The Joy of Being Wrong

The first time I attended a TED conference, I met Juliet Blake, a British media executive working in the US, with strawberry blonde hair and a daughter named Lily. Snap! In each of those details, she was like me—so I liked her instantly. By the end of the conference, people mistook us for sisters. This is the nature of bias: to the degree that we see people, places and things that remind us of previous experiences, we respond to them with attitudes built on the past. Bias bestows an evolutionary advantage—in a crisis, it calls on all your pre-existing knowledge—but it also forecloses more thoughtful assessment.

Everyone now knows this makes hiring tortuous. But it’s worse than that. In the gig economy, there’s rarely enough time or exposure to change our minds. Much of the work I do is short term: speaking engagements, a quick project, a time-constrained meeting. First impressions remain because there’s no time to develop anything else. No time to learn.

But recently, on the retirement of a colleague from an organization I have worked with for many years now, I thought back to my first impression of him. Strait-laced. Corporate. Rigid. Unimaginative. Nice enough but conventional.

I could not have been more wrong. Because, over the years, I had the opportunity to spend time with him in meetings and various engagements, I came to see that every assumption I had made was incorrect. He had real depth, intelligence and originality and far more integrity than could be seen at first glance.

I’d like to say that my mistake and its correction was a unique experience, but it isn’t. Like everyone else, the biological basis of bias zooms into action each time I meet someone new. The big difference now is that I am super-superstitious of my initial response. It isn’t always wrong—but often enough that I’ve learned (I hope) to treat it only as a possibility, not a truth. I’ve also learned how wonderful it is to discover I was wrong; it means I’m still learning. That’s the value of disconfirmation.

But it is a built-in cost of the gig economy. Its efficiency—faster, cheaper—is its fatal flaw. Fast: there’s no time to learn. Cheap: nobody on either side invests in relationships. Biases are reinforced not reviewed. No investment, no return, nobody learns much of anything. For aspiring managers, this is a disaster because they lose the opportunity—and I think it is an opportunity—to experience just how wrong they can be. Biases remain unchallenged, rigid and entrenched.

Bias brought Juliet Blake and me together. So I owe it a lot. But time has made us friends. She is, of course, a far deeper, more creative, fun and brave individual than my fatuous first impression conveyed. That has been our good luck: to have had time to get to know each other far better than that first encoutner. Looking back, I have had a lot of colleagues whom I esteem highly, but not because they’re like me, but because I had time to correct my prejudices and to appreciate their complex capacity across a range of situations. In a gig economy, or when working remotely, I wonder how frequently we get people wrong, and how rarely we get the chance to learn. Forget anti-bias training; it’s time together that teaches.

If you want to go further

The TED conference where I met Juliet was where I recorded my first talk, Dare to Disagree. Disagreement is also how we learn, but for that you need people not like you…otherwise, you’re wilfully blind.

For the love of it

I was in Rome recently, where I visited my favourite work of art there, a bronze statue known as The Boxer. Reputed to be one of the earliest statues of an ordinary person—neither a god nor a ruler—and with a lifetime of battles and scars on his body, he sits in a huge empty room at the Palazzo Massimo. In its vast silent bulk, this never fails to move me. I visit him every time I’m in town.