There’s a version of executive competence that gets admired constantly and holds up less often than it appears to: the leader whose decisions always seem to be correct. Every call lands, every bet pays off, every strategic instinct turns out to have been right. It’s an appealing image, and it’s also, in most cases where it seems to genuinely hold, evidence of something other than superior judgment—usually a narrow enough set of decisions being made, or a long enough runway before consequences surface, that the wrong ones haven’t yet been counted. The leaders who actually perform best over time, across a real volume of consequential decisions, are rarely distinguished by being right more often. They’re distinguished by how fast they notice they’re wrong and how cheaply they change course once they do.
This reframe matters because “being right” and “deciding well” get treated as the same thing, when they’re actually measuring different parts of the process. Being right is an outcome, substantially influenced by information that wasn’t available at the time the decision was made. Deciding well is a process: making the best call available with the information on hand, then treating new information as it arrives as a reason to update, rather than as a threat to the earlier decision’s credibility. A leader can decide well and still turn out to be wrong, because the world provided information after the fact that no reasonable process could have had in advance. A leader can also decide poorly and turn out to be right, purely on luck. Evaluating leaders, or evaluating yourself, on outcomes alone conflates these two, and it quietly punishes exactly the behavior that produces good long-run results: genuine willingness to change your mind when the evidence shifts.
The Cost of Always Looking Right
The cost of optimizing for the appearance of always being right is specific and corrosive. Once a leader’s identity becomes tied to their track record of correct calls, every new piece of disconfirming information becomes a threat to that identity, not just information to be processed. This produces a predictable pattern: early warning signs that a decision isn’t working get minimized, reframed, or waited out, because acknowledging them means acknowledging the earlier call might have been wrong—and by the time the evidence is undeniable, far more time, capital, or credibility has been spent defending the original decision than would have been spent simply correcting it early. The leader who needed to always be right ends up wrong for longer and at greater cost than the leader who was comfortable being visibly wrong sooner.
What “Wrong Faster” Looks Like
The contrast case—leaders who are wrong faster—looks less impressive in the moment and performs better over any meaningful time horizon. These are leaders who treat an early decision as a hypothesis rather than a commitment to defend, who build in explicit checkpoints where they ask “is this still working, based on what we now know” rather than only asking that question once a failure is impossible to ignore, and who can say “that call isn’t playing out the way I expected, here’s what we’re changing” without it costing them credibility—because the team has learned that fast correction is exactly what strong judgment looks like from this leader, not evidence of weak judgment in the first place.
Commitment to a decision and attachment to having been right about it are different things.
Build Correction Into How You Operate
Building this into how you actually operate requires changing what gets rewarded, starting with yourself. It means treating the speed of a correction as at least as important a measure of your judgment as the accuracy of your original call, and noticing when you’re delaying a needed change specifically to protect the appearance of having been right from the start. It means building explicit reassessment points into major decisions in advance—a defined date or milestone at which you’ll honestly ask whether the original read still holds—rather than leaving reassessment to whenever the discomfort finally becomes unavoidable. And it means modeling, visibly, that changing your mind in response to new information is a sign of a strong decision process, not a lapse in one, because a team takes its cues on this directly from what they watch you do with your own reversals.
None of this is an argument for indecisiveness or constantly second-guessing settled calls—a good process still commits fully to a decision once it’s made, and doesn’t relitigate it at every new data point. The argument is narrower: commitment to a decision and attachment to having been right about it are different things, and only one of them serves you when the evidence eventually says otherwise.
If you notice yourself defending a call longer than the evidence actually supports, that’s worth examining directly—not as a character flaw, but as a pattern that’s costing more than it’s protecting. Explore coaching services.
Frequently asked questions
Are the best decision-makers right more often?
Usually not. Over a real volume of consequential decisions, top performers are distinguished by how fast they notice they’re wrong and how cheaply they change course—not by always looking correct.
What’s the difference between being right and deciding well?
Being right is an outcome shaped by information you often didn’t have at the time. Deciding well is a process: best call with available info, then updating when new evidence arrives—rather than treating it as a threat to the earlier call’s credibility.
How do you get better at being wrong faster?
Treat early decisions as hypotheses, build explicit checkpoints to ask if the original read still holds, measure speed of correction alongside original accuracy, and model that changing your mind with new information is strong judgment—not a lapse.