There is a question I keep asking people in boardrooms, living rooms, and occasionally over bad conference coffee. The answers are many, but none are satisfactory enough to close the discussion.
Is it better
to have tried something bold and failed or to have played safe and slept peacefully? Because everything is calm until hindsight wakes you up, screaming about how wrong you were.
It is an old philosophical hand-me-down question, of course. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved. A line that has survived centuries, several poets. But replace “loved” with “approved that risky idea” and “lost” with “ended up in a marketing blunders list”, and suddenly the romance disappears. The courage sits whining on the edge till the time to decide arrives.
Every year, we read post-mortems of marketing disasters with forensic delight. Campaigns that were experimental. Brands that were adventurous. Leaders who said yes when others said, “Let’s sleep on it.” And now, safely seated on the sofa of hindsight, we tut-tut. What were they thinking? Who approved this? Didn’t they test it?
What we forget is that at the moment of decision these were not “blunders”; they were bets. Thought through, debated, and often passionately defended. And Time, the one that is cruel, lazy, and never present in meetings, decided to unveil its wrong side.
This is where the philosophy of ‘Better Wrong Than Safe’ becomes uncomfortable, especially in corporate India, where caution has become a virtue. It has now equally affected the private and public setups and entered the chaotic personal life. Playing it safe is applauded. Playing bold is tolerated only when it works.
The tragedy is not that some decisions fail. The tragedy is how quickly we pretend we would never have taken them.
Most path-breaking ideas look foolish before they look visionary. Every innovation has spent its early days being described as “too much”, “too soon”, or “not our brand”. When it succeeds, we call it foresight, and even the naysayers can post-rationalise their stance in pushing for more caution. When it fails, we call it irresponsibility. Same meeting. Same data. Different outcome.
This is why ‘Better Wrong Than Safe’ is not a slogan for recklessness. It is a philosophy for people who understand that decision-making at the edge is not about guarantees; it is about intent, courage, and accountability.
A safe decision rarely teaches you anything. It only teaches you how to survive the next review meeting.
A wrong decision, on the other hand, teaches you scale, speed, people, process, and politics—sometimes all of it together. It teaches you what data does not capture. It teaches you how consumers actually behave when they are not filling out surveys. It teaches you humility. And sometimes, if you are lucky, it teaches you what not to repeat ever again.
Failures educate. Success reassures. The ratio, inconveniently, is never 50:50. It is skewed. Brutally. Anyone who promises otherwise is selling a book or running a workshop.
Yet, organisations are increasingly populated by people whose most outstanding professional achievement is a clean slate claim. They have never been wrong. Their secret? They never decided anything that mattered. They deferred. They diluted. They added footnotes. They waited for “more clarity”, which is corporate for “someone else should go first”.
The problem with being safe is not immediate regret; it is delayed dissatisfaction. Years later, when a competitor does what you discussed and shelved, you feel a peculiar ache. Not failure. Not loss. Something worse. Irrelevance.
This is why I lean instinctively towards ‘Better Wrong Than Safe’. I would rather defend a decision that failed than explain a caution that prevented learning. I would rather say, “We tried, and it didn’t work,” than mumble, “We thought about it but…”
Because here is the inconvenient truth: most people do not regret wrong decisions. They regret indecision. They regret listening to the loudest sceptic in the room. They regret mistaking consensus for wisdom.
And no, this is not a celebration of chaos; it is a reminder that progress has always been powered by people who were comfortable being temporarily wrong. Every meaningful shift in the creative, cultural, professional, and personal spheres comes from someone placing a bet when spreadsheets or the situation advised restraint.
History and record-keeping are, unfortunately, kinder to those who hesitated than to those nameless and faceless humans who acted.
So the next time a campaign, a product, or an idea ends up on a “what went wrong” list, pause before judging. Ask a better question. Did it come from laziness or courage? From ego or intent? From boredom or belief?
If the answer is belief, then the failure is not the story. The story is that someone chose ‘Better Wrong Than Safe’ in a world that rewards neither in real time.
And that, even when it fails, is a decision worth making.
Sanjeev Kotnala is a brand and marketing consultant, writer, coach and mentor.
