You're right about the wrong thing

There's a version of being right that costs you the thing you were trying to protect. It never feels like losing while it's happening. It feels like being thorough.

Two mugs

We have a lot of mugs. Most of them are just mugs.

But we have two good ones. One says San Francisco. One says New York.

My wife is from San Francisco. I moved to New York in second grade. So the system writes itself. She takes San Francisco, I take New York. Two people, two cities, two mugs, zero ambiguity. I'd like it noted that this is not a preference. This is just correct.

And you know how this works, because you have one too. There's a cabinet full of others and none of them are in contention. That one is yours. It holds the right amount, the handle sits right, and by then it isn't really about the coffee. It's the four minutes before anybody needs anything from you.

New York was mine.

What actually happens is she grabs whichever one is clean, because she's getting the kids ready and does not have a window in her morning for a geography alignment.

Ignoring all that, I recently said something goofy after she grabbed the New York mug.

"Hey. That's my mug."

She kept helping the kids get ready.

"Because I'm from New York. I mean technically I moved here in second grade but you know. And that one says New York. So."

Which is, I want to point out, a correct summary of the situation. It was also the tone that gets you a look, and it earned one, and I deserved it.

Then I went back to my office, twenty feet from the kitchen, and thought: should I apologize?

And instead I started building the case. Not about the tone. About the mug. I went back three years for supporting material.

I'm still right, by the way. I want that on the record before I tell you what the test says.

But I did apologize. It took about seven seconds. Then I walked to the bodega with one of my kids and came back with flowers.

I was right. That was never the goal. A good marriage is.

The goal you can win

Question one of the Hard or Wrong Test is: what are you actually trying to achieve?

The Hard or Wrong Test is my decision framework for working out whether to push through something, change the approach, hand it off, or stop.

I've written before about two ways people answer question one badly. They answer with a feeling, or they answer with a proxy. Here's a third, and it's the expensive one, because it looks like work.

If the answer is something you can win, check whether winning it produces what you need.

You're deep in a heated text thread and you notice they typed "your" instead of "you're."

You could mention it. You'd be right. You'd also have just traded the actual conversation for a spelling win, and both of you would know exactly what you did.

That's the move. The smaller goal is the winnable one, which is precisely why your brain hands it to you.

The booth that never showed up

Early in my career we had a trade show in Seattle. Booths came through a third-party vendor. Somewhere in the chain there was confusion about who held final sign-off. We landed, went to the venue, and there was no booth. The show opened the next morning.

If you've worked anywhere, you know what happened next.

Nobody said "we need a booth." Not first.

First there was a huddle. Then a smaller huddle with different people in it. Then somebody opened a laptop and started forwarding threads with three more names added to the chain. My manager pulled me aside and asked me to find the paper trail.

And everyone was busy. Sit with that part. Nobody was slacking. People were working hard, fast, and on the record, on the question of whose fault it was.

Because that question could be settled that night. The other one couldn't.

I had the email. It proved delivery sat with the vendor. In writing, timestamped, about nine seconds from being forwarded to everyone in that room.

And it would not have produced a booth.

That's the whole thing. I could have cleared myself and every person standing there, and we would still have had an empty patch of carpet at nine the next morning.

So I said I couldn't find the email.

Not because it wasn't there. Because if I said that, we could stop pointing fingers and go put a damn booth together.

We went to IKEA. Easels, couches, bookshelves, small desks turned into learning stations. We worked until four in the morning and were still kicking boxes out of sight as the doors opened.

People told us it was the most unique booth at the show. They kept saying how comfortable the chairs were.

Of course they were. They were designed for a living room.

Here's what I won't claim. Taking it didn't produce a good booth. It produced hours. What we did with the hours is a separate story.

But the hours were real, and we only got them because somebody ended the argument.

Why blame is worse than slow

Amy Edmondson studied nursing units across two hospitals in 1996, expecting to find that better teams made fewer errors.

She found close to the opposite. The units with the strongest leadership and relationships reported about ten times more errors than the worst ones.

Hold the qualifier, because it's the finding: that's errors reported, not errors made. Good units reported more because people felt safe enough to write things down. The units reporting almost nothing weren't the safest. They were the ones where speaking up got you shamed.

So blame doesn't just eat the clock. It hides the thing you'd need to see in order to fix anything.

One thing this week

Run this at both sizes, because it works differently at each.

The big one: find the thing you're currently right about that isn't moving. Then ask what happens if you take responsibility for the outcome instead of defending the position.

The small one is harder, and it's the one that actually changes you. Catch the tiny ones as they happen. The typo. The date you remembered correctly. The detail that doesn't matter and that you were about to correct anyway. Those are reps, and you get a dozen a day.

There's a limit and it matters. If taking it costs you your job, your credit or your safety, produce the email. This is not a rule about being a martyr.

But most of the time it costs you nothing except the win, and what comes back is the hours. People remember who got everyone moving again. That reputation compounds much faster than a record of being correct.

Being right was never the goal of this test. The goal is the best decision available to you with what you actually know.

Don't let being right get in the way of the right thing to do.

Run the test on your own decision.