Being Right Is Not Enough

I’ve written three different strategies for problems that never got solved this year alone. Well-researched. Clear recommendations. Leadership agreed they were good plans. Nothing happened. The problems eventually exploded anyway, and I got to be the guy who said: “I told you so.” Turns out that’s not a win.

You can have all the right ideas, but without execution they’re worthless. Being the person who predicted the disaster doesn’t matter if you didn’t prevent it.

The trap of planning

Smart people love planning. It feels productive. You can demonstrate your understanding of the problem, show technical depth, align stakeholders. Writing a good strategy doc is genuinely satisfying.

But planning is comfortable in a way that execution isn’t. Plans don’t break production. Plans don’t require difficult conversations. Plans don’t force you to make tradeoffs in real time.

I’ve watched engineers (including myself) spend weeks perfecting a migration strategy while the legacy system gets more entrenched every day. By the time the plan is “ready,” the moment has passed. The problem is bigger, the stakeholders have moved on, or someone else shipped a partial solution that’s now the new baseline.

I’ve fallen into this trap enough times to recognize the pattern now.

What I’m doing differently

When I see a problem now, I ask: what’s the smallest thing I can do this week to move the needle?

Not the perfect solution. Not the comprehensive strategy. The smallest concrete action that reduces the problem or proves the approach.

For technical debt: don’t write the migration plan, migrate one service. For process issues: don’t propose a new workflow, run a pilot with your team. For architectural concerns: don’t design the full system, build a prototype that validates the core assumption.

This feels riskier. You’re showing incomplete work, making decisions without full information, potentially building something that gets thrown away. But incomplete progress beats complete plans.

You can iterate on working code. You can’t iterate on a plan that never ships.

The uncomfortable truth

Being right doesn’t matter if you’re late. Your strategy is only as good as your ability to execute it before the window closes.

“I knew this was going to happen, we should have done X” isn’t the flex I used to think it was. It’s evidence that I saw the problem and didn’t act.

Execution beats prediction. Start smaller, move faster, and make the impact before the moment passes.