Reflection 007.
With a number like that, I felt I should probably do something with it.
So here it is: a licence to change your mind.
That may not sound particularly radical. We change our minds all the time about small things. Where to eat. Which route to take. Whether we actually need the thing that has been sitting in our online shopping basket for three days.
Professionally, it can feel different.
The more experienced we become, the more people expect us to have answers. We are hired because we know things. We advise people because we have seen situations before. We recognise patterns, anticipate risks and hopefully notice things that someone seeing the situation for the first time might miss.
There is enormous value in experience.
But experience can also make an opinion feel more certain simply because we have held it for a long time.
Sometimes changing your mind begins with allowing yourself to ask what you would do if the answer were not already sitting in front of you.
That same supply chain executive taught me something else that went much more directly against the way I naturally think.
I am a bit of a perfectionist. That can be a good thing. It makes me look closely, question assumptions and want to understand something properly before committing to it. In quality, validation and complex projects, that instinct has often served me well. It can also be a problem.
One day he said to me:
“Marlous, it is better to take the wrong decision quickly than the perfect one too late.”
I did not like that sentence very much.
The idea of deliberately accepting a wrong decision went against almost everything I believed about making responsible decisions, but the sentence stayed with me.
And, unsurprisingly, I eventually changed my mind about it too. Although I also changed his wording a little.
I would now say that sometimes it is better to take an imperfect decision quickly than to take the perfect decision too late.
That difference matters.
An imperfect decision is not necessarily a bad decision. It may simply be the best decision that can responsibly be made with the information available at that moment.
If you make it early enough, you still have something extremely valuable.
Time.
Time to learn. Time to see whether your assumptions were correct. Time to identify consequences you could not yet predict. Time to correct the direction before the decision becomes difficult or impossible to change.
The perfect decision taken too late does not have that advantage. It may be perfect in theory, but if the moment to act has already passed, being perfect no longer makes it the right decision. That was uncomfortable for the perfectionist in me to accept.
It also taught me something important about uncertainty.
Making a decision does not always mean that uncertainty has disappeared. Sometimes uncertainty has to remain deliberately visible.
We may need to say, “Based on what we know now, this is the direction we are taking. These are the assumptions behind that decision. These points are still open. If this information changes, we need to reconsider.”
We need to know which questions remain open. We need to recognise what new information would challenge the original decision. Otherwise an assumption quietly becomes a fact simply because enough time has passed and then we lose the ability to recognise the moment when we should change our mind.
I have changed my mind about my own role too.
When I was younger, I thought that being professional meant being very clear about the answer. If I saw A, B and C, and they were incorrect because of X, Y and Z, I would explain exactly that and tell people what I believed needed to happen.
It was factual. It was structured. It was logical and I thought that was my job.
Over time I learned that being right and being useful are not necessarily the same thing.
In one project that lesson became particularly clear. I had identified issues before. That was not new. What changed was the way I learned to influence the conversation. Instead of simply providing answers, I became better at helping other people see the question themselves.
That changed my view of my own role.
I used to think my job was to be right, now I think my job is much more often to help create the conditions in which the right questions can be asked and a better decision can emerge.
That does not mean becoming vague. It does not mean avoiding a position or changing your opinion because somebody disagrees with you. In quality, engineering, validation and especially radiopharmaceutical manufacturing, there are moments when we have to be very clear about risk, compliance or patient impact.
A licence to change your mind is not a licence to abandon judgement.
It is permission to improve it.
There is an important difference between changing your mind because somebody applies pressure and changing your mind because your understanding has become better.
New evidence may appear. Someone may show us a perspective we had not considered. Operational reality may challenge what looked perfectly logical on paper. Or years of experience may make us realise that something we once considered normal was actually a weakness in the system.
That changed the way I listen when someone says, “We can sort that out later.”
Perhaps that is what experience should do.
It should not simply give us more answers, it should change some of them.
If I reach the end of my career believing exactly the same things about projects, quality, people, leadership and radiopharmaceutical manufacturing that I believed at the beginning, I am not sure that would be evidence of consistency.
It might simply mean I stopped learning.
So perhaps 007 really does need a licence.
Not a licence to change direction whenever things become difficult, and certainly not a licence to compromise when something matters.
A licence to take a responsible decision even when not everything is known, to make the uncertainty visible, to remember the assumptions behind it and to recognise when new information means that the decision should be reconsidered.
A licence to look at new evidence, listen to another perspective, recognise an assumption, reconsider something that once seemed obvious and say:
I understand this differently now.
Because sometimes changing your mind is not a sign that your judgement failed.
It is evidence that your judgement is still developing.
What am I missing?
When you make a decision under uncertainty, do you remember what would need to change for you to change your mind?
