During my first deployment to Afghanistan back in 2004, my battalion was on what’s called a site survey in Southern Afghanistan to meet with the other group that we were replacing.
I was in the operations center where I'd soon be the director. It was late at night and most of the guys were already at their fire-bases or in bed. I was sitting up with the outgoing director when an urgent report came in of impending enemy contact.
I was watching the other guys in the ops center and they didn’t just rush to the ball. They didn’t move right away. They were listening intently. They were writing furiously. They were talking among themselves.
The outgoing director leaned over to me and said, “One of the things I’ve learned in Afghanistan is the first report is always wrong.”
At first, that sounded odd to me, because clearly, these guys were out in the bush, so they had unmatched perspective on local reality, much more so than we did in this sterile command center.
But as the situation continued to unfold, the guys on the ground got more clarity and other sources of intel started to pile on. That’s when I started to see what he meant. Now people around me were starting to move and take action in the appropriate way.
It was a big lesson for me as a leader to see that in high-stakes, no-fail situations, the initial reports that come in are often wrong, inaccurate, or at least not fully baked. And that’s just human nature. If we are exposed to a high-stress crisis situation, we likely won’t get all the facts right. We’re going to report what we see and the person next to us will report it differently.
As leaders, we need the mindset that the first report is always wrong, and we need to be measured in how we respond to that first report because when you have a situation on your hands, trying to get ground truth is a difficult thing.
One of our biggest leadership issues today is creating a zero-defect environment, an environment where if you get it wrong, heads are going to roll. This causes leaders to overreact, over-speculate, and over-respond to the initial feedback they’re getting from the ground. This overreaction is fueled by fear, scarcity, and honor. It’s fueled by those primal factors that exist below the waterline that push us every single day.
