Decisions
20 min

Resulting and hindsight bias

Recognise that outcomes look inevitable afterwards and that judging decisions by results teaches the wrong lesson in any domain with chance in it.

Time cost
20 min
Output
A stated distinction between what was decided and what occurred.
Steps
5

Use when

  • Reviewing a decision, a project or someone else’s judgement.
  • An organisation punishes visible failures and ignores invisible near-misses.
  • You find yourself saying that something was obviously going to happen.

Do not use when

  • Used as a shield. “That was just bad luck” is sometimes true and is also the standard excuse for a genuinely bad process.

Inputs required

  • A decision and its outcome
  • Ideally, a record written beforehand

Procedure

  1. 01

    Retrieve what was actually known

    A record written before the outcome, or the best reconstruction available. Without it, hindsight will supply a version where the result was foreseeable.

  2. 02

    Reconstruct the alternatives

    What other outcomes were plausible then, and how likely was each? A decision looks obvious when only the realised branch is remembered.

  3. 03

    Ask the counterfactual honestly

    If a plausible alternative branch had occurred instead, would you be praising this same reasoning? If yes, the reasoning is not what you are judging.

  4. 04

    Separate the near-miss

    A good outcome that nearly went badly is a warning, not a success. These are invisible unless deliberately looked for.

  5. 05

    Judge the decision, then the outcome

    Say both out loud, in that order. “Sound reasoning, poor result” is a sentence most reviews never produce, and it is often the true one.

Characteristic failure mode

Using bad luck as a universal defence. Every poor result can be attributed to variance, and without a pre-written record there is no way to distinguish the claim from an excuse.

Worked example

A project shipped late and a review is held.

  1. 01What was known then: two of three dependencies were confirmed, the third had a verbal commitment.
  2. 02Plausible branches: the third dependency holding — roughly even odds at the time.
  3. 03Counterfactual: had it held, the plan would have been called well-judged.

Result

The reasoning was sound; relying on a verbal commitment was not. The finding is specific and would not have survived a review that started from the late delivery.

Where to go next