Being Right While Being Wrong: Perspective, and Why Presumptions are Dangerous

There were three blind men walking together down a path, in search of an excellent creature called an “elephant,” which none of them had encountered before. They came across a large animal, and knew it was an elephant. Seeking to understand its nature, one man felt the elephant’s robust, muscular trunk and concluded that the elephant was like a snake. The second man felt one of the elephant’s stout, rigid legs, and concluded the elephant was like a sturdy tree. The third man held the elephant’s loose and carefree tail, and concluded that an elephant was like a rope. They argued about their perceptions, each unwilling to concede points to the others because of what they all believed to be unassailable truths. The moral? They were all right…and they were all wrong.

This celebrated Indian parable highlights the valuable lesson of being wary of confirmation bias, and the presumptions we are too often comfortable taking. It is possible that two seemingly contradictory truths are both correct, contributing to a larger holistic truth which remains unknowable until its potential existence is considered. This is the drive at play when we act and get results a far cry from what we expected. Was our information bad? Maybe, but that’s probably not the whole story. A more useful question may be “what don’t I know about the situation that could potentially have enormous influence on my actions?” Sometimes, it is helpful (if not tedious) to set the scope of possible outcomes on a linear scale. At one end may sit your desired outcome (“what do you want?”), that which you plan to work toward. Mirroring it on the other side then, must lie the inverse outcome. Not the reverse, which would be moving backward from where you began. The inverse, in which your actions produce a result antithetical to essence of your goal.

Say you notice someone on your team is routinely struggling to get through their workload. Eager to help, you make inroads to reduce their workload to ease pressure. They come to you a few days later, wondering what they did wrong. You explain that you saw them struggling, so you adjusted their workload to help them be more successful. You’re then surprised when, upset, they respond that they didn’t appreciate the action; that they feel treated like a child; and that the problem wasn’t that the workload was too much, but that they was being assigned projects outside of their expertise and didn’t feel like they could ask for help without looking stupid.

In this case, a well meaning action, driven by assumption, led not only to loss in productivity, but damage to a relationship. We don’t know what we don’t know. Perhaps Stephen Covey said it most simply: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”