The error of our ways

Written by Leda Glyptis
20th February 2025

I would like to state for the record that I don’t go through life documenting every experience I have for blogging purposes.

Nobody likes being wrong, but we all are sometimes

Contrary to what you may think, not all experiences trigger a business parallel in my head. Though, admittedly, most do.

A few months ago, I was wrapping up some admin stuff on a project. The specifics are immaterial other than to say that the stuff I needed to do was not complicated per se but a series of dependencies to multiple system-generated codes and reference numbers all relevant to the service provider side and opaque to me… meant I needed help. And because I was deeply uncertain about what was what (let alone why), I had a lot of questions.

As someone who routinely has a lot of questions, I appreciate that the thing about questions is that they can often sound hostile even when they are not.

In fact, the more lost at sea you are… the more hostile your questions may seem. Especially if there is a power asymmetry in the relationship. I remember once asking a junior member of my team why we were doing something. Meaning… genuinely… what are we trying to achieve here?

The team was using a system I was not familiar with to get some performance metrics I couldn’t decipher without help. I was looking at something that might as well have been in a foreign language.

I needed help. I asked for help in the form of a totally open-ended question.

He panicked.

What I was asking is: I have no knowledge or understanding of this thing, please explain it to me.

What he heard was: what the hell are you doing?

Why?

It could be my tone. It could be the fact that when we start our career we assume, by default, that our seniors know all the things and have thought all the things and therefore skip directly to the end where this question is a problem for a telling off.

The point was and remains: asking questions isn’t as neutral and natural as it should be in the workplace. And we should change that.

Because it should be OK to ask questions.

And we should be OK answering them. With good grace.

Which takes me back to my original story. I had questions. Arguably too many of them. Arguably some of them self-evident or stupid. But I personally feel like I was made to feel stupid in the way my queries were handled. Or if not stupid, a nuisance.

And nobody likes to feel this way, so I became a little defensive. But I still had questions. Which didn’t help either side until, eventually, I got some information that turned out to be wrong.

And herein lies the lesson today boys and girls.

Because of everything that had happened before, I was not very charitable when the error materialised.

Am I proud of that? No.

But I am also not ashamed.

It is what it is.

And it is something we should be mindful of when dealing with people: colleagues, clients, suppliers, strangers on the street.

Nobody likes to be wrong. Nobody. Even the most laid back among us. It’s not a nice feeling. It’s disorienting. It’s disappointing. It can cause emotions that range from anger to heartbreak, anxiety, frustration and everything in-between.

I mean.

I have occasionally been wrong and delighted about it. Like the time I thought I had lost a stack of marked essays because I was convinced I had taken them to my office at the end of my teaching day… and they were not in my office at the end of that day when I popped in after dinner to collect my bag… and I had a sleepless night, trying to decide what was worse: admitting to the university that I had lost 150 undergraduate essays and they needed to be printed and re-submitted by said undergraduates or the tedium of re-reading 150 undergraduate essays.

The relief of finding them in my locker the next day was the only time I have enjoyed being wrong that I can recall.

And it’s also why you may see me double and triple-checking things these days in full OCD mode.

That time, I loved being wrong. But that doesn’t happen often. It is usually an unpleasant, frustrating and occasionally embarrassing experience.

I will say it again: nobody likes being wrong.

But we all are sometimes.

Mistakes are made. Even by the most diligent among us.

Oversights. Genuine miscalculations. Or new information becomes available that changes the way we think about things. New data can render our earlier conclusions incorrect.

Sometimes we learn something new that changes our perspective. Sometimes we see the world in a new light because of reflection, time or a conversation that stops us in our tracks.

Sometimes a bet doesn’t play out our way. Sometimes we are unlucky. A glitch in the matrix, the roll of the dice… sometimes we just look up the wrong reference (which is what happened in the story above). It happens.

Sometimes we are just plain wrong. We calculated wrong. We heard wrong. We remembered wrong. We were just wrong.

Any and every choice we make could turn out to be wrong.

Sometimes that can only be known with the benefit of hindsight. Other times we could have made the right decision and didn’t. Because we were careless. Or arrogant. Or distracted. Or rushed. Or misinformed. Or plain stupid.

It happens.

It will always happen. At least occasionally.

And it may not even be you. It may be your team member that is plain stupid, but it makes no difference to the fact that you are now collectively in the wrong. You are, in the words of the one and only Jed Bartlett: wrong. You are standing there in your wrongness being wrong.

So. Since it will happen. Inevitably. At some point… to all of us.

Be nice.

To people.

All the time. At all times. And under all circumstances.

Be respectful. Be kind. Be thoughtful and courteous. Be polite. It doesn’t take much.

It’s not hard. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the decent thing to do. And, as an added bonus, it means that when you are wrong, people may be inclined to help you out of your wrongness.

Give people a reason to help you back up after a fall.

How?

When they get something wrong, hold your hand out to help.

When you get something wrong, hold your hand up and admit it.

When they ask you for help, be helpful. When they realise they missed something, say it happens to all of us. When they make a mistake or ask a stupid question, say it could happen to all of us… because it could. And it does. And when the shoe is on the other foot, they will remember.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.