Are You Brave Enough to Be Wrong?

October 26, 2011

I just finished watching great TED talk by Kathryn Schulz on Being Wrong.  Go ahead and watch it now… It starts slow, but bear with me. It has an important message.  Pay close attention to her slide on the “series of unfortunate assumption.” Brilliant!

As I listened to her, I reflected on how her talk applies to the world of early stage technology companies and their VCs.

I am surrounded in my professional life by people (mostly men) who are very smart, very hard working, very passionate about what they do and think… and very very passionate about being right all the time.

We tend to pay the usual homage to our humility and our readiness to accept that we are not perfect or that we can be wrong. The reality is that most of us really hate being wrong, or hate admitting that we are wrong. There is a strong undercurrent within us that being wrong – or admitting to it – is a sign of weakness. Especially in the situations where we are trying to get our point of view across to others who have equally strong points of view.

The reality is that we make mistakes all the time. Sometimes we realize our mistakes and acknowledge them to ourselves and others. But most of the time, we don’t even realize it because even if we have the open mind to admit our mistakes, we may not have the information to realize when and how we’re wrong. Kathryn calls it “Error Blindness.”

The illusion of being right is a huge problem in early stage companies. A startup is all about making mistakes. Mistakes are inherent when creating something new because its newness means venturing into the unknown.

The quickest path to startup success is the rapid execution of a long series of small experiments and the rapid iterations based on learning from mistakes. Eric Ries’ Lean Startup journey is all about this concept.

Fear of being wrong (or the inability to recognize when you’re wrong) is the biggest impediment to finding the optimal path to success.

Think about that the next time you passionately argue a point with someone that is trying to show you where you may be wrong.

Think about this the next time you bash someone for being wrong. Instead, celebrate his/her wrongness and use the time to realize your own. Then learn from it.

Be brave enough to be wrong!

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.