The People You Don’t Worry About
Every workplace has people you don't worry about. They're capable, dependable and quietly get things done. But reliability has a strange side effect: sometimes, it makes people invisible.
Read →On expertise, expectations, and the uncomfortable business of not knowing everything.
There are three words that ought to be perfectly acceptable in any professional environment.
“I don’t know.”
They’re honest. They’re unambiguous. And, depending on the circumstances, they might be the most useful words anyone in the room can say.
Yet there’s something remarkably uncomfortable about saying them.
Particularly when you’re the person everyone expects to have the answer.
I’ve spent much of my professional life working with technology. Solving problems, understanding systems, finding solutions and, occasionally, working out why something that functioned perfectly well yesterday has decided that today simply isn’t its day.
Over time, you develop experience. You become familiar with the peculiarities of your environment. You learn where to look when things go wrong, which questions to ask and, perhaps most importantly, which assumptions not to make.
People begin to rely on that experience.
And somewhere along the way, an interesting thing happens.
You begin to rely on it too.
Not simply as a collection of skills and knowledge, but as part of how you measure yourself.
You become the person who knows.
Which is wonderful.
Until you don’t.
The Expectations We Create
It’s tempting to assume that the pressure to have all the answers comes from other people.
Sometimes it does. Organisations need decisions, colleagues need support, and businesses generally prefer certainty to ambiguity.
But I suspect that, at least in my case, the greatest pressure comes from somewhere considerably closer to home.
Myself.
I expect myself to understand the systems I’m responsible for. I expect to anticipate problems, identify risks and make sensible decisions. When something goes wrong, my instinct isn’t simply to ask what happened.
It’s to ask why I didn’t see it coming.
And those are two very different questions.
The first encourages investigation.
The second can become an accusation.
Of course, accountability matters. If a decision I’ve made causes a problem, I have a responsibility to understand what happened and do what I reasonably can to put it right.
But there’s a distinction between accepting responsibility for an outcome and believing that every undesirable outcome represents a personal failure.
It’s a distinction that’s remarkably easy to recognise when discussing somebody else’s mistakes.
Rather less so when examining your own.
The Curse of Hindsight
Technology provides an almost endless supply of opportunities to be wrong.
A software update introduces an unexpected problem. An integration behaves differently in production. A carefully constructed report reveals an assumption buried somewhere in its calculations. A solution that appeared perfectly sensible six months ago suddenly looks rather less convincing.
And when the cause finally becomes apparent, there’s often a familiar reaction.
Of course. I should have spotted that.
Perhaps.
But should you?
There’s a fundamental difference between what was knowable at the time and what becomes obvious afterwards.
Once you’ve discovered the cause of a problem, it’s extraordinarily difficult to remember what the situation looked like before you knew the answer.
The evidence seems clearer. The warning signs become more prominent. The alternative decisions appear obvious.
Yet none of that necessarily reflects the information you actually had when the decision was made.
Experience makes this particularly complicated.
The more you learn, the more things you become aware of that could potentially go wrong. Your knowledge expands, but so does the list of things you believe you ought to have anticipated.
Expertise, rather inconveniently, doesn’t eliminate uncertainty.
It often makes you more aware of it.
Confidence Is Not Certainty
One of the more peculiar expectations placed on technical professionals is that expertise should produce definitive answers.
Ask someone with limited experience whether a proposed solution will work, and they may confidently tell you that it will.
Ask someone who has spent twenty years dealing with similar systems, and you’re rather more likely to receive a response beginning with:
“Well, that depends…“
This isn’t necessarily indecision.
It’s often experience recognising complexity.
There are dependencies, exceptions, historical decisions, undocumented behaviours and the occasional piece of software that appears to operate according to principles known only to its original developer.
The experienced professional understands that a seemingly simple question can conceal an impressive number of complications.
But that creates a communication problem.
Businesses need to make decisions. They cannot indefinitely postpone action while every possible uncertainty is investigated.
So we have to find a balance.
We need sufficient confidence to recommend a course of action, while retaining enough humility to acknowledge that our understanding may be incomplete.
Being confident in your ability to investigate, adapt and respond is not the same as being certain that your initial assessment is correct.
And perhaps we should spend more time distinguishing between the two.
The Leadership Contradiction
There’s another dimension to this that becomes increasingly important when responsibility extends beyond your own work.
People learn from what leaders do, not simply what they say.
I can tell a colleague that making mistakes is part of learning. I can encourage experimentation, support someone who’s taken a reasonable risk, and reassure them that an unexpected outcome doesn’t automatically mean they made a poor decision.
I can believe every word of it.
But what happens when I make a mistake myself?
If my response is frustration, excessive self-criticism or an immediate determination to prove that I should have known better, what message does that send?
Perhaps not the one I intended.
There’s something contradictory about encouraging other people to accept uncertainty while refusing to extend the same courtesy to yourself.
And the difficulty is that this behaviour doesn’t necessarily come from arrogance or an unwillingness to admit fault.
Sometimes it comes from caring deeply about the quality of your work.
From taking responsibility seriously.
From wanting to be someone others can depend upon.
Those aren’t bad qualities.
But even good qualities can become counterproductive when taken to extremes.
A leader who believes they must always be right may become reluctant to delegate decisions, hesitant to explore unfamiliar approaches or unnecessarily cautious about admitting uncertainty.
Not because they lack competence.
But because they’ve made being competent inseparable from being correct.
The Difference Between Wrong and Careless
None of this means we should celebrate mistakes indiscriminately.
There’s a fashionable tendency in management circles to talk about embracing failure as though every unsuccessful decision represents some profound learning opportunity.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes someone simply hasn’t done their homework.
There’s a meaningful difference between taking a considered risk with incomplete information and making a careless decision without examining the available evidence.
Being willing to be wrong doesn’t remove the obligation to think critically, challenge assumptions or consider the consequences of our actions.
Quite the opposite.
It requires us to take those responsibilities seriously while acknowledging that even a well-reasoned decision can produce an unexpected result.
The quality of a decision cannot always be judged solely by its outcome.
A poor decision can occasionally produce an excellent result.
A good decision can occasionally produce a disaster.
The important questions are whether the reasoning was sound, whether the available evidence was considered and whether we’re prepared to change our position when new information emerges.
Which brings us to perhaps the most difficult part of the entire exercise.
Admitting that something we believed was correct might not be.
The Uncomfortable Business of Changing Your Mind
We tend to associate consistency with credibility.
Someone who maintains a clear position appears decisive. Someone who changes their mind can appear uncertain, inconsistent or easily influenced.
But surely the ability to revise a conclusion when presented with better evidence should be considered a strength?
In technology, we accept this principle almost instinctively.
We test hypotheses. We examine results. We modify configurations, rewrite code and reconsider designs when the evidence tells us something isn’t working.
At least, that’s the theory.
In practice, it’s surprisingly easy to become attached to a solution simply because we were the person who proposed it.
The more time, effort and personal credibility we’ve invested in an idea, the harder it can become to acknowledge that another approach might be better.
And this isn’t exclusively a technical problem.
It appears in management decisions, organisational strategies, recruitment, project planning and almost every situation where somebody has committed themselves publicly to a particular course of action.
Changing your mind can feel like admitting defeat.
Yet refusing to change your mind in the face of contradictory evidence seems a considerably more serious failure.
Perhaps credibility shouldn’t come from never changing our position.
Perhaps it should come from being able to explain why we have.
A Work in Progress
I wish I could finish this by explaining that I’ve learned to accept my mistakes with grace, maintain a healthy perspective and approach every unexpected outcome as a valuable opportunity for personal development.
Unfortunately, that would be rather dishonest.
I still find it frustrating when something doesn’t work as expected.
I still replay decisions and wonder whether I should have spotted something earlier.
And I still occasionally hold myself to standards that I would never dream of imposing on somebody else.
Intellectually, I understand that nobody can know everything.
Emotionally, I haven’t always caught up with that conclusion.
But perhaps recognising the contradiction is a reasonable place to start.
Because the objective shouldn’t be to stop caring about the quality of our work, lower our standards or become indifferent to the consequences of our decisions.
Those standards matter.
The challenge is learning to separate them from the unrealistic expectation that competence should somehow make us infallible.
To recognise that admitting uncertainty doesn’t diminish expertise.
That changing our minds doesn’t automatically undermine credibility.
And that making a mistake doesn’t invalidate everything we knew before making it.
We don’t necessarily need to become comfortable with being wrong.
I suspect most of us never will be.
But perhaps we can become a little more comfortable with the possibility.
Because ultimately, being wrong isn’t evidence that we shouldn’t have been trusted to try in the first place.
It’s simply part of what happens when imperfect people attempt to make sensible decisions in an imperfect world.
And, despite everything we know about technology, management and human behaviour, that’s one system we’re unlikely to patch anytime soon.
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