By Daniel Robin
“It’ll never work, asserts Max, after reading the proposal.
“What won’t work, Max? I’d like your input … or is it too difficult to let somebody else be right occasionally?,” I ask.
“Fine, you can be right all you want,” sweeping his arm graciously, “– but your idea stinks.”
“Hey, I’ve no interest in being right. I just want there to be room for us to openly and constructively disagree about it … Okay?”
“Sure, no problem, … if you’ll admit that you’re wrong. I thought I was wrong once … but as it turned out, I was, well, mistaken.”
“Ahhhhhhh! Aren’t there any other options with you!?”
A far too familiar scene for most of us. All reasonably assertive people lapse into right-wrong thinking occasionally, but why does it happen? Perhaps it springs from our human need for acceptance, validation, and understanding … to maintain self-respect and dignity in the face of make-wrong attacks. It probably gets amplified in the workplace by pressure to be decisive, or from the intense desire to succeed. However, the root cause is not in pursuing these interests, but rather in the belief that in order to be “right,” in effect, someone else has to be “wrong.”
The Price of Right-Wrong Exclusivity
Unless you’re a litigation attorney, the right-wrong assumption is expensive. How do you respond to someone who is so attached to being “right” that they pay little attention to the possibility that you could also be right? If you play this limited game, it invites conflict and quickly blocks effective dialogue, stifles creativity, dampens enthusiasm … killing the will to cooperate. Despite the best of intentions, a conversation that assumes someone must be proven wrong automatically prevents us from getting the results we most want: to be understood, to learn something new, or to get something done.
The one exception: adversarial systems, such as litigation or war, designed to produce win-lose decisions. Even then, making the person wrong is less effective than exposing problem areas such as misconduct, breech of contract, use of poor judgment … to make their position invalid.
Being “right” interpersonally is in sharp contrast to right/wrong morality debates or the need to “enforce” ethical standards — thankfully, there are established laws, including the immutable laws of nature, to guide decisions and define “fair and reasonable” conduct. An occasional debate about fair practice will help set better policies; however, most of us are in service to tangible results goals in our work, where right/wrong thinking blocks progress, aggravates, or possibly even damages relationships. It is therefore too expensive to operate as if a win/lose decision is even necessary in the first place!
Give up Being “Right” … Go For Being Accurate
When you go for being accurate, you join the ranks of the partially right and partially mistaken — welcome to being human — and more possibilities open up immediately. Like most assumptions, the right/wrong assertion will prove itself to be true, invisibly, over and over, until the limited thinking is ousted, deposited curbside with the other random garbage we’ve picked up along the way.
Look out landfill!
As you notice situations where the choice seems to be either (a) we fight about it, or (b) one of us has to be wrong (“… and it better not be me!”), see if you can shift it to (c) let’s agree to disagree openly and collaborate on finding a third alternative — perhaps we’re both partially right, and let’s figure out which parts to keep.
The next article looks at ways of dealing with anger as well as suggestions for dealing with an angry person to avoid getting “hooked” by anger of your own.
May you always be in your right mind, and have exactly the right answers to precisely the right questions. Or know someone who does.
