Interesting vs. right is a false choice

“Is it more important to be right or to be interesting?”

It’s a popular, quick & dirty personality riddle that circulates around the industry. In my heart, I want to be the kind of person who says “interesting.” There’s a free-wheeling coolness about “interesting” and an uptight preciousness when it comes to the latter. That said, you can probably sense that I’m more of a “right” answer kind of person based on my unpacking the merits of such a question to begin with…

This question has come up more than a few times in conversations with students and junior professionals by way of Coffee at a Distance and Gordon Euchler’s University of Planning, but it was listening to Rachel Mercer and Shann Biglione’s The Overthinkers on a recent pod-and-walk that my feelings on the matter came into focus.

“Would you rather something be interesting or right?” is a false choice. “Rightness” and “interestingness” are not mutually exclusive and it’s a disservice to teams, clients, and the work to suggest otherwise.

The options are loaded to being with. To be “right” is to be clinical, empirical, factual (or said another way perhaps…boring, unimaginative, and obvious). To be “interesting” is to be creative, clever, and evocative (or said another way…irrational, cavalier and incendiary).

I totally understand the instinct to distill, sacrifice, simplify — to pick a lane. It’s an expectation for the job of a strategist to begin with. But the magic of strategy is to be both interesting AND right.

Empirical AND evocative. Factual AND creative. Clinical AND clever.

The work of strategy is to constantly balance rightness and interestingness — determining the right balance depends entirely on the problem for which you’re solving. It depends on a client's expectations. It depends on resources, limitations, and timing. There is no formula.

The job is to be both.

Further complicating things is the idea of relative truth. “Rightness” is subjective and “truth” is an interpretation shaped by experience and data. We are by nature over-informed and irrational. So, if there’s no such thing as a right answer, then it’s the job of a strategic adviser to provide a compelling way forward.

Embracing rightness and interestingness also allows people to bring more of themselves into the work — the balance between the two is reflective of their experiences and perspectives. To encourage rightness and interestingness is to allow for a compelling discourse among people with different lenses on the world.

So, what does this mean in practice? It’s about looking at facts and asking yourself: so what? It’s about being moved by something and asking yourself: why? If you’re really good at facts, figure out how to make those facts matter. If you’re really good at storytelling, how does that story lend itself to a point? Or just default to the most useful and ambiguous question of all time: What’s the there, there?

Thanks to Rachel and Shann for sparking this stream of consciousness. And to the students, colleagues and interviewees who have traded ideas with me on this subject in some capacity for many years. Photo by Christian Fregnan.