The Art of Being Wrong

One of the benefits of being being middle-aged is that you’ve had enough experience of the world that you have answers to lots of questions. Sleepless babies, finals week, bad boyfriends, the anxious wait for test results while shivering in a hospital gown? BTDT. It’s true at work, too – strategies, performance reviews, annual reports: I’ve done each of those things dozens of times or more, and I have rather well-developed opinions on how to go about them. I’m rarely shy about saying so, as you may have noticed.

One of the drawbacks, however, is that no matter how confident I am in my rightness, I am actually right at about the same rate as anyone else of any age, which is to say…I’m wrong a lot. There are two challenges I face with being wrong. The first is simply recognizing that I am wrong, and the second is admitting it. The third challenge, fixing things, is rarely as hard as the first two.

I was wrong in a meeting the other day. I said something should be done one way, and it should have been done another. Doing things the way I suggested would have made people do extra, useless work. The meeting went on, with these people who trusted my judgement planning how to do the useless thing I said they should do. As we were wrapping up and someone mentioned next steps, something clunked into place in my brain and I realized my mistake. What if I hadn’t realized? I worry that sometimes I am wrong and don’t know it but other people do – that, essentially, I am walking around with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. The only way I’ll recognize it is if you tell me. Let us always tell each other about the toilet paper on our shoes.

In the moment when I recognized I had been wrong and led people down a rabbit hole, I wondered if I could get away with not saying anything. I mean, I was wrong, but I hadn’t advised people to break the law or anything. Fessing up to my mistake would mean unwinding decisions and re-doing the last quarter of the meeting, and I was running late. But the real reason I hesitated was because I hate being wrong. Hate it. It’s embarrassing. It makes me feel foolish. I worry that people won’t respect me anymore if they know I am sometimes wrong.

If you are stuck in that moment, trying to decide whether to fess up or not, think about whether your hesitation comes from uncertainty about whether your mistake was consequential or not, or whether it comes from fear of embarrassment. If you actually don’t believe that your mistake matters to other people or the work, by all means let it go. Not everything needs to be corrected. But if you are the kind of person who doesn’t like to be wrong you may avoid calling attention to your error even when it really does matter (or causes other people to look badly or do extra work) because calling attention to it will cause embarrassment.

How to make yourself acknowledge being wrong when you really would rather not? I think the best way is to practice. Start small. Say “oops, I was wrong” about little things, and when it comes to the big important things the choice to own up to error will come easier. It is true that it is both easier and more important for senior folks to own their own wrongness. Senior people can model being wrong and making things right, and can by their example show that they won’t punish being wrong, and that we work in a place where being wrong is not a sin.

No, being wrong isn’t a sin. But being wrong and making people do extra work because you can’t face being wrong just might be. In the end I did own up to being wrong in that meeting the other day, and it really didn’t hurt much at all. I’ll try to remember that next time I think all my experience means I know exactly what I am talking about…but I’m wrong.