I started Letting Go by mentioning it was the story of how I learned one of the three most important leadership lessons I ever learned. It was predict

Being Right Doesn’t Matter

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2023-03-19 20:00:06

I started Letting Go by mentioning it was the story of how I learned one of the three most important leadership lessons I ever learned. It was predictable that someone (hi Jasmine!) would ask “wait, what are the other two?”

During the same week I learned the first lesson, at the Center for Creative Leadership’s Leadership Development Program, on the penultimate day, we did a little exercise to demonstrate “synergy.” The way it went was quite simple: We were given an exercise, a puzzle to solve, where the distance from the “perfect” answer could be assessed objectively and quantitatively. At first, each person did this on their own. Then each group of people got together and tried to come up with a group answer. Synergy — the ability of a group of people to come up with a better outcome than any individual in the group could — could simply be measured as the difference in score between the best individual score in the team an the team’s score.

We were given a list of ~16 steps to take after an earthquake, taken from the Red Cross, which had a canonically correct ordering, and were meant to order them correctly. In general, this is something that could be worked out logically (e.g. “check yourself for injuries” should come before “be careful when driving”). The ‘distance’ between the perfect answer and one’s own answer could be defined as the sum of the absolute values of the distance between each step’s correct order and the order you put them in, which is such an abstract statement I figure an example will be helpful.

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