The Gift of Guessing

"Let's work the problem, people.  Let's not make things worse by guessing"

          - Flight Director Gene Kranz in the 1995 film Apollo 13

Nearly all work involves some amount of guessing.

Guessing is useful, because it's fast and easy, and sometimes it's more effective to guess and change course if we're wrong, than to make sure everything is right before we act.

But sometimes we guess when it would be more effective to work the problem.

• We guess at why the computer model is producing odd results instead of running the diagnostics to make sure it's running properly.
• We guess at why the marketing strategy isn't working, and make sweeping changes, instead of generating hypotheses and testing them.
• We speculate about why the other person is becoming upset, rather than asking them.

We guess for lots of reasons: to save time, to save money, to save face...

The key is to guess out of choice, not out of convenience or comfort.

There's no instruction manual for making that distinction.  But learning to do even more effectively is an essential part of growing as a leader.