“I got it wrong”

I was facilitating a meeting for one of the bigger London councils the other day and one of the expert speakers, an adviser to Downing Street, stood up publically and said “I got it wrong”.  Now we all know that everyone makes mistakes, but I can’t recall the last time I heard an expert admit to such human fallibility. 

The thing is that if we don’t feel that we can admit to getting things wrong, we are doomed to justify and defend our current position, even if it isn’t working for us!  Saying “I got it wrong” is very powerful, very liberating and very hard!

Perhaps today is a good day to practice this art, if only to ourselves….

“In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know, that’s a really good argument, my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds, and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”  Carl Sagan

Tags: honesty, mistakes, wrong

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 12:51 and is filed under Business Change, Communication, Personal Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.