The value and inevitability of being proven wrong

Do you like being proved wrong? If you work in enterprise technology, I hope that you do, because it’s an essential part of the job.

Working in enterprise technology means that you are in the business of making predictions: small predictions, such as how many stories you are going to complete in this sprint; medium predictions, such as whether this partner is going to deliver the project successfully; and big predictions, such as whether this technology is going to make an impact on people’s lives.

I have got every single one of these predictions wrong at some stage in my career. My favourite example of getting a big prediction wrong is the way that I thought about QR codes.

I first encountered QR codes when I was working on a project to upgrade the scanning of inbound correspondence for an organisation that handled a lot of letters. The manager of the scanning department proposed putting something that he called ‘two dimensional bar codes’ on company forms, so that they could be recognised more easily when we received them. This seemed like a good idea and we partially implemented it - but it felt like we were trying to solve an old-fashioned and temporary problem: how to deal with pieces of paper. Surely all of this interaction would move online, and the number of letters would become negligible?

It’s worth noting the context within which I formed this opinion: the project took place shortly before the launch of the first iPhone. Digital cameras were rapidly replacing film cameras, but the idea that everyone would be carrying a high quality optical scanning device in their pockets seemed unthinkable.

My experience in the scanning project may also have influenced my later reaction when I saw QR codes being used as means of exchanging data with people. This was firmly in the smartphone era, but mostly outside the UK, in countries where QR codes were used for payments, menus and ordering. My initial thought was that this seemed like an old-fashioned response to a modern problem: we were using printed images to communicate with devices that were equipped with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC communications. Surely we should just get the machines to talk to the machines, without humans having to point a camera at a code.

Once again, it’s worth noting the context. At this time, there was a growing interest in the Internet of Things, and in experiences such as contactless payments. It seemed reasonable to believe that we would soon be living in a world of devices that interacted all the time, not just at the till or on entry to public transport. That world may still be on its way, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

I think that my attitude to QR codes changed as we started to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown rules were partially, but not fully, eased. Businesses needed to figure out quickly how to limit physical contact, and often did not have the capacity or capability to build sophisticated apps. A QR code that linked to a menu became a simple, durable solution: it could be stuck to a table, inside or outside, it didn’t need any batteries, and you could expect most customers to have some way to read it.

Now, despite my prediction, QR codes seem ubiquitous. I got it wrong.

The main lesson here is not about the utility of QR codes. They are not perfect: they don’t always work, the URLs they link to are often broken, they exclude people who don’t have means of scanning them, and they can easily be spoofed and used for misdirection or malware. But they do provide a low cost, reliable way of inserting a little bit of digital data into the physical world, and that turns out to be a useful thing.

The real lesson is how easy it is to be wrong about the value, adoption and persistence of any new technology. If I had thought a bit more about QR codes, and done a bit more research into how they were being used, then I might have built them into more solutions, and delivered more value, faster, to more people.

As enterprise technologists, I think we have to borrow some concepts from science. In science, being proved wrong is regarded as useful, informative and revealing. Good experiments are designed to prove hypotheses wrong as well as right. It’s hard for us to design experiments that involve the adoption of technologies by whole societies, but we can keep our eyes open and challenge our preconceptions.

There’s nothing wrong with being wrong: in the field of enterprise technology, it is inevitable. But there is something wrong with staying wrong, and we can avoid staying wrong by looking for experiences which challenge our beliefs and reflect reality, whether we are checking progress against a plan, the state of mind of a team, or how a technology is being used by real people. We can learn to enjoy the experience of being proved wrong, because it's the only way we can learn to be more right.

(Views in this article are my own.)