[Reading time: 1 minute 24 seconds]
Yesterday I talked to you about doing things right.
Today, I want to talk about being wrong.
But not just any old wrong, but the right kind of wrong.
Engineering is full of surprises: technical, or human, or business. And surprises in engineering have this annoying tendency to be the bad kind.
So inevitably things won’t go the way you want them to. Or perhaps you learn of a better way to do something.
Now, you could just hang your head and decide that life’s unfair, and an engineer’s life in particular.
Or… you could turn being wrong into an exercise in doing the right thing.
Because being wrong isn’t bad, receiving painful consequences of being wrong is.
Just like falling out of an airplane isn’t particularly dangerous – the sudden stop at the end of the fall is :-)
So the wise person would perhaps strap on a parachute, so that falling out of an airplane is mostly just a change of perspective.
And similarly, being wrong could in the best case just mean having new information.
If you get that information early enough, it’s very valuable – you can change course appropriately, and come out stronger.
Only being wrong at the wrong time (i.e., too late) is bad: precisely because the information won’t do you any good anymore.
So the fundamental art of being wrong is to be wrong at the right time, and bring yourself in a position to learn and react.
This is the secret to building great things: to not fear being wrong, but working with it. To actively seek risk early, discover what’s going on, and feed those discoveries back into the development process.