I'm an expert at being wrong

I’m an expert at being wrong

That’s not to say that I’m wrong all the time. I’d hopefully be able to say that I’m wrong less than average. My wife and my friends would most likely tell you that I’m pretty confident about being right all the time (like most people). But it’s important to be good at being wrong, and what that means is to continuously evaluate the assertions you’re operating under, and be quick to recognize when one hasn’t worked out the way you thought it would.

The goal here isn’t to quickly sweep everything under the rug before anyone notices. It’s to hold that error up to examination, discuss it with others, give credit and apologies if necessary to people whose wisdom went unheeded, and figure out how to take away a valuable lesson. If you know even a little bit about science, it’s easy to see here that I’m essentially talking about the scientific method: making an observation, forming a hypothesis, making a prediction, conducting an experiment and finally analyzing the results. Proving your hypothesis wrong in a scientific experiment certainly isn’t as fun as being right, but proving that something doesn’t work is often as useful as knowing that it does.

The trick is to not let the failure dissuade you from continuing on, and to mitigate the consequences. Experts at being wrong are great at getting to failure quickly and efficiently. People who are terrible at being wrong persist in their wrongness for a long time, and rack up a huge consequence debt, falling victim to the sunk costs fallacy.

I’m a Product Manager, and we have developed various versions of the scientific method with various names. Agile Product Development is one of the most well known names for this general concept, and at its heart, it’s about becoming a master at validating ideas. In any field of human endeavor, there’s always a danger of realizing in retrospect that you made some critical error and that the time/effort/money you expended has been wasted. You can mitigate this danger by being extremely cautious and never doing anything, but if you still want to be an innovator and a doer, you can also mitigate the danger by figuring out how to break your idea down into smaller pieces and figuring out how to test the components while keeping the investment as small as possible.

For example, “I think it would be awesome to have a sports car. I could go on thrilling drives on the weekends and maybe even take it to the racetrack.”

A common outcome for an idea like this is:

“It would be cool to have a sports car” → “it sure was a waste of money to buy that sports car”

There are a lot of ways to break down and validate the “it would be cool to have a sports car” idea. Interview people who ran with the same idea and learn what they learned. Join some online forums and take in the chatter. Consider your reasons for wanting a sports car and see if there are simple substitutes. Do I want to impress other people? Am I looking for thrills? Maybe taking up a different adventure sports hobby would achieve a similar or even better outcome. Can I do a smaller scale version of the original idea? Borrow or rent a sports car. Sign up for a racetrack event. Try out go carts.

In product development, the biggest danger is always that you make a huge investment in building and launching something only to discover that nobody wants it. Being successful in business means taking risks, though. It requires taking a leap into uncharted territory. It requires making a bet on a bold idea.

True experts, however, are not playing a game of chance. They’re systematically stacking the deck until success is most likely before making their big investment. Over time, you’re going to be right sometimes, and you’re going to be wrong sometimes. Being an expert at being wrong means setting it up so you make $100 every time you’re right, but you only lose $1 when you’re wrong.

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If you want some help figuring out how to be an innovator but mitigate the risks of being wrong, reach out to me and I'd love to help.