On Being Wrong at the Right Time

You've told your team you want the bad news early. Almost none of us have built the conditions for it, because the condition is a person: whoever runs the company has to be the first one wrong out loud, and keep his seat, so the rest of the team can see it's survivable. Until then you find out from the results, after the point where it could have been fixed.

The leaders who do this well name the mistake. "I was wrong about that. Here's what I missed." That's a report. A performance of humility would run longer. Admitting ignorance is not humility. Learning is the expression of humility. The team only learns from "Here's what I missed" if it hears it, which is why the sentence gets said in front of people, and the right time to say it is before it costs you anything.

The habit matters most when the plan itself is the mistake. The wrong strategy can drown you when the environment rapidly changes. If you dressed for snowshoeing in the woods, but fall into an icy mountain lake, your planning no longer is useful. A bad year is the icy lake: the plan that was right is now wrong, and the people running the plan have to say so while the stakes are highest. Some teams learn it in the crisis; most that can say it then learned it when nothing was at stake.

A leader who's never wrong in public has taught everyone else in the company to hide their mistakes.