In the age of social media, are there still right answers? Do you have a responsibility to refrain from commenting on things if you really aren’t qualified to do so? If you want to be a good leader, the answer to both questions is ‘yes’.
In the past few weeks I’ve seen a puzzle resurface on LinkedIn and Facebook. The puzzle asks you to find the answer to a simple equation. The numbers aren’t always the same but here is an example:
7 + 7 / 7+ 7 x 7 -7
As you might expect, there is a wide range of answers from 0 to 63.
The variability in answers is expected. People have different abilities when it comes to math. What is interesting is how people defend their wrong answers:
“It depends on how you read the equation”
“It is how I was taught in school”
“It’s simple, just go left to right”
“The answer is subject to interpretation”
“The rest of us getting 56 are doing the calculations based on the equation with no other information. . . I believe it’s called perspective!
“If you perform the multiplication and division first , the answer is 50; however if you perform operations left to right = 56; right to left = 8”
Instead of using mathematical principles to justify their answer, people simply “prove” that they are correct on the basis of their belief that they are correct.
Despite all of the opinions and speculation, there is only one correct answer. The correct answer is 50 (even Google knows the answer – just type ‘compute 7 + 7 / 7+ 7 * 7 -7’ into your search box). The reason that there is one and only one answer is that mathematics has rules for how to evaluate an equation[1]. It’s how math works. It doesn’t matter whether you think you should do it differently, if you are unaware of “order of operations”, or if you were taught incorrectly at some point in your life. There is a correct way to solve this problem.
Easy access to data combined with social media has created a culture where people think that everything is up for interpretation. They no longer feel a need or responsibility to actually know anything about a topic before commenting on it. As a result, expertise has become undervalued and often the best sounding or most popular answer to a question becomes the truth. As we’ve seen socially, politically, and economically, uninformed answers create more problems than solutions.
I often look to “answer” forums on the internet when trying to fix something around the house. I once was trying to find the location for a specific fuse in my car. According to the on-line advice boards, it was in four different places (ironically enough, it wasn’t in any of them). Some people even prefaced their answer by saying that they really didn’t know yet answered anyway, “I don’t have 2004 Grand Am but in my 2010 Hyundai Sonata it’s on the right side of the dashboard”.
Jimmy Kimmel does a great segment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_wlfQZe6L4_) where people on the street are asked about fake news stories. Despite the fact that these people clearly have never seen or heard those stories, many have strong opinions about them.
Social media and the internet have democratized information. That’s a good thing. Informed citizens, consumers, employees, and leaders should make better decisions. However, my fear is that it has backfired. The democratization of information has also led to the democratization of truth. Sometimes that’s ok. There are many things for which interpretation and opinion are valid and required. In those cases, we should seek them. However, sometimes not every opinion is equal. For many other things, there are right answers. We need to learn the difference and act accordingly.
As with any resource, leaders need to use information and data responsibly. No rational person wouldn’t operate a heavy piece of machinery or work with chemicals for which he or she was unfamiliar. The results could be dangerous. Similarly, we should learn to exercise caution when using and presenting information that we really don’t understand. I’m not suggesting that we make this information unavailable. It just means that we need to get better at thinking critically about it and in honestly assessing our qualifications in using and representing it.
If we are going to thrive in the data and information-rich world in which we live, we need to carefully decide when our opinions are valid and when we should keep them to ourselves.
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Brad Kolar is an executive consultant, speaker, and author with Avail Advisors. He can be reached at brad.kolar@availadvisors.com.
[1] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Precedence.html
