Is It Wrong To Be Right?

There are many things I learned in my career that I could never explain to a younger version of me and expect him to accept it and understand it. Today we are going to talk about one of my favorites. We are going to talk about being right.

I was painfully right early on in my career way too often. I recall many times sitting in a room patiently waiting to say something that I knew either was true, or soon would be true. Maybe I wasn’t sitting patiently all of the time. Sometimes I would steamroll the conversation to get it out there. Regardless, even now I can feel the awkwardness of many meetings after making a powerful statement that would pour cold water over the mood of the room.

It was at least six years of being “that guy” before I started to realize it was a spectacularly unhelpful activity. About half of the time I would say something that was painfully true, and nobody wanted to acknowledge it or change it because of the size and nature of the pain. We can chalk those times up to the sunk-cost fallacy and move on. Equally frustrating were the times when I would say something horribly true and nobody at the time understood it, or agreed with it.

The downside of both of these activities is that if you are the first person to bring these things up, or are the largest source of this kind of information in your organization, it starts to rub off on you, and people will avoid you like you have cartoon stink-lines emanating from your body.

I recall being on a team creating a games publishing lineup and learning from a very experienced designer/producer how to model revenue and predict sales. We did a pretty comprehensive analysis of our competitors’ products, and projected initial revenues for our own products. My friend and I were very proud of ourselves, and decided we would share this with the rest of the company.

Our prediction was not well-received and I recall the horror and puzzlement on everyone’s faces. Part of the problem is that we predicted our own product would outsell everyone else’s products. The fact that a month later, we proved to be correct was not a soothing balm to the stinging rebuke we received organizationally. We were castigated as troublemakers from that point onwards and nobody wanted anything to do with us despite the fact that we not only gave sales projections for our products, but also gave advice to people on how to improve their products to sell better!

I think this particular case was when I hit rock-bottom. I was thoroughly confused that the two people who had the most revenue-impact on the business and had demonstrated the most knowledge and foresight were pretty much shoved into the corner to sit down and think about what we did wrong. And so we did. We sat there for a long time and neither of us could make sense of the situation.

I watched a great presentation yesterday where someone told a similar story about making logical presentations of information and having it rejected. I realized we both had a very similar epiphany moment, although she reached hers professionally way before I reached mine.

What we both learned is that sometimes people do not want to have the truth poured over them like scalding hot water—you have to weave it into a story for them to accept it as their own.

Some of you know I have a deep love of story telling. I love movies and books, and I weave much of the more interesting parts of what I watch and read into my own Dungeons & Dragons game. It took me a while to make the connective leap from from story telling for fun to storytelling for work.

It turns out that is really important. I heard in the presentation I watched yesterday that there are six stories people tell. I have read in science fiction literature that there are twelve. I ordered someone’s book yesterday to learn about six types of stories because six is easier to remember than twelve. Yes, I am that basic.

I am going to put this out there as some low-hanging fruit for you, Mr or Mrs Right: If you find yourself getting shoved into a corner because you are constantly right about things, you are going to have to figure out some new tools for helping people to understand your point if you want to rejoin the other kids in the classroom.

So let’s go over story telling and some additional tools to help you get your point across to people.

Storytelling

As someone who was a product evangelist, a part-time writer and a conference presenter, I cannot stress the value of this skill enough. You have to be able to tell a story. I have some innate storytelling abilities I have used intermittently over the years, but I believe I do not use these enough professionally. Even now I am ordering my first storytelling book because I believe I can learn to do this better and more frequently.

Consensus Building

At a previous employer, we had these meetings that people dreaded called “Architecture Reviews”. The reason they dreaded them is because people would go into the review, present a plan, and then sit there while more senior staff tore it apart in front of the whole room.

Some of the people on our team experienced slightly better success with these for one reason: They set up separate private meetings with stakeholders to review the plan up front. If you pre-sold your architecture document to senior staff, generally they would go over all of the roadblocks and speed bumps that needed to get addressed.

Many people would use the meeting as a way of getting people to look at their plan, and if it was the first time people saw it, someone would start picking at it publicly. Generally this critique is delivered by a senior staff member, which sets the tone for everyone else in the room. Everyone would suddenly sharpen their swords and find something to nitpick as a part of the festivities. If this was your architecture document, you just had a very bad time.

If you spend the time with subject matter experts privately to go over the material and explore facts, you will get a better outcome when discussing it publicly. The same goes with being right about something. Go over it with everyone in advance individually to get them to figure out options or minor course-corrections on their own time and dime. If you publicly flog them with some kind of truth, you will likely get a similar negative reaction that will take all of the wind out of your sails.

Verifiable Data

If you are struggling with getting your point across, it never hurts to appeal to authority. If you can demonstrate the validity of your data, that certainly helps your position. Making sure this is combined with the above two never hurts. Make sure it is clearly spelled out. “Do YoUr OwN rEsEaRcH” is not a good way to get people to be persuaded to accept what you are telling them. I may have been guilty of this far more than I would like to admit.

Soak Time

Bad ideas are like stubborn stains—sometimes they need to be soaked in something to be removed. Fun fact: The duration of one meeting is insufficient soak time. For anyone out there who ever sat in a meeting with me where I was furiously trying to pave over your stupidity, consider this to be a part of the apology I owe you for not giving you more time to figure out that I was trying to help you in my own horrible gaslighting way.

For small ideas, you might want to give people a day or two of soak time. For big ideas, be prepared for the window of time to be a week, or possibly even a few months.

Dark Powers

When all else fails and you really need to do the right thing, you can always throw in the towel and go crying to their manager. I will ask you to exercise caution here, because if you go to this particular font of dark power, it is a dangerous place from which to extract utility. It is addicting and all-consuming. Do this privately and gently and cautiously. I have done this a few times publicly and all it netted me was putting my name at the top of other people’s nasty little revenge books. I put this here as a last resort and something I seldom did except in extreme circumstances, and I was punished in different ways for each of them.

If you are going to someone else’s boss to rat them out for doing something dumb, just understand that it is functionally equivalent to violence, and violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. This means you are unable to solve the problem on your own and you are asking someone else to do your work for you. If you are going to go there at least sit down and write out the problem and self-soak in it for awhile so you can at least develop better tools for the future.

So there you have it! It sucks to be right, and it sucks even more to be the messenger that gets shot for communicating that. Try to develop some tools to help communicate that better to people. 

There are ways to get your point across, good and bad.

It will take some time to develop the right tools to make sure you can get people onto the same page as you, and even for me this is a work-in-progress.

So here we are at the end of today’s rambling screed of learnings. I hope you all can absorb some kind of value from the summation of these keypresses.

If you think there is someone in your life who could benefit from this message, think of how you can convey it to them without just passive-aggressively linking them to this article and saying “HEY DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO COULD LEARN FROM THIS” and laughing to yourself all the while—or possibly crying.

In any event, stay safe out there and give me some feedbacks. I am not yet trending on twitter, and I am not yet twerking on tiktok. I cannot decide which of those is more important for me in 2021.