Learning from Mistakes

There is something strange about leadership. We expect leaders to have answers. The higher someone rises in an organisation, the less comfortable we seem to become with hearing them say, “I don’t know. ” I have often wondered whether we have got this backwards. A leader who believes he must always be right will eventually surround himself with people who are afraid to tell him that he is wrong. That is a dangerous place for any institution to be. The most difficult decisions rarely arrive with complete information. They come with uncertainty, competing priorities and consequences that cannot be fully anticipated. Waiting for perfect clarity is often another way of avoiding a decision altogether. Leadership, therefore, is not the ability to know everything. It is the ability to make a considered decision while knowing that you may not know everything. That requires a certain kind of humility. Not the humility of hesitation. The humility to listen. There is a difference. A hesitant leader keeps postponing decisions because certainty never arrives. A confident leader makes a decision but remains willing to reconsider it when the facts change. KP Excise Dept seizes 240kg hashish in Swabi I think that distinction has become increasingly important in public life. Governments deal with problems that do not remain still. A policy that works in one district may produce a very different result in another. An approach that seems sensible today may become inadequate six months from now. Circumstances change. People’s needs change. Technology changes. Even our understanding of a problem changes. Yet institutions often behave as though changing one’s mind is a sign of weakness. It shouldn’t be. Changing your mind because you have learned something new is not inconsistency. It is learning. KP CM inaugurates new hybrid buses, Pink Bus Service for women Some of the best decisions in any organisation begin with someone asking a deceptively simple question: **What if we are wrong? ** That question can be uncomfortable. It can also be liberating. It forces us to look beyond our assumptions. It invites disagreement. It gives people permission to challenge ideas before those ideas become policies, projects or large expenditures. And perhaps most importantly, it creates room for better answers. This is particularly important as governments begin working with Artificial Intelligence. AI can process enormous amounts of information. It can identify patterns, compare possibilities and help decision-makers see things that might otherwise remain hidden. But it cannot tell us what matters. That remains a human responsibility. A system can tell us that a particular intervention is likely to produce a certain outcome. It cannot decide whether that outcome is fair. It can identify an efficient route, but it cannot determine whether efficiency should be the only consideration. It can predict what might happen, but it cannot decide what ought to happen. Those distinctions are easy to overlook when technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. They shouldn’t be. The more capable our tools become, the more important human judgement becomes, not less. TTPA delegation invites PPP to APC This also changes what we should expect from the people working in government. We should want officials who are capable of making decisions, certainly. But we should also want people who are willing to ask questions, test assumptions and acknowledge when something is not working. That requires an institutional culture in which failure is not automatically treated as incompetence. There is an obvious qualification here. Public money is not a laboratory experiment. Citizens should never be asked to bear the cost of careless experimentation. But there is a difference between reckless experimentation and responsible learning. KP govt spending significant amount of resources on security: Muzzammil A small pilot can be more responsible than a large programme launched on assumptions that have never been tested. A policy reviewed after six months can be stronger than one protected from scrutiny for six years. A leader who listens to criticism early may prevent a much larger failure later. This is where I think the idea of intelligent government becomes more interesting. An intelligent institution is not one that never makes mistakes. It is one that learns from them quickly. It notices when reality differs from expectation. It changes course without treating the change itself as an embarrassment. And it does not confuse consistency with stubbornness. Six Punjab districts perform 7, 294 successful cardiac procedures: CM At the Office of AI Punjab, this is an idea worth keeping close as we think about the role of technology in government. We should not use Artificial Intelligence to make institutions more rigid or to give greater authority to decisions simply because a machine has produced them. The opportunity is to build institutions that can learn faster, question assumptions more intelligently and make better-informed decisions while keeping responsibility firmly with people. That may require a cultural change as much as a technological one. We have spent a great deal of time teaching institutions how to follow procedures. The next challenge may be teaching them how to learn. The distinction is noteworthy. Procedures provide consistency. Learning provides adaptation. A government needs both. Perhaps the strongest leaders are not those who enter a room convinced that they have the answer. Perhaps they are the ones who can enter with a view, defend it honestly, listen carefully to the people who disagree and leave prepared to change it if the evidence demands it. That does not make leadership weaker. It makes it more resilient. In a world becoming more complicated by the day, certainty is becoming harder to find. Good leadership does not require pretending otherwise. It requires the courage to act without perfect knowledge, the discipline to measure the consequences and the humility to say, when necessary: We were wrong. Let’s do better. Ali Mustafa DarThe writer is a software engineer by education, a business leader and Adviser to the Chief Minister of Punjab on Artificial Intelligence and Special Initiatives.

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