Mistakes of Commission Over Omission
Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Meservey's risk doctrine for comms: as a startup your enemy is the status quo, and the safest-feeling action — doing nothing — is precisely what lets the status quo win. She argues you should deliberately prefer errors of commission (visible, observable, learnable) to errors of omission (invisible, unlearnable, compounding). The analogy: sitting in cash feels safe but you get poorer in real terms while the market compounds; investing is volatile but wins over time.
Origin
Lulu Cheng Meservey's stated philosophy as a comms operator, framed explicitly against the risk-averse instincts of the traditional PR profession. The commission/omission distinction itself is a long-standing concept in ethics and decision theory that she applies to communications.
Core principles
- 01For a startup, the status quo is the rival — inaction is a vote for it.
- 02Minimising risk by doing nothing is the surest way to lose slowly.
- 03Errors of commission are observable, so they are learnable; errors of omission are neither.
- 04Volatility in public messaging is the cost of compounding attention.
- 05Every topic that matters already has people who are mad about it — that is not a reason to stay silent.
How to run it
- 1
Name the status quo you are fighting
Identify explicitly what the default outcome is if you say nothing — who wins, what narrative persists. That default is your true competitor.
- 2
Classify the risk you're avoiding
When you hesitate to publish, ask whether declining is a genuine judgment or an omission you cannot later observe or learn from. If it's the latter, that is the more expensive mistake.
Watch out 'Nobody will notice if we don't' is exactly the invisibility that makes omission uncorrectable.
- 3
Take the risk on a topic that actually matters
Pick the stand where your natural audience's convictions align with yours — a topic people are already mad about, because every topic that matters has that property. Get founder/exec buy-in before poking your head up.
Pro tip Check that the stance is one your core audience will appreciate — that is what converts a risk into a payoff.
Watch out There are two distinct risks: execution risk (will you do it well?) and exposure risk (making a thing where there wasn't one). Name both to leadership beforehand.
- 4
Observe and metabolise the failure fast
Because a commission error is visible, watch precisely where it broke — where engagement fell off, which line confused people — and correct immediately.
Pro tip Publish the postmortem to yourself: the failure is the data you would never have gotten by staying quiet.
In the wild
While Substack was taking heavy incoming for not censoring enough, Meservey — on maternity leave and out of the loop — chose to publish a thread defending the free-expression principle. It carried real risk: she might execute badly, she might create a story where there wasn't one, and she might embarrass the founders.
→ The thread travelled widely and earned around 30,000+ likes among the audience Substack cared about — online writers — because that audience genuinely appreciated the stance. The founders were supportive and the risk paid off.
Inside that same thread, Meservey included a line riffing on an obscure New Yorker book-review reference that was vivid to her but meaningless out of context — the classic error of releasing an inside joke with yourself into the world. Engagement visibly dropped off at that tweet and readers asked what she was talking about.
→ A textbook mistake of commission: publicly visible, immediately diagnosable, and instantly learnable. She now cites it as a canonical 'don't' — a lesson she could never have extracted from silence.
Common mistakes
Treating silence as the safe option
Doing nothing feels like minimising risk but it is a decision to let the status quo — your greatest rival — win by default, with no learning to show for it.
Cosplaying a conservative corporate comms function
Startups inherit the risk-aversion of large-company PR, which is calibrated for entities that benefit from the status quo. The incentives are inverted for an insurgent.
Publishing an inside joke with yourself
A reference that is vivid in your own head but has no shared context is a dud — it stops the reader cold and collapses engagement mid-thread.
Is it for you?
Best for
Startup comms leads and founders who feel institutional pressure to stay quiet, and anyone weighing whether to take a public stand on a contested topic their core audience cares about.
Not ideal for
Regulated disclosures, active legal matters, or large incumbents whose position genuinely benefits from the status quo.
From the transcript
“so I always encourage people to try to make mistakes of commission rather than Omission”
“my analogy for this is if you're investing money in the market versus if you're just sitting in cash”
“I did the thing you're not supposed to do which is take an inside joke with yourself and release it”
From the episode
Navigating comms and PR
Lulu Cheng Meservey (Substack, Activision Blizzard)