Winning isn’t About Being Right

…it’s about getting it right, fast!

Let me break it down for you. 

The Early Myth: Being Right Is the Job

There was a time when I wholeheartedly believed being right was the job. You think hard, argue well, convince people, and then defend the idea till the end. What the last couple of years have taught me is something uncomfortable but oddly liberating. Turns out the job isn’t to be right all the time. It is to get it right, even if that means changing your mind mid-way. Across roles, campaigns, and decisions, I’ve realised this simple pattern: the people and teams who win consistently aren’t the smartest in the room. They aren’t married to an idea. On the contrary, they are the fastest to pivot when reality disagrees with them.

Where Confidence Meets Reality

Think of any initiative you’ve worked on so far. A launch. A process change. A campaign. An app feature. Most of them start with confidence; a clear plan; a strong rationale; an absolute buy-in from the right people. Then execution begins. And that’s when the signals show up. Something feels off. The response isn’t what you expected. The assumptions don’t hold as strongly outside the room as they did inside it. This is the moment most teams struggle with. Not because they don’t see the problem but because they are emotionally invested in the decision. Teams often don’t fail because they make wrong decisions. They fail because they quite literally fell in love with their decisions.

Delay Disguised as Diligence

In such a scenario, what usually follows is delay disguised as diligence.

You often hear phrases like:

“We’ll give it more time.”

“Let’s tweak a few things.”

“Maybe the audience hasn’t understood it yet.”

Sometimes, that’s true. Often, it’s just discomfort speaking. The hardest skill to build isn’t decision-making. It’s detachment. Detachment from the idea you argued for. Detachment from the very effort you’ve already poured in. But most importantly, detachment from being seen as the person who made that call in the first place.

How Winning Teams Think Differently

The teams that win do something different. They treat decisions as hypotheses, not verdicts. They listen more closely to what’s happening on the ground than what was agreed in the meeting. And most importantly, they optimise for outcomes, not optics. The irony is this. From the outside, these teams look messy. From the inside, they’re incredibly clear. Clear about what matters. Clear about what needs fixing. Clear about when to move on.

Perspective >>>>> Execution

There’s another layer to this that often goes unnoticed. You can’t pivot fast if you only see your own task. When you understand the broader impact, it becomes easier to let go. You stop defending ideas. You start defending outcomes.You pivot fast when you understand the impact of what you’re doing. When you see how one decision affects customers, teams, timelines, and trust, it becomes easier to let go of ego and adjust. You need a macro view of what you’re doing and why it matters. That’s where ownership really begins. Not at execution. At perspective. 

The Real Lesson

Over time, I’ve come to acknowledge this bare truth: staying attached to being right slows not only you but the whole team down. Staying attached to getting it right speeds them up. Clarity rarely shows up before action. It shows up because of it. And the faster a team learns that, the more consistently they win. Because clarity is rarely a prerequisite. It’s almost always a byproduct. And in the long run, that’s how winning actually looks.