G8 Thoughts / Deciding

A bad result does not prove a bad choice

Outcomes are noisy, choices are not, and judging one entirely by the other teaches you the wrong lesson twice over.

You take the back road because the main road is usually jammed at that hour, and today, for once, the back road has a burst water main and the main road is clear. You arrive late. Was the choice wrong. On the information you had, no. You would make it again, and making it again would usually work. But it will not feel that way, because arriving late is vivid and the reasoning that led there is not, and the mind runs the tape backwards from the result to a verdict on the decision.

This produces two errors that pull in the same direction. The first is punishing sound choices that went badly, which teaches caution about exactly the reasoning you should keep. The second, less discussed, is rewarding poor choices that happened to work out. If you pick a route at random and it happens to be quick, nothing has been learned, but it will feel as though something was, and the habit of picking at random gets a little stronger. Good outcomes are far worse teachers than they appear, mostly because nobody sits down to review a week that went well.

The repair is to separate the two reviews. Ask first whether the reasoning was sound given what was known at the time, and only then ask what happened. Both questions are worth answering; they simply answer different things. If the reasoning was poor and the result was fine, that is still a lesson. If the reasoning was sound and the result was bad, sometimes the honest conclusion is that you were unlucky, and being able to say that without it becoming a general excuse is one of the harder skills in this whole business.