How Right Comes From Wrong

Golf truth: Good shots come from experience. Experience comes from bad shots.

I was watching a group deal with unexpected results. Their first inclination was to explain what was wrong.

One guy started and everyone else piled on. It was just a made up opinion that became shared.

Once they agreed, there was no point investigating further. Time to go to something else.

For many people, naming a situation is enough. Doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t make it better, but it lets everyone move on with misunderstood agreement.

I have a default after-action question, “What was the best thing you learned?”

That’s not an idle question. While I’m trying to figure it out, I don’t want some idjut making up a negative label, because then we might accept the label and move on before the useful work gets done.

If I’m going to ponder, I want everyone else doing the same thing, not distracting me with their made-up labels.

H. L. Mencken said, “For every problem, there is a simple solution, and it is wrong.”

I don’t stop at simple solutions any more. The solutions I find are the result of layering what works on top of what works until we come to something useful. A major part of that is staying with a lesson until we get something valuable, which is usually harder than figuring out what is wrong.