Written by: David Carneal – Digital Efficiency Consulting Group – DECG
Read Time: 4 min
Being wrong is not the dangerous part. Staying wrong is where the invoice gets interesting.
Every organization makes decisions with incomplete information. Markets shift, customers change, systems age, teams grow, vendors disappoint, and software updates arrive with the emotional sensitivity of a brick. A workflow that made perfect sense two years ago may now be dragging the business through wet cement. That does not mean the original decision was bad. It means reality kept moving, because reality has terrible manners.
Ego turns normal aging into organizational erosion. Instead of saying, this may need to evolve, leaders defend the original decision because changing it feels like admitting failure. Strategy gets protected. Process gets protected. Metrics get protected. People learn which topics not to touch. The business keeps moving, but with more rework, more exceptions, more side channels, and more invisible labor.
This is why ego rarely causes sudden collapse. It usually causes slow cost. The kind that hides in delays, customer friction, employee frustration, missed handoffs, duplicate entry, unclear approvals, and decisions that take too long because everyone knows the real rule lives in someone head.
Slow cost is dangerous because it becomes normal. Teams adapt. They build workarounds. They create private trackers. They memorize exceptions. They warn new employees with phrases like, here is how it really works. That sentence should come with a tiny siren and perhaps a snack, because you are about to hear the unofficial operating system.
Here are common signs the organization may be staying wrong
- A process is defended mainly because it has always been done that way.
- People can explain the workaround faster than the official workflow.
- Leaders ask for innovation but punish uncomfortable information.
- Reports show green while employees describe constant friction.
- Cross-functional problems are discussed privately but not addressed structurally.
- New employees keep asking reasonable questions that annoy everyone.
New employees are underrated process auditors. They have not yet been trained to accept nonsense as scenery. When they ask why something is done a certain way, leaders should pay attention. Yes, sometimes they lack context. But sometimes they are pointing at the raccoon in the copier room while everyone else insists raccoons are part of the culture.
A useful leadership distinction is this: strong leaders are not afraid of being wrong. They are afraid of staying wrong. That mindset changes the emotional math. Review is not humiliation. Feedback is not disloyalty. Process redesign is not an insult to the person who built the old version. It is maintenance.
No one buys a piece of equipment and says, we serviced it once in 2019, so we are good forever. Yet businesses often treat workflows exactly that way. They install a process, survive the rollout, and then assume it should keep working indefinitely while headcount, customer expectations, systems, and volume all change around it. Bold strategy. Also, no.
Try a simple staying-wrong review once per quarter. Choose one major workflow and ask:
- What assumption did this process depend on when it was created?
- Is that assumption still true?
- Where has volume, complexity, staffing, or customer expectation changed?
- What workaround has become permanent?
- What would we change if nobody cared who originally designed this?
That final question politely escorts ego out of the room. It does not erase accountability. It just moves the conversation from personal defense to process fitness.
Leaders should also separate decision quality from outcome review. A past decision can be reasonable and still need revision. Saying we need to change this now does not mean we were foolish then. It means we are paying attention now. That is the job.
The cost of staying wrong compounds quietly. One exception becomes standard practice. One manual check becomes five. One approval delay becomes a customer expectation problem. One undocumented workaround becomes training debt. Eventually the organization is not operating by design. It is operating by memory, personality, and endurance. Fantastic for heroic stories. Terrible for scale.
CTA: Pick one workflow and ask, what assumption behind this process is no longer true? Do not fix everything today. Just find the assumption. That is where the door opens.