The reflex
An initiative goes wrong. The result becomes the main argument for judging the decision, while the information available at the start has barely been examined.
The builder’s reflex
Examine the original reasoning, then the result. A bad result does not prove a bad decision; it does not prove it was a good one either.
Why
A reasonable decision can meet an unfavourable event. A fragile decision can produce a good result. To learn, you have to look at the options, the information, the constraints and the risks known at the moment of the choice, and then at what the action actually produced.
The quality of the reasoning also depends on the conditions: time available, access, experience, backing. You can act on some of those conditions without controlling them all. Asking what would have been easy to find is useful if that ease is checked with the person concerned, not deduced after the fact.
Reversibility helps you choose the protections around an attempt, but it is rarely total. Restoring a price or going back to an earlier version can still leave a cost, confusion, or lost trust. An action that is hard to undo calls for more checks and a suitable mandate; its unfavourable result deserves a fair analysis too.
A group chooses a venue for a workshop based on the published access and the budget available. A transport disruption then gets in the way of people arriving. The review can confirm the original choice while revealing the value of a fallback. It can also show that a piece of information was overlooked. The conclusion depends on the facts, not on a need to defend or condemn the decision.
Try this
Before an important decision, keep a few lines on the goal, the options, the information and the unknowns. Keep that record proportionate to what is at stake; it is not a file to produce for every move.
At the review, ask:
“What did we know, and what could we reasonably have checked?”
“What did we learn, and what does that change for the next decision?”
Choose one improvement, or explain why the reasoning still holds. At the next comparable case, look at whether that lesson was usable. For someone starting out, a peer can help reconstruct the options without imposing the answer after the fact.
From where you sit
- Engineering: note the important assumptions before you know the result.
- Design: examine what an attempt teaches without automatically declaring the choice good or bad.
- Management: look at the mandate, the means, and the risks actually known.
- Recruiting: ask what options were considered and what information was available at the time.
To discuss
In a recent decision, what does the result teach us without rewriting what we knew at the start?