In my previous reflection, I wrote about something I had to learn over the years: being right is not always the most important thing. That lesson did not come from one single moment. It developed gradually, through experiences that changed the way I looked at my own role, at the way I communicated with others and, eventually, at the way I approached technical problems themselves.
One of those experiences happened when I was still in my twenties and relatively fresh in my career. At that time, I was very technically focused in my work. I liked understanding how things worked, identifying problems and finding solutions.
I was sent to a site to provide support and, while I was there, I noticed several things that concerned me. The issues I saw were mainly related to microbiological aspects, and I felt that they were important enough to mention. The difficulty was that I was not entirely sure whether it was my place to say something about them. I had been sent there for a specific purpose, I was still relatively junior, and I was looking at a site where other people had been working much longer than I had. At the same time, though, simply saying nothing did not feel right either.
So I discussed it with my manager. I explained what I had observed and why I thought it mattered. He listened, saw the points I was making and told me to write them down in a memo.
So I did. I wrote what I had seen, what I thought was happening and where I believed there were problems. Then he reviewed it and said something along the lines of:
“You might be right. You might be wrong. But you cannot say it like this, because then you will not be heard. And being heard is your intention.”
That stayed with me.
He did not tell me to remove the points, make them less important or avoid saying something uncomfortable. Instead, he showed me how to rephrase them while keeping the message itself intact. The observations did not disappear, but the way I communicated them changed.
At the time, this was a completely new way of looking at things for me. My focus had been almost entirely on the content: was the observation technically correct, was there a problem, and could I explain why? My manager added another question that I had not really considered before: what are you actually trying to achieve?
If my intention had simply been to put my opinion on paper, perhaps my original wording would have been enough. But that was not my intention. I wanted people to consider what I had seen, think about it and, where necessary, improve something. For that to happen, being right was not enough. I also needed to be heard.
Looking back now, I think there was another lesson hidden in that experience, although I probably did not understand it yet at the time.
The things I had noticed were mainly microbiological, so naturally I was looking at them through the technical lens I knew best. Today, after many years of working in radiopharmaceutical environments, I see much more clearly how easy it is to look at a problem from one discipline and believe that the answer should therefore be obvious.
In radiopharma, it rarely is.
Microbiological contamination control, radiation protection, operations, engineering and supply chain can all place very different demands on the same process. Sometimes those demands appear to pull in completely different directions. A solution that looks ideal from a sterile-manufacturing perspective may create difficulties for radioactive containment or operator exposure. Additional handling steps may make sense microbiologically but become less attractive when every intervention increases dose or contamination risk. Operations may have practical limitations that are invisible on paper, while supply chain has to deal with something many other industries do not face in quite the same way: the product is literally disappearing while we are working with it.
The microbiologist may be right. The radiation-protection specialist may be right. Operations may be right. Supply chain may be right.
And still, proving who is right does not necessarily get us any closer to a good solution.
What matters is understanding what each discipline is trying to protect, where the real risks are and how the process works as a whole. Optimising one requirement in isolation can easily make the overall system worse.
That does not mean compromising on important requirements simply because they are inconvenient. It means understanding the purpose behind them well enough to find a solution that protects what actually matters.
In a way, that is exactly what my manager was teaching me all those years ago.
He was teaching me that my observation was only one part of the picture. I needed to communicate it in a way that allowed other people to engage with it, challenge it, add what they knew and, hopefully, arrive at something better together.
That does not mean making difficult findings softer until nobody knows what you really think, nor does it mean avoiding disagreement or changing a conclusion simply because somebody may not like it. Sometimes something needs to be said very clearly. But clarity and confrontation are not the same thing.
Over the years, I have become much more conscious of that distinction. I still ask myself whether something is technically correct, but I also try to ask what I am actually trying to achieve, how the other person might hear what I am saying, and whether I am creating space for someone to consider my point or unintentionally making them defend themselves against it.
And there is one more question I try to ask now that I probably would not have asked in my twenties:
What might they be seeing that I am not?
I still have strong opinions, I still say what I see, and I certainly have not stopped disagreeing when I think something matters. But somewhere along the way, I learned that identifying the issue is only part of the responsibility. How we communicate it matters, and so does our willingness to understand the perspectives around it.
Because sometimes we may be right, and sometimes we may be wrong. Sometimes, perhaps, several people are right at the same time.
But if our intention is to make a difference, being right is not enough.
We also need to make it possible for other people to hear us, and remain curious enough to hear them in return.
