Are You Trying to Be Right or Are You Trying to Get It Right? Part Two

Part Two – The Judgment Trap: Don’t confuse the vivid with the important.

In Part One, I explored the difference between defending a position and testing it. But even when we want to get it right, our brains can lead us toward some predictable traps.

We naturally give disproportionate weight to what is dramatic, recent or emotionally powerful. One unhappy customer can become “the customer view.” One bad quarter can become “the strategy isn’t working.” One difficult employee can suddenly become “a culture problem.” But vivid and in your face doesn’t necessarily mean important.

A useful leadership question we might want to entertain is whether what we are seeing is a meaningful signal or simply a vivid one.

There is another trap: Experience.

Experience gives us pattern recognition. It helps us make sense of complexity and act quickly. But patterns can quietly become assumptions. And the more senior we become, the more valuable intuition can be, and the more costly it can be when our intuition is wrong.

So perhaps the question isn’t whether we should trust our experience. It is rather:

How do we use experience without becoming stuck in it?

Getting it right requires enough curiosity to pause, test the pattern and ask whether what we are seeing is actually representative. Sometimes the most important piece of information is the one that doesn’t fit our story.