it isn’t actually an overblown statement to say that innovation is dancing with being wrong. New things are all sorts of wrong. Making change is a kind of wrong. Lots of work we do plays with degrees of wrong.
Heck, isn’t life just a series of mistakes?
Mistakes that you can learn from — or hide from.
Hidden inside that overstated fail fast one-liner is a core nugget of truth that’s less about failing and far more about getting feedback as soon as possible. Despite how we’ve learnt to treat it, wrong isn’t a verdict — we aren’t in court — it’s feedback.
I was asked recently at a panel to name what surprised me about working with other people. And my answer was: being wrong can be fun. I elaborated that I love being right. Being the best. I have a serious A-type personality in many respects. Achiever comes up in my top five strengths every time I do StrengthsFinder (are you terribly surprised?), but I’ve learnt that it’s super unhelpful to be too swayed by that tendency.
Because the best solutions, the best answers, the best outcomes come from leaning into the grey area. By being vulnerable. By being open to feedback. By leaning into the wrongness.
Wrong is on the way to right. Science figured this out ages ago. If you think about it, the whole scientific method is basically a fancy way of being wrong until you’re less wrong. And then doing it all again. Your current understanding of how things work is just a hypothesis that is ready to be proven wrong. And when it is (and it usually is), you simply come up with a refined new hypothesis that now accounts for the new data you’ve collected.
And you test it again.
It’s not about avoiding being wrong — it’s about steadily becoming less wrong. And this is as true at work as it is in a scientific trial.
The problem is ego. We get attached to our ideas and we start identifying with them personally — we treat them as extensions of ourselves — something to be defended. A mindset encouraged by the winner-takes-all approach that is so common in our workplaces. Your ego doesn’t want your idea to be wrong because that would mean you are wrong. Ekkk!
The irony here is that the chance of you being wrong increases dramatically when you go on the defensive and try to be right straight off the bat.
The most successful projects I’ve been on started with someone saying Okay team, I have no idea how to solve this, but here’s what I think we should try first. The disasters? Those started with someone presenting a 102-slide deck showing precisely how to solve the problem.
The opposite approach — freely admitting that you don’t know (yet) is the real winner. When you can separate your identity from your ideas, then you are open to better ideas/outcomes/solutions. When you can admit that you don’t understand something, then you’ve taken the first step to true understanding. It means you can change direction when new info suggests you should, instead of doubling down on a bad idea.
There’s actually no way around it: to be great, you need to lean into wrongness. You need to lean into being absolutely, unapologetically, defiantly — and also definitely — wrong.
Given that, it’s sort of surprising just how disincentivised being wrong is in our workplaces.
No, it’s not a you problem. It’s systematic.
It’s a system issue
Zoom out and you’ll see that the concepts of right and wrong are everywhere you look — perhaps even more than you realise. Once you’re looking for it, then you’ll see it absolutely everywhere.
We humans took this simplistic black-and-white schoolyard thinking and really doubled down. Winners and losers, rights and wrongs are everywhere. On TV, sports days, academic awards, the Olympics, even Real Housewives of Beverly Hills ... and they are at the core how most of our organisations are structured. Most organisations have the concepts of right and wrong baked right into their cultural DNA.
At work as in the schoolyard, we like a good winner. Many actively incentivise being right and (often even more actively) punish being wrong.
Of course, we don’t take a generous approach to these things. Really, we prefer one grand winner. Like being right, being the winner is an insanely small target.
The rest? Well, we’re all losers.
As an aside, it has been interesting to watch the recent erosion of the we’re family facade as the screws are tightened on our economy. The truth is that we were never actually family, we were always in competition, but when the competition wasn’t as brutal, then we could ignore this uncomfortable truth.
It is this schoolyard-style competition to be right that generates all sorts of unhelpful behaviour from everyone involved. Just as we fall into lizard brain thinking, organisations can fall into lizard brain thinking, too.
People defend flawed positions rather than admit uncertainty. People hide unwelcome information, simplify complex problems, and gloss over issues. People go out of their way to minimise their risk of being wrong. Or, in extreme cases, you see people actively avoid making decisions because the risk of being the person to have made a decision that turns out incorrect is too high — if wrong is punished, and there can only be one winner, then the safest position is avoid making a move.
This type of culture is especially detrimental to good quality thinking, which requires comfort with uncertainty, the ability to hold competing ideas, and space to explore.
I have utterly no doubt that you’ve seen this in practice. Perhaps when the architecture team is ramming through a bad enterprise solution because to revisit the decision would require admitting they’ve made a mistake — an expensive one. Or when your boss talks up the achievements of the team in the all hands and somehow manages to avoid mentioning that we definitely didn’t achieve the objectives for the quarter.
In these environments, being right becomes more important than getting it right.
Now, unless you’re the CEO (or are quietly and surprisingly influential), you are unlikely to be able to change the whole system.
But you can change how you operate within it.
You can be great … if you’re prepared to be a bit uncomfortable.
Be uncomfortable
I’ve repeatedly chosen to be uncomfortable in my career. Which is to say I’ve chosen to be wrong a bunch.
Honestly, it was mostly an accident. I took the opportunities I saw. I picked up rocks and then said oh, hey guys, look at this without really understanding what would happen next (some of which was a very unfun surprise). Blind curiosity is how I ended up with my first BA role. It’s how I ended up holding a Lead BA role title. It’s how I ended up here.
As a result, if I look back, being wrong is what I was practicing all this time. And now being wrong no longer has the same sting it used to have. I can’t recall an email-gate-type incident from the last 5 years. I have very few stories of late that make me cringe.
It is not that I have been more right of late — being wrong just doesn’t carry the same sting.
Turns out, being wrong is a skill. And like all skills, you get better at being wrong through practice. Practice builds your being wrong muscles. But what you’re actually practicing isn’t being wrong, but your response to it. What you do when you inevitably are wrong next.
For me, that’s having a go-to phrase. Mine is: oh interesting — I wasn’t thinking about it that way! I use this (or a variant of it) daily. I especially like it because it labels the new information interesting instead of othering it. And if I emphasise it (oh interrrreeessstttinnnnggg) I can signal that I am — actually and genuinely — interested in the new info.
It also takes responsibility for my role, and indicates that it will require additional consideration — while also quietly implying collective action.
You need a go-to phrase. Because without the ability to stand in the wrongness, you’re never going to ever get to being truly right. Choose something that feels natural to you and practice it.
Because, you can build this muscle, and it’s a great muscle to build.
Practice makes better. Practice makes less wrong.
And that’s the point.
Breaking the pattern
The punchline, if you’ve only skimmed this article, is this: Trying to be right will make you worse at your job. Allowing yourself to be openly wrong will make you better.
Because when you’re not terrified of being wrong, then you can tackle big things. Deliver big outcomes. Being wrong more often — ironically — means you end up being right more often.
But maybe not in the way you expected.
So go forth and be definitely wrong. Hell, be wrong defiantly. Secretly, it is how to be right more often.