WHEN THE GREATEST RISK IS NOT MAKING A MISTAKE, BUT LOSING THE ABILITY TO PERCEIVE IT

Do you know the difference between ignorance that recognizes itself and ignorance that disguises itself as certainty? Let me begin with a recent chat with a client, an entrepreneur, who was going through a delicate moment with his managers. In one of our meetings focused on Executive Cognitive Behavioral Development (DCC), he began by telling me a story that, on the surface, seemed trivial—the kind any experienced leader has lived through—but which, listened to attentively, revealed something disturbing about the way entire organizations can become ill without showing a single visible symptom.
He told me: “Marcello, last week I conducted a strategic planning meeting with my ten managers. I presented the new directive, opened the floor for questions, and what I got back were nods, smiles, and total agreement. I left the room with a strange feeling. It wasn’t satisfaction. It was distrust. Because I know—I feel—that at least three of them think differently. And yet, nobody said anything.” I paused and asked: “And what bothers you more—that they think differently or that they chose not to tell you?” He fell silent. A long silence, the kind that weighs heavily. And then he replied: “What bothers me is that I no longer know what they would say if they could say what they really think. And the worst part: I think I’m the one who built this.”
This conversation kept reverberating within me. Not because of the confession itself—which required courage—but because of what it exposed about something that goes beyond this entrepreneur, this company, these managers. It pointed to a flaw that doesn’t appear in reports. That doesn’t trigger alerts. That doesn’t produce red numbers on dashboards. A flaw that settles like a fog over a familiar landscape—everything is still there, the outlines, the roads, the buildings, but visibility is lost. And those inside the fog rarely realize it has descended. This is the most devastating kind of flaw an organization can experience: not the mistake itself, but the erosion of the ability to recognize it.
We live in an era that celebrates performance, speed, assertiveness. Professionals are trained to have answers. Leaders are rewarded for demonstrating certainty. Organizations build entire cultures around the idea that hesitating is weakness, that doubting is a sign of unpreparedness, that pausing to question is losing competitive rhythm. And thus, without realizing it, structures are built that function like echo chambers—where every decision confirms the previous one, where every indicator reinforces the narrative already in place, where every meeting is a ceremony to validate what had already been decided before it even began.
This entrepreneur’s case is not an exception; it’s the symptom of a pattern. Think about what happens every day in meeting rooms around the world. A product team finalizes an eight-month project. Everyone knows there are flaws. The designer realized the user experience has serious friction points. The engineer identified a weakness in the architecture that will cause problems at scale. The market analyst has data suggesting the target audience was poorly defined. Each of them carries this knowledge in silence. In the delivery meeting, the manager asks: “Are we ready?” And everyone nods. Not because they are sure they are, but because they have learned that “no” is an answer that costs more than it gives. The deadline became more important than the result. The delivery became more important than the quality. And the entire system operates to protect the narrative of progress, even when progress is a well-presented fiction in slides.
Here lies something that should disturb any serious professional—and that returns to the question I opened this text with: the difference between ignorance that recognizes itself and ignorance that disguises itself as certainty. The first is a starting point—it’s the spring that drives learning, revision, growth. The second is a trap—it’s the ground that seems firm but is hollow inside, waiting for the moment to give way. And organizations, for the most part, are built on the second. Because the second is more comfortable. The second is more presentable in boardrooms. The second preserves egos, protects positions, maintains narratives.
Recognizing one’s own ignorance—or, in more organizational terms, admitting that a business model might be wrong, that a strategy is founded on fragile premises, that an internal culture is silencing essential voices—requires a courage that the market rarely rewards in the short term. This is because we operate in systems that reward quick answers and punish deep questions. That celebrate those who “solve” and ignore those who “question”. That promote those who deliver predictability and marginalize those who bring complexity. This dynamic is not an abstract phenomenon; it materializes in concrete gestures. An innovation manager at a technology company—one of those that plaster “culture of experimentation” on all walls—proposed, in a quarterly meeting, that the company’s main product was entering a phase of obsolescence and that it would be necessary to rethink the entire monetization model. He had data. He had trend analyses. He had comparatives that clearly pointed in the same direction. The reaction was polite, polished, corporately impeccable. They thanked him for his contribution. They said they would take it into consideration. And in the following weeks, he was gradually removed from strategic decision-making forums. There was no conflict. There was no dismissal. There was something worse: invisibilization. He remained in the company, with the same title, the same salary. He just wasn’t where decisions happened anymore. The message to the rest of the team was crystal clear, even if never verbalized: questioning the prevailing model has a price. And the price is not confrontation—it’s disappearance.
This kind of dynamic shapes behavior profoundly. The professional who admits not knowing is seen as less prepared. The leader who changes their mind in the face of new evidence is accused of being inconsistent. The manager who acknowledges their team made a mistake is treated as if they themselves were the problem. The system creates a gravitational pressure towards certainty—even when that certainty is manufactured, fragile, superficial. And individuals, pressured by this gravity, quickly learn to mimic conviction. To pretend they know. To ornament uncertainties with assertive language. To trade vulnerability for performance.
This is not a flaw in people. It’s a flaw in the system. When an organization punishes doubt and rewards certainty, it is, unintentionally, building the conditions for its own obsolescence. Because the world out there doesn’t stop changing. Markets reconfigure. Technologies advance. Consumer behaviors shift. And an organization that cannot ask itself “where are we wrong?” with the same intensity as it asks “where are we winning?” is an organization walking, with firm and confident steps, towards what it refuses to see.
And here is an example you might recognize in your own journey. Think of that brilliant colleague—perhaps the most talented on the team—who one day simply stopped speaking in meetings. Didn’t resign. Didn’t create conflicts. Just stopped contributing what they really thought. Started delivering the expected, not the necessary. They didn’t give up out of laziness or disinterest. They gave up because they understood the system didn’t want their insight—it wanted their compliance. And when they finally left, the manager said in a team meeting: “We lost a great talent.” Unaware of the irony that the talent had been lost long before—on the day they decided that thinking out loud was too risky.
When minds operate under the continuous pressure of seeming right, something deteriorates in the relational fabric that sustains an organization. Real trust—the kind that allows someone to say “I don’t know” without fear of reprisal—is replaced by performative trust, where everyone says what is expected, does what is safe, and avoids what could cause friction. The result is a precise, predictable, synchronized organization—and, at the same time, profoundly deaf. Deaf to the changes announced at the edges. Deaf to the weak signals that the most attentive analysts capture but dare not verbalize. Deaf to the frustrations of talents who, tired of not being heard, simply leave—taking with them something no retention process can recover: the ability to see what the organization cannot see on its own.
And here we come to the point that changes everything: error as information. Not as shame. Not as deviation. Not as a sign of weakness. Information. Pure, dense, valuable. Error, when welcomed with cognitive maturity, reveals the hidden premises that supported a decision. It illuminates the blind spots nobody wanted to see. It exposes the group dynamics operating beneath the surface. Error, when the organization has the maturity to receive it, is the best diagnostic system that exists—more accurate than any external consultancy, more honest than any climate survey.
The problem is that welcoming error requires dismantling something most organizations protect tooth and nail: the illusion of control. The belief that if everyone follows the plan, if processes are respected, if indicators are monitored, everything is under control. Admitting that it’s an illusion—that real control is much more limited than we’d like, that the future is inherently uncertain, that our models are crude simplifications of a reality that won’t be captured—is an act of cognitive courage that few professionals are willing to practice and few organizational cultures are prepared to sustain.
How many times in your professional routine have you found yourself defending a position not because you believed in it, but because you had already publicly committed to it? How many times have you sustained a decision not out of conviction, but for fear of seeming inconsistent by revising it? How many times have you silenced an uncomfortable insight because you knew verbalizing it would have a greater political cost than silence? If you recognize yourself in any of these questions, don’t judge yourself. Recognize, instead, that you are operating within a system designed—consciously or unconsciously—so that strategic silence is more profitable than intellectual honesty.
The ability to say “I was wrong” is perhaps the most reliable indicator of adaptive intelligence in a professional. Not because making mistakes is desirable, but because recognizing the error before it becomes systemic is what separates organizations that learn from those that merely repeat. Organizations that learn are not those that make fewer mistakes—they are those that integrate error more quickly into their navigation system. That treat each failure not as a full stop, but as a comma—a pause that allows for recalibrating the route before the deviation becomes irrecoverable.
And this requires a transformation in our very relationship with knowledge. Because knowledge, in organizations, has become a currency of power. Those who know more are worth more. Those who have the answers, lead. Those who demonstrate certainty, earn trust. This equation, which seems so logical, is actually profoundly dysfunctional—because it transforms knowledge into possession and ignorance into a flaw. And when ignorance becomes a flaw, nobody admits it. And when nobody admits it, nobody corrects it. And when nobody corrects it, it grows. Silently. Until the day reality, ignored for so long, knocks on the door—no longer as a weak signal, but as an unavoidable crisis.
I return to that entrepreneur who opened this text. Weeks after that conversation, in another Executive DCC session, he told me something that signaled a turning point: “Marcello, yesterday I did something I had never done. I started the meeting by saying I thought we had made a wrong decision last month. And I asked each manager to tell me, honestly, what they thought.” I asked what happened. He smiled—a smile mixed with relief and discomfort—and replied: “At first, silence. Nobody believed it was safe to speak. Until one manager, the youngest in the group, said: ‘If you’re really asking, I think we were wrong not only in that decision, but in the criteria we used to make it.’ And from there, the conversation that should have happened months ago finally began.”
That moment—the moment someone breaks the tacit pact of silence—is where everything changes. It generates something far more valuable than comfort or efficiency: the possibility for the organization to see itself. Not as it narrated itself to be, but as it really is.
And this takes us back to the beginning. To that subtle and vital difference. To the question that, now, is no longer just about organizations, but about each one of us: in which of these ignorances have we chosen to live?

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If this text resonated with something you feel, experience, or observe in your professional environment, I invite you to go further. On my blog—www.marcellodesouza.com.br—you’ll find hundreds of publications exploring the deeper dimensions of human and organizational cognitive behavioral development. Texts that challenge the obvious, that refuse the superficial, and that were written for those who truly seek to transform the way they think, lead, and relate. Access, explore, and allow yourself to question what seemed settled.