Confusion should be part of your Reputation

Full disclosure: I rarely choose to listen to Taylor Swift, but I have heard her music. I know I like Ryan Adams cover of her entire 1989 album: Say you'll remember me! As a human on this planet, I know that Swifties are a thing, and I just found out about "Kaylor Shippers" (do your own Google search for that one).

I was impressed this morning to find out that Reputation, Swift's latest album is going to break records. I was more than impressed. I was surprised! Here's why. This is the first review I read of the music on the album:

Taylor Swift’s New Single Is a Failure of Imagination.

Note the capitalization there - it was the title of the article. You can imagine the rest of the review - Taylor’s idea of reinvention, on the other hand, seems to be the sonic and stylistic equivalent of an extra coat of eyeliner. Invisible everywhere except in the mirror’s reflection - and that was only a review for the first song!

Contrast that scalding review with what I read this morning:

It’s her refusal to have to choose between delightfully effervescent sonic values and raw, classic candor that makes “Reputation” the pop album of the year ... It might be the album of next year, too. If your poptimism fails you, as you wonder whether there are enough great acts to keep hit radio stocked with worthy hits, it’s reassuring to find that “Reputation” might have just about enough first-rate future singles to carry us through the next 12-18 months, all by itself.

I was befuddled, stunned, and puzzled by the difference. I was confused. So confused I went to metacritic to see which review was more accurate:

WOW! Lots of goodness here! Anyone would want a report card, quarterly review, or performance report (or any other sort of evaluation) that looks like this. The album is just barely out and it's already the #3 Most Shared AND Most Talked about album of 2017 (see the upper right corner). And look at the reviews at the top of the list! Clearly the first reaction I read was the outlier.

We often think of confusion as a negative state. And indeed, it can be. You don't want a driving instructor confused about which foot pedal in a car is the break or the gas. But, in simple terms, confusion is uncertainty. Look what it made me do: find more data and, eventually, listen to new music.

For leaders the relationship between confusion and reputation is tricky. No leader wants to be known as being confused. But masking confusion also masks opportunities to learn and that limits leadership.

Good leaders do something tricky: they build confusion into their leading.

Here's a cool example from research on the Italian film industry. The researchers found that director's artistic reputation enhanced a film's performance. But part of that was driven by the director's relying on new collaborators in each film rather than bringing in the same group each time. New collaborators forced the directors to move away from their routines. In essence, sowing confusion. As a result the directors could learn, experiment, and try new things. On average, the result was a film that was more creative.

Building confusion into our habits of leading is critical because, just as my initial assessment of Swift's new album was based on a single source of data, the same is true of many of the beliefs that fuel our interactions every single day. Each of us has some situation we're reading completely incorrectly because we've relied on one source of information when others were available. Confusion, if acknowledged and explored, allows us to systematically update those beliefs, giving us more ideas to draw from, more fuel for creativity, and more information for accurate decision making.

What are you doing to make sure you're confused on a regular basis? What is happening to your reputation if you're not?

Maybe there's more wisdom Swift can offer:

We're happy free confused and lonely at the same time / Tonight's the night when we forget about the deadlines, it's time uh oh!

On second thought, let's just stick with the idea that confusion can be good.