In my business blog today, I got a little, er, hot about tax season. In my footnote, I flamed on about the 2004 elections, noting:
One thing I’m sure of: none of you stopped to analyze the quality of your 2004 decision-making and explicitly change the criteria you used to make your bad decision. It may be 2008, but you’re about to use the same broken decision-making process in November and you’ll wonder why politics doesn’t change.
Political flaming aside, when you make a decision that turns out badly, do you explicitly learn from it? And if so, do you use an explicit “post mortem” process? And do you tend to learn about specifics of a situation (e.g. “I’m never voting for candidate Z again because they lie”), or do you actually change your decision-making process (e.g. “next time, I will look at voting records and read news articles on opposing web sites and supporting web sites before making my decision.”)?
4 responses so far ↓
1 Richard Mondello // Apr 14, 2008 at 11:02 am
This is one of those things that is hard to just think about and come up with an example for…
I do like the methodology, though. The example of the 2004 and 2008 elections and taking a thorough analysis of one’s thought processes rather than just a reactionary move is useful, and one I’ll try to remember.
2 Candis // Apr 14, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I’ve never made a bad decision.
Okay seriously - I think I might sometimes change the process in decision making after a bad one, but probably more subconciously than anything. I think my brain makes little checkmarks on things that I’ve done wrong, kind of like the commonly known “mental note”, and then refer back to them later when it’s time to make another decision.
Sometimes the result of a decision feels wrong even though the thought process that got you there was right.
Feel like I can keep going with this one Stever… very deep question you propose! Hard to sum up in a comment…
3 Diana LeRoi-Schmidt // Apr 16, 2008 at 9:34 am
Since I don’t like to be wrong, and I do like to learn. The majority of the time I will make a conscious note of my error and the decision not turning out well and going forward will make sure I don’t end up in that situation again.
I can’t say that I’m flawless with that execution, but I feel very strongly about making a well educated decision.
Looking back on my life I’ve definitely improved and been more aware as I’ve gotten older to not keep going around in circles with bad decisions
4 Chris Larsen // Apr 16, 2008 at 9:39 am
Decisions have definitely improved with experience, hard lessons, and perspective. In that last case, I think my decision-making has improved because of a decrease in my anxiety about making a wrong or bad decision. Even more, perspective has shown me many times that there isn’t usually “wrong/right” or “bad/good” decisions. As Hamlet learned, it’s generally better to act than to not act.
After all, someday the earth will fall into the sun and the sun will burn into a cinder, so this too shall pass.
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