A good decision can still lose.

You can make the right call and get a bad result. You can make a reckless one and get lucky. If you judge decisions by how they turned out, your programme learns the wrong lessons and calls it experience.

Annie Duke spent eighteen years as a professional poker player before she wrote about decision-making. Poker teaches something boardrooms get wrong. You can play the mathematically correct hand and lose it. You can play badly and win. Over one hand the result tells you almost nothing about the quality of the decision. Only over many hands, judged on how they were played rather than how they ended, does skill separate from luck.

She calls the habit of judging a decision by its result "resulting". It is the human default and it runs right through programme delivery. The decision that led to a good outcome is praised and repeated, sound or not. The decision that led to a bad outcome is condemned and avoided, even if it was the best call available at the time. The programme learns to repeat what worked and avoid what did not. That sounds like learning. It is often the opposite, because what worked may have worked despite the decision, and what failed may have been right and unlucky.

The question is not "did it work?" The question is "given what we knew at the time, the information we had, the assumptions we tested, the confidence we held, was that the right call?" A good result from a sloppy process is a warning, because the process will not stay lucky. A poor result from a sound process is not a failure to avoid. It is a decision to understand, because the next one like it may land differently.

You cannot ask that question six weeks later unless you wrote something down before you made the move. Not a hope. A prediction: if we push this authority down to section level, we expect the average age of open decisions to halve within three weeks, and we expect no rise in decisions that later get reversed. If both hold, authority was the thing in the way, not information.

With that written down in advance, the review has two things to compare instead of one. What you expected, and what happened. The gap between them is where the learning lives. Without it, the target quietly slides to wherever the ball landed and every outcome becomes a qualified success.

Before your next big call, what do you expect to happen, and have you written it down?