Cunningham’s Law
People are usually quicker to correct a specific, wrong claim than to construct a right answer from an open question, which is why a rough, wrong draft often surfaces expertise faster than asking for it directly.
What Is It?
Named after programmer Ward Cunningham, per an account by fellow technologist Steven McGeady, the law observes that people are far more motivated to correct a specific, wrong claim than to answer an open-ended question. Correction feels lower-effort and more satisfying than generation from scratch. A wrong answer gives people something concrete to react to, while a question requires them to construct an answer with no scaffolding at all. A draft also lowers the activation energy for participation: instead of wondering where to begin, people only have to decide whether they agree. The deeper mechanism is a reduction in cognitive load, generating an answer means considering an unbounded range of possibilities, correcting one means evaluating a single concrete thing.
Why Does It Matter?
Organizations that want engagement, feedback, or hidden expertise often ask open questions in meetings, “thoughts?”, and get silence, then circulate a rough, deliberately incomplete draft and get pages of specific, detailed correction within hours. The same pattern shows up in documents: a team that can’t answer “what should we do?” will readily fill the margins of a flawed proposal with improvements. Correcting is lower cost than creating from scratch, and people are usually more confident spotting an error than inventing a complete solution, so a concrete draft, even a wrong one, can surface expertise an open question never reaches.
What Changes Once You See It?
You stop assuming silence on an open question means no one has anything to say, and start testing whether a concrete, deliberately imperfect draft would surface the same expertise faster.
You also get more deliberate about circulating an intentionally rough first draft rather than waiting for a polished one, since polish tends to invite agreement rather than correction, and you become less afraid of showing unfinished work, since an imperfect draft often attracts exactly the expertise a polished one conceals.
Common Misunderstandings
- It isn’t a license to be careless as an excuse for low-quality work. It’s a specific technique for surfacing correction, most defensible when the imperfection is intentional and transparent, not a private manipulation.
- It isn’t the same as trolling for engagement. Overused, it trains colleagues to distrust every draft you produce, so it’s a tool to use sparingly on genuinely hard-to-extract feedback.
- It doesn’t mean the initial draft has to be intentionally wrong. Often “unfinished but specific” is enough to trigger the same correction dynamic, most of the value comes from incompleteness, not incorrectness.
- It doesn’t mean people withhold correct answers out of malice or reluctance. Responding to a concrete claim is simply a lower-effort cognitive act than generating one from nothing.
Diagnostic Question
Would people react more productively to a concrete draft than to another open request for ideas?
Explore Further
Field Notes
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Related Field Guide
Origin
Despite the name, the attribution itself is disputed, and the “law” circulates primarily as an internet aphorism rather than a formally studied psychological principle. Attributed to Ward Cunningham, co-inventor of the wiki, by fellow technologist Steven McGeady.