Decision-making training in LucerneDoes a good outcome prove that your team made a good decision?
When a project succeeds, praising the decision that launched it seems natural. But how can we evaluate that choice without retrospectively crediting it with qualities that its outcome alone cannot establish?
1. What the literature establishes: outcomes influence evaluations
Jonathan Baron and John C. Hershey (1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) experimentally demonstrate that a decision's outcome influences assessments of its quality, even when the information available at the time of the choice remains identical. A favourable outcome leads to more positive evaluations of the decision-maker and their reasoning. This outcome bias calls a common practice into question: treating success as proof of a sound method.
2. A second mechanism: the past becomes artificially predictable
Baruch Fischhoff (1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) shows that knowing an event's outcome changes retrospective estimates of its probability. Once something has happened, it seems more predictable than it did beforehand. This hindsight bias differs from outcome bias: it changes our reconstruction of what could have been known, rather than merely our evaluation of the choice.
3. The premature conclusion: outcomes should be ignored
These studies do not suggest that outcomes are useless when evaluating decisions. They encourage us to separate two questions: was the choice defensible given the information available at the time, and what can we learn from what actually happened? Success may reveal a sound assumption, but it does not automatically validate every step in the reasoning. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limitations: a well-written record does not guarantee a good decision
These experiments use controlled situations and do not demonstrate that any particular procedure improves business performance. In practice, a written record can also become an administrative justification, especially if it is produced after initial results have emerged. To support a useful review, it must be dated before the commitment and make the alternatives, uncertainties and decision criteria explicit.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs provide a relevant setting for this distinction: in the many family-run businesses with short lines of communication and strong regional ties, a visible outcome can quickly become a judgement about the person who decided. Consider a hypothetical Lucerne hotel contemplating a tourism partnership: before signing, the manager records the options, available information, uncertainties and reasons for the choice in a dated document. At the review, a colleague who was not involved in the project first assesses that document without knowing the outcome, then learns what happened; changes in assessment and genuinely new information are recorded separately. For SHR's “Decision-making” programme, this is a proposed, verifiable application: retaining both assessments makes it possible to observe what outcome knowledge changes, without claiming that this alone measures decision quality. To go further: explore the Decision-making training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Decision-making in Lucerne
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