Reframing What “Looking Like an Idiot” Means

Last week, I wrote about how effective strategy is often inhibited by our instinct to avoid looking like an idiot to others. It’s difficult to solve in an organizational culture, but one place to start is to find ways to make being “wrong” look smart, rather than idiotic.

Tech and startup cultures have great language for this. For example, in The Lean Startup, Eric Reis writes about validated learning, which is “a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty in which startups grow.”

Put another way, it’s a way of framing success in the period in which you’re building and testing but don’t yet have a product that works.  

In design thinking, there are terms like “rapid prototyping,” which is really code for “sketch a bunch of stuff and just let customers tell you what’s good.” If you’re an idiot, this is truly the best approach, since the customers do all the work for you! 

Providing a “smart” framing for this work can also help us get out of our own way. For example, when coaching in a workshop of black executives, one of the participants mentioned to me that he could never buy into the concept of “fail fast,” which lots of tech and startup people use. He understood the concept, but it was difficult for him to adopt because it ran counter to all of the messages he’d heard that failure wasn't an option for people who looked like him. 

The unlock was reframing “I’m going to experience failures” to something like, “I’m going to identify bold, experimental projects each quarter that could be impactful if they work, and help us learn if they don’t.” He realized that if he communicated that intention to his stakeholders, he could talk about the work, and even the “failures,” through the lens of success. He also realized that doing so would make him sound more “strategic” because he would be taking smart risks.

You won’t look like an idiot if you can say, “Here’s all the things we’ve learned, and here’s how we’re operating in a smarter way because of it.”

Another strategy is to cultivate intentionally safe spaces for looking like an idiot. We may tell people at the start of a brainstorming session that no idea is a bad one, but everyone knows that it’s still possible to look dumb. 

As one example, I have a standing bi-weekly call with a friend for the purpose of exchanging ideas. Because we’ve known each other forever, there are lots of jokes, playful insults, and deviations from the topics at hand. 

On the last call, he said, “We could definitely cut this down to 30 minutes if we got rid of all the foolishness.” But it’s precisely the comfort to be foolish that makes it easy to share dumb ideas and refine them into good ones. After all, every good idea starts as a dumb one.

Finally, leaders can encourage the right behaviors through formal structures that give permission to be wrong. For example, a marketing leader mentioned to me that when he worked at Frito Lay, the idea was to use 70% of marketing spend on tried-and-true initiatives—those activities you know will work. But he was expected to put 20% of resources into initiatives that would push the envelope, and 10% into true experimentation. 

Similarly, in the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) system, the goal is to score a 70% across all of your key results. If you consistently score higher than that, you’re probably not being ambitious enough. In the book Measure What Matters, John Doerr writes: “Living in the 70 percent zone entails a liberal sprinkling of moonshots and a willingness to court failure.”

Still, simply asserting that people should be bold when articulating their plans doesn’t always negate the human reservations to doing so. In Measure What Matters, Doerr quotes Amelia Merrill, a former HR leader, who said of her company’s OKR process, “People here are used to getting A’s. They don’t get B’s. Not getting 100 percent—that’s just really hard, culturally, to make that transition.”

Certainly this takes time, but I’d argue that the route to getting over those concerns is providing avenues for people to look smart when they admit that their plans didn’t fully work. 

That should sound like:  

That initiative was a good idea when we started, but if I were to focus our energy on the highest impact work today, I’d do this other initiative instead.

That pilot helped us learn a lot about customers. We’re going to end it, but integrate those lessons to make our other products even stronger. 

My old answer was good, but this new one is even more right because I’m a genius.