In my decades of playing soccer, I’ve taken part in hundreds of games. I’ve played in games where we dominated and lost. I’ve played in games where we were awful yet somehow scraped through to win. I’ve played in games where the other team cheated the whole way through with time-wasting, shirt-pulling, hacking people down at the knees (picture Paraguay’s shithousery against France in the World Cup) and still walked off winners. I hated it, but the result said they were the better side. Is that true? If you only looked at the scoreboard, the result justified the means. But the scoreboard doesn’t tell you who played well, who got lucky, or who you became in the process of trying. There’s something missing when you reduce quality to a number. We make this same mistake looking back on the decisions we make and the results we deliver. Things turn out well, we’re a genius. Things turn out badly, we’re the dumbest person to ever live. That gap between how something turns out and how well it was actually done is one of the most expensive blind spots we carry, and most of us have no idea we’re doing it. Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned decision scientist and PhD, explains why, and it comes down to poker being a truer test of decision quality compared to, say, chess. Chess is a game of known quantities. In chess, there’s no hidden information and almost no luck. Every piece is on the board in front of you, and your mistakes are instantly obvious. Your outcomes in the game and the quality of your decisions are highly related. Almost nothing that matters in life is like chess. Real decisions look more like poker (and in fact, John von Neumann, who built game theory, did so based on poker). “I can start with the very best, two aces, and I can lose the hand,” Duke says. You can’t see the other cards, luck is baked in, and it plays out over time. As she puts it, “the correlation between outcomes and decision quality isn’t one, and it’s not even close.” There’s a near-infinite list of factors that could explain why you wound up in a particular situation. The butterfly flapped its wings 100 miles away. You rode the wave of Nvidia and AI. You graduated around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. So many of our results are decidedly beyond our control, so what’s happening when we forget to focus on the one thing we do control: our process? Resulting Duke calls it “resulting,” or “using the outcome quality as a perfect signal for deriving decision quality.” In other words, resulting is when you think that the end result is all that matters, so a good outcome must have come from a good decision and a bad one from a bad decision. Unfortunately, that’s far too clean, too narrow a focus, and far too black and white, for the reality of the complexity we live in. The dumbest boss you’ve ever had can sometimes turn up great results. The smartest person you know and love can still get unlucky. It doesn’t make the first one right or the second one wrong. Think back to soccer, or any sport for a second. There’s a reason a season is more than one game because, in theory, the better teams will win consistently over time. This is especially true when we consider dynasties (the Patriots, Golden State in the 2010s, Manchester United in the 2000s, the Yankees a long time ago, etc.) as repeated, continued team success over years and years. An upset can happen to anyone, but a dynasty does not happen by accident. This awareness of the longer-term win is ingrained in poker, where champions like Duke build their edge over hundreds of thousands of hands. Eventually, the luck washes out. That’s what makes resulting so expensive if left unchecked. You don’t learn, and so any improvements are circumstantial, not intentional. If you see a lucky win as “skill,” you run the same sloppy process again, and eventually the luck runs out. The process is the only part you control, and by focusing there, you broaden your definition of what success looks like. My own bar for my work is to feel good enough in the decision before I take action, and how much diligence “good enough” requires scales with the stakes. In my writing, I make peace (or try my damnedest to) with the fact that how it’s received is out of my hands. This one could go viral or land to absolute crickets. All I can control is: “Is this a piece I’m proud of? Would I read this?” That’s one version of a better process and a better question. But you can change the questions you ask and aim them at any decision — a hire, a launch, a conversation you’re dreading. A scoreboard or a focus solely on the result asks, “Did it work?” A better question asks, “Given what I knew at the time, did I make the initial call well?” It invites you to consider: What information did I have? What did I miss? Was I calm, or was I reacting? What would I do differently with the same cards next time? Did I consider other perspectives? Did I play out how this could fail (a “premortem,” as Gary Klein calls it, where you assume the decision has already gone up in flames and work backward to determine why)? To answer those questions, you need a clear picture of what you knew before the result came in. But the first step is to realize your recall is not to be trusted. So before a result comes in, consider writing down the call you made, the reasoning, and roughly how likely you think each outcome is. Memory can conveniently become a liar in the retrospective. Because your brain is a clever, conniving little genius, it’s too easy for your mind to rewrite the story of what you were thinking so that a success looks like it was obvious and intentional all along, you brilliant genius, or there’s nothing you could have done differently, you poor sacrificial lamb. A written record of your decisions, and why you made them, is an honest history. To be clear, winning still rocks. Within the bounds of what is legal, moral, and reasonable good taste, I’m OK with doing everything in our power to secure victory. Winning feels objectively better. But a dizzying amount of life lies beyond our immediate control, so our task is to practice what we can and let go of the rest. Luck and lady fate aren’t going anywhere, but over the long run, focusing on process is the most reliable way to actually get better, because you’re finally practicing the part you control. How do you win at a career? At a marriage? At being a parent? At being a friend? You don’t. These are infinite games, to borrow a term from James Carse and Simon Sinek. There’s no final whistle, and the point is to keep playing well over hundreds, if not thousands, of reps, until you finally pass into the great beyond. There are no deciding walk-off home runs here. Just the next call, and how well you make it. The last call you’re proud of — was it a good decision? And how would you know?https://bigthinkbusiness.substack.com/about This article How not to confuse good outcomes for good decision-making is featured on Big Think.