Living to Learn
People and companies inhibit success by being right
Yesterday I tutored 5th graders in Math. These students are primarily native Spanish speakers who receive Free and Reduced Lunch and got selected to become “Dreamers”, participants in the “I Have a Dream” nonprofit that provides tutoring, mentoring, cultural enrichment, and eventually scholarships (if they graduate from high school) to children from low-income families.
I was helping a table of girls with their math homework — multiplication and fractions. Maritza was struggling with the word problems and Ana was helping her out by giving Maritza the answer — “3/4". She kept saying to Maritza, “I told you the answer, just write it down.” And Maritza probably would have if I hadn’t been hovering and asking “why” that was the answer. Ana didn’t know. Neither did Maritza. Ana had heard it from someone earlier in the day. I asked, “Isn’t it better to learn than to get the correct answer?” To which Ana replied, “I prefer to be right”. I get it.
I’ve spent a lot of time over my 31 years getting good grades, earning promotions, receiving awards, but often because I was afraid to fail or desired recognition, the access to which is too often getting the correct answer or delivering what was asked, not maximizing learning or lingering in the problem to really innovate, to really challenge the status-quo, to really make the biggest difference. Just because it’s correct doesn’t mean it’s right. We all know that. But do we live it? Living to be right is a mindset that, like Ana, was deeply ingrained in me from a young age. But as it turns out being right often kills learning. When we’re right we stop asking why, stop thinking deeper, we too quickly plow through to the next thing.
Most organizations incentivize the “right” mindset over the “learning” mindset. Your “success” depends on delivering on your targets — launching that product on time, saving $X million, implementing the new organizational structure swiftly. We get recognized and promoted when we deliver. We get fired when we don’t. But we’re often successful, often right, at the expense of the organization’s success and our own learning.
In his article “Doing your job may be hazardous to your career”, Fred Kofman explores how winning in organizations usually sets people up to win and organizations up to fail, or at least struggle. One of the biggest dilemmas in business is that to maximize business value — to make the most profits, make shareholders the happiest, etc — requires making functional tradeoffs and compromises. In other words, optimizing the whole requires sub-optimizing the parts. Yet incentive systems and KPIs are designed to optimize the parts, which reinforces conflict and silos across functions.
This is the dynamic that leads a sales representative on direct commission to focus on high revenue products, even at the expense of lower profits. The same dynamic leads a call center operator on the clock to rush her calls, even at the expense of lower service quality.
The solution seems obvious — functions should work together, understand the objective, and come up with the solution to make the customer happiest. And yet, that happens far less than it should. Fred Kofman provocatively says that the solution to this is impossible, because global incentives evoke moral hazard and adverse selection, so local incentives are a necessary evil. Companies need to just work to be a little less terrible at collaboration, given these misaligned incentives, than their competitors.
One of the reasons this solution seems impossible is that we humans want to be right. We don’t question our targets enough. We don’t slow down enough in Sales to understand the havoc our behavior is causing on the manufacturing line. Doing so takes time we don’t have and could cause us to miss our numbers. To think from a global perspective means you have to authentically consider another’s perspective and be willing to not be right about your own. Collaboration requires compromise which is hard to do when you’re hard wired to be right, to deliver, to win. But without collaboration, without finding ways to think from the whole, organizations will struggle and fail to produce the bold changes and innovations required for ongoing success.
I doubt my little dose of advice to Ana and Maritza will do anything. At least not the first time. I still have to remind myself regularly to prioritize learning over being right. But let’s keep doing it…Remind ourselves and our young people that it’s not about being right, it’s about learning. Imagine what breakthroughs will result, what will become possible in organizations and the world, if we do.
