Room full of "right" answers

In October 1962, thirteen of the smartest men in Washington sat around a table in the White House basement and could not agree on anything. The Soviets had missiles ninety miles from Florida. Everyone in that room — the ExComm, President Kennedy's crisis team — agreed the missiles had to go. That's where the agreement ended.

The Joint Chiefs wanted airstrikes, followed by invasion. To them, anything less was weakness that would get soldiers killed later instead of now. Adlai Stevenson pushed for negotiation at the UN. To the generals, that looked like naivety dressed up as diplomacy. McNamara floated a naval blockade — a middle path that struck the hawks as too soft and the doves as too aggressive. Bobby Kennedy kept circling back to what the Soviets would see, not just what America needed. Each man was staring at the same thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Each one was certain he saw the obvious answer. They were all different answers.

None of them were dumb, and none of them were reckless. The general who wanted to strike had watched Pearl Harbor and Munich teach him what hesitation costs. The diplomat who wanted to talk had watched two world wars teach him what pride costs. They weren't blind to the stakes. They were blind to each other's vantage point — and mistook that blindness for the other side simply not getting it.

That's the boardroom. That's the conference room. That's the kitchen table when your spouse wants to talk it through and you just want to fix it. That's the bedroom door at midnight when your teenager's version of "obvious" and yours aren't within a mile of each other.

The writer of Hebrews describes a High Priest who could have led from a distance, untouched by the mess of human limitation. Instead:

"...he is able to deal gently with ignorant and wayward people because he himself is subject to the same weaknesses." (Hebrews 5:2) 

Gently — not because the wayward were right, but because the priest knew, firsthand, what it was to be limited. He wasn't gentle despite his own weakness. He was gentle because of it. His weakness was the very thing that let him deal patiently with someone else's.

That's the tragedy in most of us. We want to be right without remembering we're also limited. We want patience for our own blind spots but judgment for everyone else's. But the moment I forget I have blind spots — that my read on the situation, my read on my kid, my read on the coworker who "just doesn't get it," is filtered through everything I don't know about their day, their fear, their history — that's the moment my feet get planted so firmly in my own opinion that I stop being able to see anything else.

Kennedy's genius in that basement wasn't picking the smartest voice. It was refusing to let any one certainty win by force. He kept the hawks and the doves in the same room until a blockade — nobody's first choice — became the third way nobody alone could see. That only happened because enough people in that room admitted their answer might be missing something.

Where are you the most certain right now — with a direct report, a spouse, a child — that the other person is simply missing the obvious? What might you be missing about their obvious?

Before your next disagreement in the boardroom or at the kitchen table, name your own blind spot out loud before you name theirs. Ask one question aimed at understanding their vantage point, not defending yours. For those of us who just know that we are right, chill out….. we may not be.