A New Year's Resolution: Reclaiming the Gift of Being Wrong

Sometimes heaven is just a new pair of glasses.? Father Ed Dowling, advisor to the Founder of AA

Here’s a new, New Year’s Resolution:? This next year my goal is to recognize when I am wrong earlier and more often.? Let’s unpack that.?? Certainly, we have become a society heavily invested – I would say over-invested – in being “right.” Yet, as much as we have been wrong in recent times, you would think we would have gotten better at it.

We did not find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were not able to keep our doctor if we liked our doctor under Obamacare.? Mexico did not pay for the wall.? President Biden was not sharp as a tack.? Roe vs. Wade turned out not to be established law.? Russian collusion did not get Trump elected President in 2016 and Hunter Biden’s laptop story was not a Russian disinformation operation.? Much of what experts told us initially about Covid was spurious.? The Southern Border was not secure.? The January 6 storming of the capital did not end Donald Trump’s political career. ?So many of our hot takes are really a hot mess.

And, we have been just as wrong in our personal lives:? The job that was going fine until it didn’t.? Our health challenge that came out of the blue.? That vital family or friend relationship that blew up.? The mental health or addiction issue that became a full-blown crisis.? The congregational split in our church.? We thought we knew, had it figured out and then we find out that we did not know – that we were wrong about what became an uninvited reality.?

Being wrong alone is one thing, but when we get into narrow, homogeneous, purity-focused groups – we can become exponentially even more wrong.? In my 2017 Huffington Post article, “The New Religion: Destructive Escalation.” I described a psychological process that can move opposing parties down a path of growing polarization and conflict. Researcher Cass Sunstein calls it the law of group polarization concluding it “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”? David French nets it out: “the more ideologically or theologically ‘pure’ an institution becomes, the more wrong it is likely to be, especially if it takes on a difficult or complex task.? Ideological monocultures aren’t just bad for the minority’s that’s silenced, harassed or canceled…it’s terrible for the confident majority – and for the confident majority’s cause.”? ??

This same group dynamic helps explain research that finds the more news partisans watch, the more wrong they are likely to be about the actual positions of their opponents.? Knowing more may actually result in knowing less. Experts and credentials are wonderful things but their ability to be righteously wrong can be breath-taking.?? Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia provided a jarring example in his 1997 Capitol Rotunda speech describing the Germany of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews: “You will have missed the most frightening aspect of it all, if you do not appreciate that it happened in one of the most educated, most progressive, most cultured countries in the world.” In the words of the late Charles Krauthammer: “There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.”?

Adding insult to injury, is anything more galling than coming to grips with the fact that someone you dislike or even hate is right – and you are wrong on a topic or issue?? Is anything more valuable than discovering you are wrong about something, earlier and in time to correct it by turning around?? The biblical term for this is repent.? The more secular term is acting on feedback.? Somewhere along the way, we as a culture seem to have forgotten just how valuable it is to accept being wrong and then make a mid-course correction.???

Think where democrats might be if they could have admitted earlier that President Biden’s mental acuity was impaired.? Or, where President-elect Trump might be if he could have admitted the wrongs of January 6 or that he lost the election in 2020.? Think where organized religion might be if it were better at admitting wrongs. For Christians, isn’t it ironic that Jesus greatest anger was directed at a group of righteous religious leaders – the Pharisees – not the so-called sinners. ?Think where each of us could have benefited from recognizing, admitting and correcting wrongs earlier.? Sometimes when we admit our wrongs, it gives others permission to also.?

By admitting it when we are wrong, we bolster our case for when we are right.? Oh, that President-elect Trump and the new administration can become confident enough to admit when they are wrong over the next four years.? It is risky to trust a leader who doesn’t know or won’t admit when they are wrong – it is not a strength, but a weakness.

Organizing Your Life for Correction

It is truly ironic that our ability to be more “right” requires us to discern when we are wrong.? Said differently, the best way to be right is to confidently recognize when we are wrong; a sure way to be and stay wrong is to resist admitting it and eschew turning around.? As Amanda Ripley, author of High Conflict describes it, “telling people to reject hate and choose love will not work.? Because people swept up in high conflict do not think of themselves as full of hate, even if they are.? They think of themselves as right.”? One of the reasons that power corrupts is the more right a leader has been in the past, the harder it is to be open to the possibility of being wrong about the future.?

Comedian and political commentator Bill Mahr, a devout Trump detractor, recently said that he is not going to “pre-hate” the new administration but will wait and respond to what actually happens.? We could all do with less pre-hate.? ??

How about in 2025, we commit to be righteous less, and to admitting our wrongs more often and sooner.? Don’t worry, life and reality will present ample opportunities.? What might that look like to be more curious, less judgmental and to organize our lives to take advantage of being wrong? Let me revisit an example I have used in this space before:

The late leadership guru Stephen Covey famously observed that an airplane taking off with a clear destination in mind, is off course at least 90% of the time due to weather conditions, turbulence and other factors.? In fact, at just 1% off the plane will veer 92 feet off course per mile flown.? For a 1,000-mile flight, that means the plane would miss the landing destination by 17 miles.? However, feedback to the pilot/auto-pilot allows for constant course corrections and to land the plane on a runway, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

And sometimes, just like in real life, the pilot even has to divert the plane to a different airport destination due to weather or other unforeseen circumstances.? This can be accomplished not because of an assumption that the plane will always be on course.? Rather, it is designed with the assurance that most of the time it will be off course. ?Thus it is guided by a navigation system of constant update, correction and redundancy that accounts for the inability to be “right” on course the whole time.

This provides a key lesson for leaders.? The fear of being wrong is often an obstacle to decisive decision-making.? Yet often the race for innovation and competitive advantage is really a race to be “wrong” or fail sooner in order garner the advantages that enable becoming “right” sooner with new direction, products, processes and approaches.? ?Post-it notes were born out of a failed attempt to make stronger adhesives.? Coca Cola resulted from an unsuccessful attempt to make cough syrup.? The discovery of penicillin was made possible by a mistake with unattended Petri dishes. ?And, who can forget General Eisenhower’s famous June 5, 1944 hand-written note “the blame is solely mine,” anticipating the possibility of a D-Day failure ??

And, so it is for all of us.? Learning, growing, and developing requires us to confidently seek where we are off course, admit it and make the effort to correct.? It requires being much less invested in “being right,” and more invested in “becoming” right.

Making Resistance Our New Best Friend

So, why are we so adverse to feedback, correction and change?? Recent college grads seem to especially struggle with receiving constructive feedback.? One reason is how we view negative feedback.? Feedback is often perceived as a form of resistance that undermines our credibility or worth.? It also begs corrective action that requires us to consider the possibility we are wrong and make an effort to turn around.? Often our knee jerk is to resist resistance.? We need to rethink how we view resistance.? Let me present a second airplane example I have used previously in this space because it is the best example I can think of:

According to the OAG, an average of 100,000 commercial flights take-off in the U.S. each day.? Each of those flights will take-off (and land) going into the wind. Why will they purposefully encounter such friction (air) – a force that opposes their motion? No matter how strong the thrust from their engine, it will not lift the plane.? Each flight will seek the friction, called drag, that converts thrust into lift – to fly. Too much friction means no movement. Too little friction means no lift.

In order to fly, we need forward thrust but we also require resistance.? Feedback that tells us we might be wrong is a mechanism for becoming right.? It means seeking friction-enabled vs. frictionless progress. ??The question is how do we take advantage of resistance, in the form of feedback, to lift us to higher levels? ?Let me suggest five keys:

1.???? Lean into the possibility of being wrong earlier:? the more open you are to the possibility of being wrong the earlier you have the opportunity to correct and become more right.? And, like Eisenhower, you will often be affirmed for being right.?

2.???? Lean into the possibility of being wrong more frequently:? the accelerating rate of change from breakthroughs like Artificial Intelligence means there will be more opportunities to be wrong.? You will need to be wrong more often just to keep up.

3.???? Let go of the illusion of certainty:? The tagline of California Psychics (advertised frequently on radio) is “Discover the joy of certainty.” Let me suggest an alternative: “Discover the joy of uncertainty” or perhaps “faith.”? False certitude is the riskiest form of uncertainty.? ??

4.???? Tie your self-worth less to being right: instead place your confidence in learning and becoming right by being open to being wrong.

5.???? Diversify your political investment portfolio: understand that the more you narrow who you hang out with, the greater the risk of becoming increasingly wrong.

There is a reason so many of the great biblical parables such as the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan and secular stories like the Boy Who Cried Wolf and Cinderella, are about coming to grips with being wrong.? As much as we would all like to be right, the great turnarounds come from recognizing when we are wrong and then correcting.? What a fertile ground – looking to find a new way of seeing, perhaps with new glasses, that helps us identify where we are wrong and then attempting to find how we might be more right. If in 2025, we can reap the benefits of resistance and correction – we might all be lifted.

Robert's latest book, "This Land of Strangers: The Relationship Crisis That Imperils Home, Work, Politics and Faith," is now in paperback. A "recovering CEO," he has authored 200 published articles and his work has appeared in The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post, The CEO Magazine. His website: www.robertehall.com