Reading a setback for its cause

After something goes wrong, one explanation is always more available than the others, and availability has nothing to do with truth. Learning the wrong lesson is more common than learning none.

A piece of work fails, a client leaves, a launch lands on nothing. Within a day, everyone involved has an explanation, and it is generally the last visible thing that happened: the price was too high, the timing was bad, one person dropped a ball. These explanations share a useful property, which is that they are easy to reach. They rarely share the property of being correct.

Separate the decision from the outcome

A good decision can produce a bad outcome and a bad decision can produce a good one. If you judge only by results, you will punish sound reasoning that got unlucky and reward carelessness that got away with it, and over enough cycles that is a reliable way to get worse.

So ask two separate questions after any failure. Given what was known at the time, was the reasoning sound? And separately, what actually happened? Answering them together produces the confident, wrong conclusions people carry for years.

“The most available explanation is the one that arrived first and shouted loudest.”

Look for the cause that was in place beforehand

The proximate cause is what happened last. The real cause is usually a condition that was already true before anything went wrong: a single client carrying most of the revenue, an agreement with no definition of done, no cash buffer, a process that only worked because one person never took a holiday.

Proximate causes are events. Real causes are conditions. This is why the same failure recurs in a new costume after everyone has diligently fixed the event.

Write it down within the week, then read it later

Memory rewrites failure quickly and flatteringly. Write the account within a week: what you expected, what you decided and why, what happened, and what you now think caused it. Then leave it. The value is in reading it in six months, when you can see whether the lesson you took was the lesson available.

A worked example

A regular client stops giving you work. The available explanation is that a competitor undercut you, because that is what you heard. Acting on it, you cut your rate, which lowers your income and does not bring them back.

The condition that was already true is that all contact ran through one person who had recently changed roles, and nobody else at that organisation had any idea what you did. Price was the event. Single-threaded contact was the cause. One of those is fixable and the other was never the problem.

What to do this week

Take the last thing that went badly and write both causes on one line each: the event, and the condition that made the event possible. Then decide which one you have actually done anything about.