Keep this life skill for later
Sign in to save
← All life skills

Communication · a life skill

Advanced Summarizing Decisions

a record written before the outcome, read before the verdict

Months later, a decision gets judged from memory, and by then memory knows how it ended. A short record written before you act keeps what you knew, what you didn't, and who disagreed. Then the debrief can tell a bad call from bad luck.

  • Challenging to start
  • Life-Changing impact
  • Learn it: 30 days
  • Ten minutes before, one read after
one decision record, and the two debriefs six months on
A bakery's decision record from 12 February, and two debriefs of the same failure: one from memory, one from the record Written 12 February, before signing the lease: open a second shop? Chose a second shop in Eastfield, favoured by Marta. Passed on waiting a year, favoured by Dev, and deliveries only, favoured by Lou. Dissent from Dev: we're stretched thin on staff. Why: the lease is cheap until March and queues run out the door. Unknown: whether Eastfield has any weekday trade. Revisit if weekday takings are under £600 for 6 weeks running. Six months later Eastfield is losing money. The debrief from memory says: we all knew weekdays would be dead; Dev saw it coming; never should have opened; verdict, a bad call. The debrief from the record says: weekday trade was the unknown we wrote down; Dev's worry was staff, not weekdays; the trigger fired in May and nobody checked; verdict, a fair bet and a late exit. The record 12 Feb before signing the lease Open a second shop? Chose A second shop in Eastfield Marta Passed Wait a year Dev Passed Deliveries only Lou Dissent Dev: “We're stretched thin on staff.” Why Lease cheap until March; queues out the door. Unknown Whether Eastfield has any weekday trade. Revisit if Weekday takings under £600, 6 weeks running. Six months later Eastfield is losing money Debrief from memory Debrief from the record “We all knew weekdays would be dead.” “Dev saw it coming.” “Never should have opened.” Weekday trade was the unknown we wrote down. Dev's worry was staff, not weekdays. The trigger fired in May. Nobody checked. Verdict “A bad call.” Verdict A fair bet, a late exit. 1 2 3 4 5

The same failure, debriefed twice. From memory, everyone knew all along and Dev called it. The record says weekdays were the open question, Dev's worry was staff, and the signal to pull out came in May with nobody watching for it.

The habit

Try it now.

  1. Write the record before you act

    Ten minutes, before the lease is signed or the offer sent. Written afterwards, it drifts toward how things went.

  2. List the options you didn't take, and who wanted them

    At least two, each with a name. Write any dissent in the dissenter's own words, and let them check it.

  3. Write why, and what you don't know

    The reasons you'd give today, and the one or two unknowns that would change your mind if they broke the wrong way.

  4. Set a revisit trigger with a number or a date

    “Weekday takings under £600 for six weeks running.” Put it in someone's calendar, with their name on it.

  5. Debrief from the record, not from memory

    Read it aloud before anyone gives a verdict. Ask whether the call was sound on what you knew, then, separately, how it turned out.

    If it went well, debrief anyway. A lucky win from a weak call teaches the wrong lesson.

When to break the rule: cheap, reversible decisions don't need a record. If you could undo it by Friday for less than an afternoon's work, decide and move on.

Write a decision record

Write the record now, and debrief from it later.

Name the decision, list every option with who favoured it, and mark the one you chose. Then write why, what you don't know, when you'll look again, and who disagreed. The checks flag what a future debrief would miss. Below, pick how it turned out, and the debrief questions come from your own record.

Options, and who favoured each

Decision record

What a debrief would miss

    Later: debrief from the record.

    Months on, read the record first, then answer two questions separately: how it turned out, and whether you'd make the same call knowing only what's written down.

    How did it turn out?

    Pick one, and the questions come from your record.

    Knowing only what's in the record, would you make the same call?

    Went wellWent badly Same call
    EarnedKeep the method.
    Bad luckKeep the method. Check the trigger worked.
    Different call
    LuckyFix the method before the luck runs out.
    DeservedFix the method, not only this decision.

    Nothing you type is saved or sent anywhere. Copy the record into wherever your team keeps its decisions, and put the revisit trigger in a calendar.

    The study behind it

    Once you know how it ended, you think you saw it coming.

    In 1975 Baruch Fischhoff gave students short accounts of real events they were unlikely to know. One was a war between the British and the Gurkhas of Nepal that began in 1814, with four possible endings: a British victory, a Gurkha victory, a stalemate with no peace settlement, or a stalemate with one. Some students read the account alone and judged how likely each ending was. Others read the same account with one more sentence saying how it ended.

    Whichever ending people were told, they rated it more likely, and the details of the account that seemed to matter shifted toward it. That held even when the ending they were told was not the one that happened.

    In a second experiment, people were given an ending and asked to “answer as you would have had you not known what happened.” They couldn't; the ending still leaned on their answers, and they overestimated what they would have known without it. In a third, they overestimated what other people, who hadn't been told, had actually known. Fischhoff called it creeping determinism.

    A debrief from memory runs straight into this. Everyone already knows the ending, so it looks as if it was on its way all along. The record, written before the ending arrived, is the one copy of what you knew at the time.

    The design of Fischhoff (1975). Every group read the same account. One was told nothing more; one was told the British won; one was told the British won and asked to answer as if it had not been told. Both told groups rated a British win as more likely than the group told nothing. Bar heights are illustrative. Group Same account, then Each ending's odds Before nothing more a b c d After “The British won.” a b c d After to ignore it “The British won.” Now answer as if you hadn't been told. a b c d a British win · b Gurkha win · c stalemate, no peace · d stalemate, peace
    The design, with illustrative bar heights rather than the paper's figures. Other groups were told one of the other three endings, and each rose the same way. Fischhoff, “Hindsight ≠ foresight”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1975.

    The idea

    Why it works.

    A debrief from memory judges the decision by how it turned out, and knowing how it turned out has already rewritten the memory. Doubts that came true feel like warnings everyone heard; reasons that held up get forgotten.

    A record written before the outcome keeps the reasons, the unknowns and the dissent as they were. With it, a team can separate two questions that memory runs together: was the call sound on what we knew, and did it work out? Only the first one tells you whether to change how you decide.

    When it goes wrong

    Habits that help.

    • Keep every record in one place. Same headings, dated, findable by someone who joins next year.
    • Let the dissenter write their own line. Paraphrased, it softens; read back later, it reads as if they were right about everything.
    • Give the trigger an owner. A trigger nobody watches is the bakery's in May.
    • Debrief the wins too. A good outcome from a weak call teaches the wrong lesson, and teaches it louder.

    Go deeper

    Keep going.

    Practise this in HourLife.

    In Decisions: Context, and what success looks like. Write down a decision, weigh the options, mark the one you chose, and come back later to record how it turned out.

    Download on the App Store Download on the Mac App Store How Decisions works in HourLife