Resulting Trap Awareness
Stop judging decisions by their outcomes alone
Resulting is the tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. When something works out well, we assume it was a good decision; when it fails, we assume the decision was bad. This creates a dangerous feedback loop where we learn the wrong lessons from experience. Annie Duke illustrates this with Pete Carroll's infamous Super Bowl pass call -- a statistically sound decision that produced a bad outcome and was universally condemned, despite the underlying logic being defensible.
The framework asks you to systematically decouple outcome quality from decision quality. A good decision can produce a bad result due to luck, and a bad decision can produce a good result for the same reason. No sober person thinks driving home safely after drinking reflects good driving, yet in business and life we routinely update our strategies based on lucky outcomes rather than sound process.
To combat resulting, you must evaluate decisions based on the information available and the reasoning process at the time the decision was made, not based on how things turned out. This requires building the habit of asking 'Was this a good process?' separately from 'Did this produce a good result?' The compounding benefit of this shift is enormous: even catching a few extra learning opportunities that resulting would otherwise obscure can dramatically improve long-term decision quality.
- The quality of a decision is independent of the quality of its outcome.
- Hindsight bias makes inevitable what was merely possible.
- Changing strategy based on lucky results is as dangerous as driving drunk because you got home safely.
- We should evaluate decisions based on what we knew at the time, not what we know now.
- Resulting is the default mode of human cognition and requires deliberate effort to overcome.
- Identify the decision-outcome pairWhen evaluating any past decision, explicitly separate the decision itself from the outcome that followed. Write them down as two distinct elements. Resist the urge to let the outcome color your assessment of the decision.Pro tipAsk yourself: 'If I didn't know the outcome, would I still evaluate this decision the same way?'WarningOur brains automatically fuse outcomes and decisions together -- you must consciously pull them apart.
- Reconstruct the decision-time informationDocument what you knew at the time you made the decision, not what you know now. Include the alternatives you considered, the probabilities you estimated, and the reasoning you applied. This prevents hindsight bias from distorting your evaluation.Pro tipKeep a decision journal that captures your reasoning before outcomes are known.WarningHindsight bias is so powerful that even knowing about it doesn't fully protect you from it.
- Assess process quality independentlyRate the quality of your decision process on its own merits. Did you consider the relevant information? Did you weigh alternatives? Did you account for uncertainty? A good process with a bad outcome is still a good process worth repeating.Pro tipShare your decision process with a trusted group before the outcome is known to get unbiased feedback.WarningDo not let a bad outcome convince you to abandon a sound decision process.
- Extract the correct lessonBased on your process assessment, determine what, if anything, you should learn. If the process was sound and the outcome was bad, the lesson may be 'keep doing what you're doing.' If the process was flawed and the outcome was good, the lesson may be 'fix the process before luck runs out.'Pro tipCreate a two-by-two matrix: good/bad process vs. good/bad outcome to categorize decisions.WarningThe hardest lesson to accept is that a bad outcome required no change in strategy.
In Super Bowl XLIX, Pete Carroll called a pass play on second down at the one-yard line instead of handing off to Marshawn Lynch. The pass was intercepted and the Seahawks lost. Analysis showed that the decision gave Seattle three chances to score instead of two, and the interception rate in that situation was approximately 2%.
A CEO identified firing his company president as his worst decision after the replacement search went poorly and sales declined. When Duke probed the original decision process, it revealed the company had benchmarked competitors, worked with an executive coach, considered restructuring responsibilities, and had a reasonable basis for believing they could hire someone better.
Duke observed resulting constantly in poker, where players would change winning strategies after a few unlucky hands. She was warned early in her career by experienced players not to fall into this trap. The concept crystallized when she began consulting with CEOs and found that executives universally identified their 'best' and 'worst' decisions by outcome rather than process -- including one CEO who identified firing a company president as his worst decision simply because the replacement search went badly, despite the original firing decision being thoroughly reasoned and well-justified.