There is a kernel of truth to this argument: There must be some allowance for being wrong some of the time for a team to really thrive. If one wrong move results in outsize penalties to your reputation, your performance review, or your compensation then everyone is going to avoid taking any risks. It becomes safest to do nothing at all and adhere closely to the status quo, because you can’t be wrong if you avoid making any calls on your own.

However, this article takes this concept a little far, in my opinion. There must be some room for being wrong after making a good faith effort and doing proper research, but we have to be honest that being wrong on important outcomes will never be perfectly free of consequences even in the most idealistic workplaces. If you’re wrong as often as you’re right, people will notice. People take account of how often others are rigit and wrong and will factor that into judgments. It’s only natural.

In a healthy workplace, making the right call most of the time should open up room for being wrong occasionally. Nobody is perfect! If a company is handing out outsize penalties, explicit or otherwise, for single incidences of being wrong then that’s toxic and bad.

However, I’ve worked with people who are so unafraid of being wrong that they can’t be trusted. They’ll take on projects they know they’re not qualified to do because they don’t mind failure. They’ll answer questions they aren’t qualified to answer because they’re not afraid of leading someone astray. They’ll pull the trigger on high stakes issues quickly because they’re more concerned about doing something than doing the right thing. Everyone around them learns this quickly and adapts around it. It becomes an obstacle to promotion, as it should in a company that chooses leaders who can be trusted.

It’s a balance.

This article makes a mistake I see from a lot of casual advice writers, which is to first construct a hypothetically ideal workplace and then explain how to operate within their ideal workplace:

> In my posts, especially when providing advice, I will assume you work in a healthy workplace environment. If you work in a psychologically unsafe environment, none of this even matters - if possible, and safe, search for a different job.

This advice tends to feel good because it always describes a perfectly safe, secure workplace that caters to the employee (the reader) with little or no regard to anything else like their coworkers, the company, or the bottom line. In the real world, it’s never that simple. It’s easy to say “quit your job” to anyone who doesn’t see this ideologically perfect scenario in their own workplace, but the reality is that people need to learn how to operate within the realities of an imperfect, real workplace.

Definitely search for better jobs if you’re at a toxic company! However, don’t expect any company to live up to some of the lofty ideologically pure scenarios that get described in advice columns. In the real world, you’re going to have to weigh the risks and consequences of being wrong and adapt as you learn more about how the company and your peers react. Behave accordingly and operate with a feedback loop, but watch out for irrational paranoia about being wrong.