he always GETS it right

Andy Grove once told me, over a cup of Jamocha Almond Fudge ice cream at Baskin Robbins in Los Altos, “F*@&ing Steve Jobs always gets it right.”

“Nobody’s always right,” I said.

“I didn’t say Steve IS always right. I said he always GETS it right. Like anyone, he is wrong all the time, but he insists, and not gently either, that people tell him when he’s wrong, so he always gets it right in the end.”

I thought a lot about this conversation over the next couple of years. I think Andy was exactly right: a big part of Steve Jobs’s genius came from his willingness to be proven wrong. Here’s how he described it in his own words:

Jobs: I don’t mind being wrong. And I’ll admit that I’m wrong a lot. It doesn’t really matter to me too much. What matters to me is that we do the right thing. Watch the video >>

In other words, you don’t have to grovel or pretend to be worse than you are. You just need to accept the possibility that whatever you’re saying may be wrong. Don’t be arrogant. Be curious.

Kim Scott

"How to give humble feedback," by Kim Scott. Radical Candor. Accessed August 17, 2022

the coward that dare not know

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.

W.E.B. Du Bois

Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. Taylor & Francis. 2017 edition.  As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World. 

what you don't know

Don't be intimidated by what you don't know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently. 

Sara Blakely

Start With You: How Badass Executives Are Transforming Their Lives (And Business) In Just 12 Quarters by Peter C. C. Fuller. Page Publishing. 2018. As found in 2022 Great Quotes From Great Leaders Boxed Calendar: 365 Inspirational Quotes From Leaders Who Shaped the World. 

suspend your assumption

 

Test your assumption that the meeting is getting derailed. If the team has agreed on the topic to discuss and you still think that someone is off-track, say something like, “Lee, I’m not seeing how your point about outsourcing is related to the topic of our planning process. Help me understand, how are they related?” When Lee responds, you and other team members might learn about a connection between the two topics that you hadn’t considered. For example, Lee might say that outsourcing will free up internal resources so that the team can complete the planning process in less time. If there is a connection, the team can decide whether it makes more sense to explore Lee’s idea now or later. If it turns out that Lee’s comment isn’t related but is still relevant for the team, you can suggest placing it on a future agenda. One caveat: there are times when it is critical to address team members’ issues immediately, even if they are off-track. If team members raise highly emotional issues about how the team is working together, it is important to acknowledge the issue’s importance and then decide whether it is more important to address than the current agenda topic. Sometimes focusing on how the team works together is more critical than focusing on the team’s substantive topics.

This isn’t simply a polite way of dealing with people who are off-track. It’s a way to suspend your assumption that you understand the situation and others don’t, to be curious about others’ views, and to ask people to be accountable for their own contributions so that the team can make an informed choice about how best to move forward. For this approach to work you can’t just say the words; you have to believe that Lee might be on-track and that you don’t see the connection.

Roger Schwarz

“Dealing with Team Members Who Derail Meetings,” Harvard Business Review. September 20, 2013 as quoted in HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter. Harvard Business Review Press. 2016.

only the curious

Only the curious have something to find.

Sean Watkins

Song lyrics can be surprising sources of insight, just like this line from Nickel Creek’s song “This Side” (written by band member Sean Watkins) off their 2002 album of the same name. The track chronicles the story of a person experiencing things for the first time, including all the fear that comes along with change. Slowly, the person becomes more comfortable and can explore new opportunities with confidence. It inspires us to approach the world through a lens of curiosity — to strike out and find and do new things. Because if we remain at home, in a place where we’re comfortable, we’ll never discover anything bigger or find the courage to be comfortable with anything else.

Daily Inspiration. March 27, 2021. Inspiring Quotes. 

be curious when receiving feedback

Be curious. The best inoculation against defensiveness is curiosity. Act like a detective pursuing a mystery called “I wonder why they feel that way?” Ask questions. Request examples. Stay curious until — even if you don’t completely agree — you can see how a reasonable, rational decent person would think what they think. Later, you can decide what you agree or disagree with, but for now, your goal is simply to learn. Curiosity inhibits defensiveness because it keeps the focus off of your self worth and on the experience of others.

Joseph Grenny

"The Key to Giving and Receiving Negative Feedback" by Joseph Grenny. Harvard Business Review. August 6, 2015.

engaging in new experiences

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has identified… an important contributing factor of happiness – engaging in new experiences… that broaden our horizons. “Whenever we discover new challenges,” he writes, “whenever we use new skills, we feel a deep sense of enjoyment. To repeat this desirable feeling, we must find ever higher challenges, build more sophisticated skills; in doing so we help the evolution of complexity move along….”

He popularized this notion in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, and described it as that sense of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Anne Kreamer

It’s Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace. 2011. Random House.

the most basic of all knowledge

A report from the National Center for Clinical Infant Programs makes the point that school success is not predicted by a child’s fund of facts or a precocious ability to read so much as by emotional and social measures: being self-assured and interested; knowing what kind of behavior is expected and how to rein in the impulse to misbehave; being able to wait, to follow directions, and to turn to teachers for help; and expressing needs while getting along with other children.

Almost all students who do poorly in school, says the report, lack one or more of these elements of emotional intelligence (regardless of whether they also have cognitive difficulties such as learning disabilities). The magnitude of the problem is not minor; in some states close to one in five children have to repeat first grade, and then as the years go on fall further behind their peers, becoming increasingly discouraged, resentful, and disruptive.

A child’s readiness for school depends on the most basic of all knowledge, how to learn. The report lists the seven key ingredients of this crucial capacity – all related to emotional intelligence:

1. Confidence. A sense of control and mastery of one’s body, behavior, and world; the child’s sense that he is more likely than not to succeed at what he undertakes, and that adults will be helpful.
2. Curiosity. The sense that finding out about things is positive and leads to pleasure.
3. Intentionality. The wish and capacity to have an impact, and to act upon that with persistence. This is related to a sense of competence, of being effective.
4. Self-control. The ability to modulate and control one’s own actions in age-appropriate ways; a sense of inner control.
5. Relatedness. The ability to engage with others based on the sense of being understood by and understanding others.
6. Capacity to communicate. The wish and ability to verbally exchange ideas, feelings, and concepts with others. This is related to a sense of trust in others and of pleasure in engaging with others, including adults.
7. Cooperativeness. The ability to balance one’s own needs with those of others in group activity.

Daniel Goleman

Emotional Intelligence. Random House LLC, 2006. 358 pages, p.193,194

mapping the coast of the island of knowledge

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

Jamie Holmes

"The Case for Teaching Ignorance" The New York Times. 8/24/2015

ignorance

In the mid-1980s, a University of Arizona surgery professor, Marlys H. Witte, proposed teaching a class entitled “Introduction to Medical and Other Ignorance.” Her idea was not well received; at one foundation, an official told her he would rather resign than support a class on ignorance.

Dr. Witte was urged to alter the name of the course, but she wouldn’t budge. Far too often, she believed, teachers fail to emphasize how much about a given topic is unknown. “Textbooks spend 8 to 10 pages on pancreatic cancer,” she said some years later, “without ever telling the student that we just don’t know very much about it.” She wanted her students to recognize the limits of knowledge and to appreciate that questions often deserve as much attention as answers. Eventually, the American Medical Association funded the class, which students would fondly remember as “Ignorance 101.”

Classes like hers remain rare, but in recent years scholars have made a convincing case that focusing on uncertainty can foster latent curiosity, while emphasizing clarity can convey a warped understanding of knowledge.

In 2006, a Columbia University neuroscientist, Stuart J. Firestein, began teaching a course on scientific ignorance after realizing, to his horror, that many of his students might have believed that we understand nearly everything about the brain. (He suspected that a 1,414-page textbook may have been culpable.)

As he argued in his 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science,” many scientific facts simply aren’t solid and immutable, but are instead destined to be vigorously challenged and revised by successive generations. Discovery is not the neat and linear process many students imagine, but usually involves, in Dr. Firestein’s phrasing, “feeling around in dark rooms, bumping into unidentifiable things, looking for barely perceptible phantoms.” By inviting scientists of various specialties to teach his students about what truly excited them — not cold hard facts but intriguing ambiguities — Dr. Firestein sought to rebalance the scales.

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

Jamie Holmes

"The Case for Teaching Ignorance" The New York Times. 8/24/2015