One of the traits I picked up early in my career is a desire to poke holes in whatever I was working on. If I did not challenge my own thoughts and deliverables at the start they would make it through and get caught later by others. Sometimes that later would be too late to come up with a great alternative. Sometimes the error was something I should have definitively caught that brought question to everything else. But no matter what, others finding the error or deficiency was worse than finding it myself.
Over time, this process has developed into an approach I apply to everything I work on. If you pressure test ideas early, they will be a stronger base to build from right at the start. No one wants to waste time working on something that we could have caught as a problem by taking an extra hour to probe on. I view my role on a team as being the person to question everything from basic assumptions to data to the simple “so what?” in order to make sure everything is ready.
This occasionally drives my teams a bit crazy. More than a few times they have thought that I am against an idea only to find out I actually strongly support their position. In technology, there is a name for this called the red team. It is a friendly group of individuals specifically setting out to attack infrastructure to find the weak points so that they can be shored up before outside actors find the vulnerabilities. I believe it is always better for a friend to find the problems early than for someone outside the group to point them out later.
Downstream mistakes caught by people not involved in the process result in more significant project problems. Simple mistakes can loom large to outsiders which can lead them to wonder about:
- Data and process quality
- Bad math leading to wrong answers
- Insufficient quality control
- Invalid results
- A team that does not have experience in the subject
When someone is reviewing the final results of a project and do not have experience with the team, small mistakes can carry outsized influence. Typos that were the result of everyone staring too long at the screen can seem as if there was too short of an editing process. Mistyped, or old data can look like bad math calling everything else into question with it. Recommendations not firmly grounded in the results can seem like a pre-ordained outcome that may be biased. Small mistakes happen, but the more review applied earlier on leads to higher overall quality.
Not everyone likes to be the person who questions everything, but the question you need to ask is: if you are not the one checking everything, who is?