Imagine a relatively young and new-at-his-field surgeon. Is that someone you want operating on your loved one? Absolutely not, isn’t it? Because what if he gets it wrong? He’s just a newbie, and you don’t want him using your loved one as a testing ground now!
How to think of this? By giving up the ego, it would seem! Here’s Master surgeon Atul Gawande in his own words in a superlative Adam Grant podcast:
Q: But one of the things I took away from that book was how important it is to be able to detach your ego from your mistakes and your failures. And you're now facing that at a much larger scale, knowing that if you fail to contain an outbreak, it could be thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people who die. How do you navigate that?
A: This was during my training, where I had to learn on people how to do surgery. How do I claim that permission to have a learning curve? And the only way is by not pretending to be perfect, but instead to always be living up to the belief that I'm aiming for perfection and that I understand it's not just me, but a team of people that make it possible for me to learn effectively and safely and for a person who depends on the team to have confidence in the team in even if there is a learner on the team.