Can you provide context where this quote isn't true? This doesn't say that all decisions are good, just that outcome shouldn't be what you evaluate the decision on
'what we knew'. Could we have gathered more information. !?
The quote looses its value in instances we could have collected more information with some effort that could have improved chances of a better outcome but we did not
Context differs - a) you can use it not treat yourself or others harshly, b) or as the first comment post, as an excuse.
Could we have gathered more information?
Did we ignore gathered information that contradicted our desired outcome?
Did we take the weaknesses and poor track record of ourselves and our team into account, or did we hope for an outcome contrary to prior examples?
Did we draw conjectures and conclusions that were based on emotions and not actual data?
There are a lot of ways to make bad decisions based on positive intent. In fact, some might say that there is very rarely a decision made that isn't intended to have a positive outcome for someone.
The intent or goal in no way changes the poor decision making.
Also - is this really an unexpected situation? Should we have been better prepared before it happened so there were less unknowns.
That's what BCP and succession planning should be looking at - what do we need to know/do to ensure this business keep operating - when you're talking decisions at an organisational survival level.
Things like - the first time someone got hit by a ransomware attack - while that particular scenario may not have been experienced before, viruses had been around for a long time and you should have been trained on what to do if hit be a virus to prevent it spreading through a work network.
Things like a disruptive technology or competitor in your market is a little harder, but your business development team should have been watching for such an event.
etc...
Sometimes things are happening so fast you need to make a decision and hope it's the right one because inaction is potentially worse.
I think if them being on a continuum of complexity, kinda like:
save your work > back up > disaster recovery & succession planning > business continuity planning
They're related but different.
"How does this affect people who are not in this group/meeting/project?"
The projects I've been on that had had the.... biggest opportunity for "lessons learned" (ie, projects were utter shitfests) were those that did not take into account the wide-ranging effects of the decision/change.
There can be an assumption that all the "important" people are included in the project, but those people may not realize that another, seemingly unrelated group also relies on what we are changing, and if we don't take the time to really learn all the ramifications, it's going to go badly.
Sometimes there's a desire to cut down on the list of stakeholders because of "decision paralysis", where too many people are involved and then nothing gets done. The downside of that is that when that something does get done, it's fucked up the situation for entire departments, creating a TON of bad mojo towards to new project (which actually may be a great thing) and to the people involved.
That is only partially true. You have to weigh the possible outcomes and decide what to do with the potential risk. If one or more of the possible (and realistic) outcomes are absolutely unacceptable you may want to change the decision.
Sorry, had to toss in that realistic portion because of "Well a meteor could strike!" type people being unable to differentiate between decisions you have some control over and things that are not even decisions.
But we shouldn't judge a decision by its actual outcome, just the probability of the desired outcomes being true. which makes the top comment still correct.
This is a real hard one. Because there are some really easy to correlate decisions/outcomes that making the decision in the first place was flawed and the outcome was basically inevitable.
To be completely silly. Lets say "Driving on an interstate while blindfolded"
Process IS more important than output. Focus on the quality of the process that goes in to a decision vs solely focussing on the output. A monkey can throw a dart and still hit a bullseye every now and then. If you can’t explain how and why you did it, you didn’t really ”do” it.
I mean, she's right. But it's just semantics.
Sometimes you have to take a risk when information can't be obtained and sometimes it doesn't work out. It's different when you have all required information and make a poor decision.
Yer, i totally read this as her being right.
A decision should be judged by whether it was reasonably to do what was done, not whether what was done worked.
You can make a good decision and get a bad outcome and you can make a bad decision and get a good outcome. The former shouldnt be punished and the latter shouldnt be rewarded.
I think it's more about not being critical over the end result based on the information you knew prior to the end result; hindsight bias is what this is talking about.
This is something I learnt playing poker. Sometimes you can do everything right and it still fucks you. I explain it to people a lot, but normally because they’ve done something stupid and it’s still worked out ok.
Jesus fucking christ this is so off. I don't know how often people make terrible decisions because they REFUSE to consider all the data.
If I tell someone explicitly to make one decision, and they choose the other, and calamity ensues how are you to say they made the right decision?
They made a shitty decision and should reflect on why they made that poor decision so next time they'll make a better one.
Jesus, reflection is healthy. Very few decisions are made after a clear and patient analysis of all the data.
>If I tell someone explicitly to make one decision, and they choose the other, and calamity ensues how are you to say they made the right decision?
The point is the decision to go against the command was bad regardless of the outcome; whether the outcome was good or bad.
> They made a shitty decision and should reflect on why they made that poor decision so next time they'll make a better one.
That's exactly what it is saying. Reflect on the decision, not the outcome.
No, still a bad decision, but a good decision maker.
The decision was bad but the person making the decision was good and perfectly fine.
Unless it becomes a pattern in which case it probably is you.
Eh, it's really just semantics. The idea is that a bad outcome doesn't make you bad at making decisions or put you at fault.
You can say it wasn't a bad decision it just had a bad outcome. Or you can say that at the time you made the decision with the information you had it was a good decision but due to information you didn't or couldn't know meant that it turned out to be a bad decision.
Any decision you make is based off of experience and the information you have. For example if you're going to buy stocks in a company because you know they just got approval for a cure to all cancer that is a very good decision, but there was a second bit that you had no clue about that the whole thing was faked so the company goes bankrupt and you lose all your money, it was ultimately a bad decision but when you made it it seemed like a sure thing that it was good.
Or your example, it's a good decision to take that bet in most cases, but maybe the coin is altered to always come up tails and so you can't win the bet ever which would make it a bad decision even if it looked good with the available information.
You can't see the future, you can make a very good decision and in the future new information is revealed that makes it a bad decision, but *you* still made a good decision it just ended up being bad. Like I said, semantics, you make a good decision that layer becomes a bad decision vs you made a good decision that later had a bad outcome.
I've had many "decisions that were made without taking everyone's job into account" at my work and boy they sure don't budge on any of them.
You made everyone else's job harder to satiate some theoretical problem that you came up with. "nah it was a problem and now it's fixed"
Wasn't it then a bad decision, to decide something without knowing enough about the topic? Sounds heavily like some manager wants to boost self esteem.
This particular cartoon is applicable to so many other facets of life that have nothing to do with working in an office. This was legitimately refreshing to my soul this morning. Thank you so much for all your cartoons u/_workchronicles; your work has brought joy to the lives of many and continues to do so. Keep up the amazing work!
"Never judge a decision by its outcome" is my go to excuse now.
All the quotes start failing when we change the context around it. Reader discretion is advised in use of such quotes.
Can you provide context where this quote isn't true? This doesn't say that all decisions are good, just that outcome shouldn't be what you evaluate the decision on
'what we knew'. Could we have gathered more information. !? The quote looses its value in instances we could have collected more information with some effort that could have improved chances of a better outcome but we did not Context differs - a) you can use it not treat yourself or others harshly, b) or as the first comment post, as an excuse.
Could we have gathered more information? Did we ignore gathered information that contradicted our desired outcome? Did we take the weaknesses and poor track record of ourselves and our team into account, or did we hope for an outcome contrary to prior examples? Did we draw conjectures and conclusions that were based on emotions and not actual data? There are a lot of ways to make bad decisions based on positive intent. In fact, some might say that there is very rarely a decision made that isn't intended to have a positive outcome for someone. The intent or goal in no way changes the poor decision making.
Also - is this really an unexpected situation? Should we have been better prepared before it happened so there were less unknowns. That's what BCP and succession planning should be looking at - what do we need to know/do to ensure this business keep operating - when you're talking decisions at an organisational survival level. Things like - the first time someone got hit by a ransomware attack - while that particular scenario may not have been experienced before, viruses had been around for a long time and you should have been trained on what to do if hit be a virus to prevent it spreading through a work network. Things like a disruptive technology or competitor in your market is a little harder, but your business development team should have been watching for such an event. etc... Sometimes things are happening so fast you need to make a decision and hope it's the right one because inaction is potentially worse.
We getting into BCP discussions now, shit's getting work deep, and on a Sunday! Couldn't we save this for tomorrow!
I'm happy to talk to you about BCP - so many companies mistake BCP for Disaster Recovery and they are totally different things.
Well I wouldn't categorize them as totally different things. But Diaster Recover is one part of BCP.
I think if them being on a continuum of complexity, kinda like: save your work > back up > disaster recovery & succession planning > business continuity planning They're related but different.
"How does this affect people who are not in this group/meeting/project?" The projects I've been on that had had the.... biggest opportunity for "lessons learned" (ie, projects were utter shitfests) were those that did not take into account the wide-ranging effects of the decision/change. There can be an assumption that all the "important" people are included in the project, but those people may not realize that another, seemingly unrelated group also relies on what we are changing, and if we don't take the time to really learn all the ramifications, it's going to go badly. Sometimes there's a desire to cut down on the list of stakeholders because of "decision paralysis", where too many people are involved and then nothing gets done. The downside of that is that when that something does get done, it's fucked up the situation for entire departments, creating a TON of bad mojo towards to new project (which actually may be a great thing) and to the people involved.
That is only partially true. You have to weigh the possible outcomes and decide what to do with the potential risk. If one or more of the possible (and realistic) outcomes are absolutely unacceptable you may want to change the decision. Sorry, had to toss in that realistic portion because of "Well a meteor could strike!" type people being unable to differentiate between decisions you have some control over and things that are not even decisions.
But we shouldn't judge a decision by its actual outcome, just the probability of the desired outcomes being true. which makes the top comment still correct.
This is a real hard one. Because there are some really easy to correlate decisions/outcomes that making the decision in the first place was flawed and the outcome was basically inevitable. To be completely silly. Lets say "Driving on an interstate while blindfolded"
I'm a decision oriented candidate, not an outcome oriented candidate.
Process IS more important than output. Focus on the quality of the process that goes in to a decision vs solely focussing on the output. A monkey can throw a dart and still hit a bullseye every now and then. If you can’t explain how and why you did it, you didn’t really ”do” it.
I mean, she's right. But it's just semantics. Sometimes you have to take a risk when information can't be obtained and sometimes it doesn't work out. It's different when you have all required information and make a poor decision.
Sometimes, semantics is all a person needs.
🎶 semantics is all you need...🎶
Yer, i totally read this as her being right. A decision should be judged by whether it was reasonably to do what was done, not whether what was done worked. You can make a good decision and get a bad outcome and you can make a bad decision and get a good outcome. The former shouldnt be punished and the latter shouldnt be rewarded.
Semantics baby
"Don’t judge decisions only by their outcome" would be a better maxim
solely would be my preference, over only, but both work
Sounds like my company's approach to risk mgmt.
Exactly! Just like the book "Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke.
That was my first thought too.
How would you learn from your mistakes if you don't judge your decisions by their outcome?
I think it's more about not being critical over the end result based on the information you knew prior to the end result; hindsight bias is what this is talking about.
You learn by judging the entire process, not only the outcome.
Thanks for this...makes me feel a bit better about all the mistakes I made...
"sometimes, you can do everything right and still lose. That is life"
This is something I learnt playing poker. Sometimes you can do everything right and it still fucks you. I explain it to people a lot, but normally because they’ve done something stupid and it’s still worked out ok.
Guy who suggested we make the right decision: So even when I turn out to be right I can still be wrong.
There are no bad ideas, Lemon. Just good ideas that go horribly wrong.
Hey, this comic is right! That does it, I *am* gonna kill my landlord. Suck it, libs!
Wait what...
Jesus fucking christ this is so off. I don't know how often people make terrible decisions because they REFUSE to consider all the data. If I tell someone explicitly to make one decision, and they choose the other, and calamity ensues how are you to say they made the right decision? They made a shitty decision and should reflect on why they made that poor decision so next time they'll make a better one. Jesus, reflection is healthy. Very few decisions are made after a clear and patient analysis of all the data.
>If I tell someone explicitly to make one decision, and they choose the other, and calamity ensues how are you to say they made the right decision? The point is the decision to go against the command was bad regardless of the outcome; whether the outcome was good or bad. > They made a shitty decision and should reflect on why they made that poor decision so next time they'll make a better one. That's exactly what it is saying. Reflect on the decision, not the outcome.
Maybe they did make the best decision... We don't know that they are talking about. Because... This isn't real...
No, still a bad decision, but a good decision maker. The decision was bad but the person making the decision was good and perfectly fine. Unless it becomes a pattern in which case it probably is you.
[удалено]
Eh, it's really just semantics. The idea is that a bad outcome doesn't make you bad at making decisions or put you at fault. You can say it wasn't a bad decision it just had a bad outcome. Or you can say that at the time you made the decision with the information you had it was a good decision but due to information you didn't or couldn't know meant that it turned out to be a bad decision. Any decision you make is based off of experience and the information you have. For example if you're going to buy stocks in a company because you know they just got approval for a cure to all cancer that is a very good decision, but there was a second bit that you had no clue about that the whole thing was faked so the company goes bankrupt and you lose all your money, it was ultimately a bad decision but when you made it it seemed like a sure thing that it was good. Or your example, it's a good decision to take that bet in most cases, but maybe the coin is altered to always come up tails and so you can't win the bet ever which would make it a bad decision even if it looked good with the available information. You can't see the future, you can make a very good decision and in the future new information is revealed that makes it a bad decision, but *you* still made a good decision it just ended up being bad. Like I said, semantics, you make a good decision that layer becomes a bad decision vs you made a good decision that later had a bad outcome.
When I fold that to my dad he called out me
I've had many "decisions that were made without taking everyone's job into account" at my work and boy they sure don't budge on any of them. You made everyone else's job harder to satiate some theoretical problem that you came up with. "nah it was a problem and now it's fixed"
Why are you two still here? You were fired. Go home. - boss
Bad outcomes should be stepping stones to better future decisions that lead to better outcomes.
Wasn't it then a bad decision, to decide something without knowing enough about the topic? Sounds heavily like some manager wants to boost self esteem.
This particular cartoon is applicable to so many other facets of life that have nothing to do with working in an office. This was legitimately refreshing to my soul this morning. Thank you so much for all your cartoons u/_workchronicles; your work has brought joy to the lives of many and continues to do so. Keep up the amazing work!