Success or Failure Is Not The Measure of Your Decision Making Process

We are all guilty in one respect or another, of determining the measure of a decision by it's success or failure.  That seems obvious, right?  It happens every day in sports, business and our personal lives.  It happens in life and death situations....law enforcement...the military.

We look at the outcome and determine if someone made the right decision or not.  The fact is we rarely evaluate the decision itself...which is the only true measure of how sound our decisions really are.  Actually we should be using the same process to make the decision that we use to evaluate it.

Questions we should be asking: What are we trying to accomplish?  What options are available to us?  What are the chances for success of each option?  How much risk can we afford to take, regardless of the reward potential?  Unfortunately many of the factors that can affect the outcome are actually out of our control.  New products or processes may appear.  Technology can suddenly change (who remembers "pagers"?). Markets can shift unexpectedly.  In the end, you can only weigh those factors we do know or can anticipate, or have some control over.

Failure is failure though!  We live and die by that credo.  But we still need to evaluate the decision making of our people...our peers...and most importantly, ourselves.  How many times do we look at our past decisions and ask "Why did I do that?".  We kick ourselves for choices that appear to be wrong because they failed.  In truth, if we dig deeper and look at the situation from the standpoint of what we knew then, it may be that we made the best decision based on that situation.  And vice-versa...the quickest road to failure is to attribute past success to good decision making, when in fact, we just got lucky.
 

Now I know, Napoleon is noted for asking, upon the recommendation of promotion for one of his generals..."Yes, I know he's good....but is he lucky?".  And there are definitely times where good fortune can make all the difference.  We've all heard....'you make your own luck'.  Perhaps though, making your own luck is all about making smart decisions to begin with.