Are You Guilty of 'Resulting?'

We’ve all done it.

We make what seems like a sound decision at the time all for the result to blow up in our face.

Then, we start second-guessing whether we actually made the right choice.

In her new book “How to Decide,” author and former poker champion Annie Duke dives into this concept of “resulting,” which she says occurs when people simply focus on how their decision panned out, not on what the decision actually was.

“You can run a red light and get through the intersection unscathed. You can go through a green light and get in an accident,” Duke writes. “This means that working backward from the quality of a single outcome to figure out whether a decision was good or bad is going to lead to some poor conclusions.”

Shaky presentation but win over the prospective client? We view it as a success.

Play a disciplined and focused game but lose to a tough opponent? We view it as a failure.

It’s time that we file for divorce. We need to learn to better separate process and outcome and make peace with the fact that some of our seemingly great decisions simply will not work out.

Duke says that to do this, we need to ask ourselves some key questions:

1. How much is the outcome clouding our judgment about the quality of the decision?

2. Even if bad decisions precede a bad outcome, can we identify some good decisions we made along the way?

3. What were the factors that were outside of our control?

4. How else could things have turned out?

The main point here is that getting it wrong does not necessarily mean we failed or made a bad decision. And getting it right doesn’t mean we succeeded and made a good one.

We have to train ourselves to put far more value on our systems and our processes than we do on the final product.

The best way to gauge where our team will finish in the standings isn’t by simply looking at the scoreboard after every play of every game. It might actually be by paying no attention to it at all.

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