“How might I be wrong?”
It’s not a question that comes naturally to most leaders. After all, we’re hired to have answers, make decisions and project confidence. But after four decades in business – and accumulating more mistakes than I care to count – I’ve become convinced that this single question might be the ultimate expression of what Louis Pasteur called “the prepared mind.”
The Evolution from Know-It-All to Learn-It-All
Early in my career, I wanted to be the guy with all the answers. Fresh out of engineering school, armed with analytical tools and a healthy dose of confidence, I figured my job was to solve problems by being right. The faster I could get to the right answer, the more valuable I’d be to the organization.
Then I encountered a scatter plot that changed everything.
At Frito-Lay, our team was investigating what drove the effectiveness of key items distributed via direct store delivery (DSD). I was absolutely certain the associates who ordered, merchandised and delivered the products on each DSD route were distributing products in a random fashion unrelated to the sales velocity those products would generate. The initial data seemed to confirm my hypothesis when we looked at a scatter plot showing no relationship between routes and performance. Case closed, right?
But something felt off, so we kept digging. Second question. Third question. Fourth. The real breakthrough came when we shifted from “How do we prove we’re right?” to “How might we be wrong?” That simple reframe led us to discover an equation that predicted route performance with 88% accuracy – a finding that transformed our understanding of how our basic incentive systems drove behavior.
That moment taught me something profound. The prepared mind isn’t just ready to discover new information. It’s fully prepared to discover that the information it has might be incomplete or incorrect.
In today’s AI-driven world, where change can happen at unprecedented speeds, this distinction matters more than ever. What we “know” today might be obsolete tomorrow. Leaders who cling to being right about specific outcomes will find themselves unprepared for the only certainty we have – continuous change.
Scaling the Joy of Wrongness Across Teams
When leaders model the willingness to be wrong, it creates something magical – psychological safety at scale.
Think about it. If the CEO can say, “I might be wrong about this; what do you think?” it signals to everyone that the goal isn’t to protect egos or maintain the illusion of infallibility. The goal is to get closer to truth, faster.
When working through a complex challenge, the moment someone says, “How might we be wrong about this?” the entire dynamic shifts. Instead of defending positions, we start exploring possibilities – and creating a competitive advantage.
Teams that feel safe being wrong learn faster than teams that must pretend they’re always right. They surface problems earlier. They iterate more quickly. They adapt to changing conditions without emotional overhead.
Proactive culture building looks like this:
- Celebrating teams who change course based on new evidence.
- Rewarding people who surface inconvenient but important truths.
- Distinguishing between the quality of decision-making and the outcome of the decisions.
- Creating space for people to express doubt or skepticism without career risk.
This is People First in action. When you make it safe for people to question and admit uncertainty, you’re accessing the full intellectual capacity of individuals and teams across the enterprise.
The Prepared Mind Advantage
There can be genuine excitement – and unexpected joy – in discovering that a mental model is incomplete and that reality is more nuanced or more promising than initially imagined.
This joy of wrongness compounds over time. The more comfortable you become with being wrong, the more questions you’re willing to ask. The more questions you ask, the faster you learn. The faster you learn, the better your decisions become — not because you’re never wrong, but because you get wrong faster and are able to start course-correcting sooner.
In my experience, the leaders who thrive in times of disruption aren’t the ones who have all the answers. They’re the ones who have all the questions, including the most essential question of all – “How might I be wrong?”
The prepared mind that’s truly ready for anything is the mind that’s prepared to be wrong about everything. And that, paradoxically, might be the most right thing of all.