Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / Stop Grading the Outcome
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 Stop Grading the Outcome. Here we go. Professional poker players have a habit that looks strange to outsiders. They will fold a hand that later turns out to have won, and they will feel good about the fold anyway. Here's the idea behind that habit. In Annie Duke's words, she said, learning to recognize the differences between the things we can and cannot control gives us the ability to focus our energy and effort on the things that matter. Duke spent years as a professional poker player before becoming a decision scientist, and the game taught her something that does not come naturally to many people. Including many executives. Poker looks from the outside like a game about controlling outcomes. It is actually a game about controlling decisions and making peace with the fact that outcomes have a mind of their own. A player can make the mathematically correct call, the one with the best odds given everything they know at the table, and still lose the hand because a low probability card lands anyway. A different player can make a reckless, poorly reasoned call and win because the same unlikely card happened to fall their way. Judging the quality of either decision by which one won the hand tells you almost nothing useful. Duke calls this resulting the habit of grading a decision entirely by its outcome rather than by the quality of the reasoning that produced it, and she argues it is one of the most expensive mental habits a leader can carry into a career. A good quarter gets treated as proof the strategy was right. A bad quarter gets treated as proof it was wrong. Nobody stops to ask whether the decision was actually sound, given what they knew at the moment it was made, only whether the number came in above or below the line afterward. Here's where people commonly misread this idea. They hear focus on what you can control and assume it means something close to acceptance, a kind of calm indifference to outcomes you cannot influence. That's not quite it. Duke's actual argument is about efficient allocation of a genuinely scarce resource. Attention. Every hour spent relitigating a well reasoned decision that happened to produce a bad result is an hour not spent on the parts of the business that were actually within reach and actually needed the energy. The goal is not emotional distance from outcomes. It's refusing to let outcomes hijack the finite amount of real problem solving capacity. That a leader has in a given week. I think about how this plays out in a normal performance review cycle. A team makes a well-researched bet on a product feature backed by real customer research and a defensible model of demand, and the market simply does not respond the way the research suggested it would, for reasons nobody could have reasonably anticipated. In many organizations, that team gets treated the same way as a team that made a careless, poorly researched bet that also failed. The outcome was identical. The decision quality was not. Confusing the two is exactly the trap that Duke spent her career or second career trying to help people avoid. This distinction is getting harder to hold on to, not easier, as tools generate answers that sound like certainty. A model can produce a forecast, a risk score, or a recommendation delivered very fluently and with confidence. And that creates a feeling of control over the outcome that the underlying situation may not actually support. The tool cannot tell you whether a bad result that follows its recommendation reflects a flawed decision or simply an unlucky draw from a genuinely uncertain situation. Making that separation is still an entirely human judgment, and it may be more valuable now than at any point before, precisely because confident sounding outputs make it so easy to skip. So here's what I would suggest. The next time a decision at work produces a bad outcome, resist the urge to immediately grade at a mistake. Ask instead what was actually known at the moment the decision was made and what was knowable, and judge it against that standard, not against the result. Do the same in reverse for a decision that worked out well purely by luck. Neither the win nor the loss tells you as much as you think it does about whether the underlying thinking was sound. The leaders who last, like the players who last at a poker table, are rarely the ones who win every hand. They are the ones who stop confusing what they controlled with what simply happened to them, and who keep their energy pointed at the part of the game that was always theirs to play.