When Did You Last Change Your Mind?

Think about someone at work you find difficult. Perhaps they dominate meetings, become defensive when challenged or have disappointed you often enough that you no longer expect very much from them. Whatever the reason, once we have worked with someone for a while, we tend to develop a fairly settled view of who they are.

What happens after that? Once we think we understand someone, we naturally begin interpreting what they do through that understanding. The person we consider unreliable misses a deadline and confirms what we already thought, while the colleague we believe lacks confidence says very little in a meeting and seems to prove the point again.

But what happens when they do something that doesn't fit? Perhaps the unreliable colleague has quietly delivered everything on time for the past six months, or the person you thought lacked confidence handles a difficult client conversation particularly well. It is surprisingly easy for those moments to attract less of our attention because they don't fit the picture we already have.

Our judgments about people are rarely based on nothing. Something happened to create them, and at the time our conclusion may have been perfectly reasonable. The difficulty comes when an impression formed months or even years ago becomes something we no longer think to examine.

Experience plays an interesting part in this. As we become more experienced, we get better at recognising patterns. We have seen versions of the same problem before and can often anticipate difficulties that somebody earlier in their career might miss. That ability is valuable and is one of the reasons experience matters.

There can, however, be another side to it. The more patterns we recognise, the easier it becomes to decide that we already know what we are looking at. A familiar situation reminds us of something that happened before, a colleague behaves in a way we recognise or a new proposal resembles one that failed several years ago. Sometimes our judgment is exactly right, but occasionally the pattern looks familiar because we haven't paid enough attention to what is different this time.

The same thing happens with ideas. We decide that something won't work, that a particular project isn't worth pursuing or that a problem has a familiar cause. Once we have reached that conclusion, it is very easy to spend our time gathering information that supports it rather than genuinely testing whether it still stands up.

That seems particularly worth thinking about when information and opinions are so readily available. We can find evidence for almost any point of view within minutes, and tools such as ChatGPT or Claude can summarise an issue or construct a plausible argument remarkably quickly. Access to information has become easier, but deciding what to make of it still requires judgment.

But we can ask ourselves: What would make me change my mind? If the answer is genuinely "nothing", that is worth noticing. If there is evidence that would cause you to reconsider, it may be useful to ask whether you have actually looked for it.

This isn't about assuming your original judgment was wrong. You may look again and reach exactly the same conclusion. There is simply a difference between a judgment that has been tested against new information and one that has gradually become familiar enough to feel like a fact.

I think this matters particularly when we are making judgments about other people. Reputations have a habit of following us around. Someone makes a poor decision, handles a situation badly or struggles during a particular period and a description begins to form around them. Once other people start repeating it, that description can become surprisingly difficult to escape.

Yet people do change. They gain experience, become more confident, learn from mistakes and sometimes become quite different colleagues from the ones we first encountered. If our view of them never changes, we can find ourselves responding to a version of that person who no longer exists.

There is a similar risk in the judgments we make about ourselves. We can become attached to old conclusions about what we are good at, what we aren't suited to or what sort of opportunities are realistic for us. Some of those conclusions may still be accurate, but others may belong to an earlier stage of our lives or careers.

None of this means we should continually second-guess ourselves. Good judgment matters, and we couldn't function effectively if every decision required us to reconsider everything we had previously learned. Experience is valuable precisely because it allows us to recognise patterns and make sense of situations more quickly.

Perhaps the skill is knowing when a judgment has earned our confidence and when it deserves another look. Every so often, it can be useful to reopen the case and see whether the evidence still leads us to the same place.

Questions to Consider

• Is there a person or situation at work about which your view feels firmly settled?

• What evidence originally led you to that conclusion?

• Have you noticed anything recently that doesn't quite fit?

• What would genuinely make you reconsider?

Try This This Week

Choose one opinion you feel reasonably certain about. It might concern a colleague, an idea or something you believe about yourself. Rather than looking for more evidence that you are right, spend a little time noticing what doesn't fit your existing view. You don't need to persuade yourself that you were wrong. Simply see whether the picture looks any different when you allow for the possibility that something may have changed.

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