Talking to someone this week I came across what I decided was both an intriguing and in some ways disturbing concept summed up as “It is better to be strong and wrong than weak and right”.
In other words as a professional adviser it is preferable to have a firm view and to hold to it rather than to be correct but weak in expressing or communicating an opinion even though it is the correct one. We have probably all experienced, perhaps early on in our career, being in a meeting, with very senior colleagues and decision makers all in a hurry to reach a decision, and known what the answer is but not been able to make the meeting listen.
This is quite a natural state of affairs. Bill Clinton said:
“When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody that's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.”
But being wrong can be catastrophic. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 at the head of a huge army he was warned by General Rapp about the extremities of the oncoming winter in Russia. "The natives say we shall have a severe winter," Napoleon retorted scornfully, " Bah! You and your natives! We shall see how fine it is." The rest as they say is history.
I read somewhere that Winston Churchill had a special team whose job was to bring him bad news every day, just in case nobody dared to tell him something he might not want to hear.
In 1999 a team of Lockheed Martin engineers used the English system of measurement, while the rest of the team used the metric system for a Mars orbiter. The use of two different measurement systems prevented the spacecraft's navigation coordinates from being transferred from a spacecraft team in Denver to a lab in California. The orbiter was then lost in space, and NASA was out $125 million. Somebody must have noticed this discrepancy but if so their voice was not heard.
Maybe the lessons here are that firstly it’s really important to speak up and persist in doing so even if yours is the only objecting voice and secondly if you are a decision maker always to find ways to listen. Sometimes it is the small maybe junior voice at the back of the room which stops being strong and wrong being an unmitigated and costly disaster.
In other words as a professional adviser it is preferable to have a firm view and to hold to it rather than to be correct but weak in expressing or communicating an opinion even though it is the correct one. We have probably all experienced, perhaps early on in our career, being in a meeting, with very senior colleagues and decision makers all in a hurry to reach a decision, and known what the answer is but not been able to make the meeting listen.
This is quite a natural state of affairs. Bill Clinton said:
“When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody that's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.”
But being wrong can be catastrophic. When Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812 at the head of a huge army he was warned by General Rapp about the extremities of the oncoming winter in Russia. "The natives say we shall have a severe winter," Napoleon retorted scornfully, " Bah! You and your natives! We shall see how fine it is." The rest as they say is history.
I read somewhere that Winston Churchill had a special team whose job was to bring him bad news every day, just in case nobody dared to tell him something he might not want to hear.
In 1999 a team of Lockheed Martin engineers used the English system of measurement, while the rest of the team used the metric system for a Mars orbiter. The use of two different measurement systems prevented the spacecraft's navigation coordinates from being transferred from a spacecraft team in Denver to a lab in California. The orbiter was then lost in space, and NASA was out $125 million. Somebody must have noticed this discrepancy but if so their voice was not heard.
Maybe the lessons here are that firstly it’s really important to speak up and persist in doing so even if yours is the only objecting voice and secondly if you are a decision maker always to find ways to listen. Sometimes it is the small maybe junior voice at the back of the room which stops being strong and wrong being an unmitigated and costly disaster.
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