Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Outcome Is Not the Verdict: How Great Leaders Really Evaluate Decisions
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Outcome Is Not the Verdict How Great Leaders Really Evaluate Decisions. Here we go. There's a trap that almost every leader falls into at some point, and the smarter the leader, the more dangerous the trap. It's the habit of judging a decision by what happened afterward. If it worked out, the decision was good. If it did not work out, the decision was bad. Simple, clean, wrong. Annie Duke, one of the most serious thinkers on decision making alive today, put it plainly. She said, The quality of a decision is not the quality of its outcome. Let that sit for a moment. Most leaders have never fully separated those two things in their minds. We talk about decisions as if they and their outcomes are the same conversation. They're not. They are two completely different conversations, and confusing them costs leaders enormously. Here's a leadership moment I wanted you to think about. Imagine two project teams. One team makes a well-researched, carefully considered call with full information. Unexpected market conditions shift. The project underperforms. The team looks bad. The second team makes a rushed call. Skips the due diligence, moves on instinct alone. The market cooperates by accident. The project performs. The team gets celebrated. Now ask yourself, which team made the better decision? The first one, by a wide margin. But in most organizations, the second team gets promoted. And that's a serious problem, because it trains people to chase outcomes rather than discipline their thinking. The common misread here is what researchers call resulting. Judging the quality of your thinking by the result, it feels natural, even logical. If something turned out well, surely we must have decided well. But this is the noise mistaken for the signal. Good outcomes can come from poor decisions. Bad outcomes can come from excellent ones. Nature and markets and human systems are not fair referees. So here's a reframe. Your job as a leader is not to guarantee outcomes. You can't do that. What you can control, what you are actually responsible for, is the quality of your reasoning process. Were you honest about the information you had? Were you honest about what you did not know? Did you define success before you could see the result? Did you pressure test the assumptions or just confirm the ones you already believed? When you evaluate those questions with rigor and integrity, you're building the kind of judgment that compounds over time. Leaders who judge by outcomes learn nothing from their wins and And nothing from their losses. Leaders who judge by process get smarter with every decision that they make. This matters in any environment. And in a world where data, analysis, and AI-assisted recommendations are increasingly part of how leaders gather input, it matters even more sharply. More data does not automatically mean better decisions. The tools can organize the information, they can surface options, they can run scenarios, but the one thing they cannot do is own the judgment call. That still belongs to the person with the title, the responsibility, and the character to decide with integrity. A good process gives these tools meaning. A poor process wastes them. So here's the reflection I want you to leave with today. Think of a decision you made in the last quarter, not a good one or a bad one by outcome, just one you made. Now strip the result away entirely. What was your process? Did you define your criteria clearly before deciding? Did you acknowledge uncertainty honestly? Did you involve the right voices? Would you make that same call again under the same conditions? If the answer is yes, you made a good decision, regardless of what happened next. That's the discipline. That's the edge. Not perfect outcomes because nobody has those. Rigorous, honest, integrity-driven thinking. The kind that gets better every time you choose to evaluate it clearly. Great leaders are not people who always get the right result. They are people who build the kind of process that gives them the best chance. And when things go wrong, they have the intellectual honesty to ask the right questions, not just the comforting ones. Judge the process, not the outcome.