Staff Writer 
Blessing Nyahuma
YEARS ago, in Professor Gunda’s house, I learnt one of the most important lessons of my scholarly life.
Professor Gunda and Professor Kügler were discussing with me the question of violence in apocalyptic literature. I had read widely, developed my argument carefully and was convinced, beyond reasonable doubt, that I was right.
Then the discussion began.
What struck me was not simply how knowledgeable these two senior scholars were. What stayed with me was how unthreatened they seemed by the possibility of being wrong.
An argument could be challenged without becoming a personal attack. Evidence could force reconsideration without humiliation. An idea could be refined, reconstructed or abandoned without anyone behaving as though his dignity had been diminished.
There was an absence of ego before the evidence.
That day I learnt one of the first serious lessons of scholarship: you must become comfortable with being wrong.
Ideas are not sacred possessions. They are claims submitted to scrutiny, strengthened by criticism or abandoned when evidence exposes their weakness.
If you do not want to be wrong, you do not really want to be a scholar.
Unfortunately, what I knew in scholarship did not always follow me home.
My wife and I would sometimes be driving somewhere unfamiliar. I would be behind the wheel. She would suggest that I had taken the wrong road.
“No, this is the road.”
A few kilometres later, the evidence would begin accumulating against me. The GPS system kept demanding a U-turn. Somewhere inside me, I knew she was right. You would think scholarship would take over. Examine the evidence. Revise the hypothesis. Turn around.
Not necessarily.
Suddenly I could produce theories. Perhaps the Software of the navigation system was outdated. Perhaps there was another entrance. Perhaps this road would eventually reconnect with the correct one.
Apparently, the man who could reconsider violence in apocalyptic literature could not reconsider a motorway exit.
So we drove several unnecessary kilometres.
It became for me a metaphor for something much larger.
We sometimes prefer to travel further in the wrong direction than endure the humiliation of turning around.
Some of the greatest damage in families, organisations and societies occurs not because people cannot see that they are wrong, but because admitting they are wrong has become psychologically more expensive than continuing the mistake.
The corporate world pays heavily for this. A chief executive champions a strategy. Millions are invested. Staff are reorganised. Consultants are hired. The board approves it. Then the evidence changes.
Customers are not responding. Costs are rising. Competitors have adapted. Employees closest to the market can see that the strategy is failing.
But reversing course now carries another cost. Someone must admit that the original judgement was wrong.
Suddenly the organisation is no longer protecting a strategy. It is protecting an ego.
Projects survive because powerful people sponsored them. Executives reinterpret disappointing numbers because abandoning the plan feels like confessing incompetence.
Behavioural economists call part of this the sunk-cost effect. We continue investing because of what we have already invested, even when the future no longer justifies it.
But money already lost cannot be recovered by losing more money.The wrong road does not become right because you have travelled fifty kilometres on it.
Great organisations therefore need leaders capable not merely of making decisions, but of correcting them.
I have a love-hate relationship with Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. It explains something unsettling about us: when our beliefs, decisions and emerging evidence no longer sit comfortably together, we experience psychological tension and instinctively look for ways to resolve it. Sometimes we change our minds. More often than we would like to admit, we change the explanation.
Sometimes we change our minds.
Sometimes we change the explanation.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson explore this through self-justification: our remarkable skill at constructing reasons that protect decisions already made.
Intelligence does not always protect us from self-deception. Sometimes it simply gives self-deception a better vocabulary.This is especially dangerous in business because seniority can turn a private error into an institutional one. When nobody can challenge the chief executive, an ego can acquire a budget, a strategy department and several hundred employees.
The strongest leader, therefore, is not the person who never changes direction. It is the person capable of saying, “Given what we knew then, I supported this strategy. Given what we know now, we must change it.”
That is not weakness. It is disciplined leadership.
There is a crucial difference between conviction and stubbornness.
l Nyahuma is a Germany-based Zimbabwean public intellectual. His writing explores Human Development, the Psychology of Leadership, Family Life and the Formation of Character, examining the deeper human questions behind society’s greatest challenges
