Decision-making training in LucerneIs a good outcome enough to validate a management decision?
When a choice delivers the intended result, it is tempting to treat it as a model to follow. SHR’s “Decision-Making” programme offers a way to address a more demanding question: how can we evaluate a choice without confusing its quality with its outcome?
1. What the literature establishes: outcomes influence judgement
Jonathan Baron and John C. Hershey (1988, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that knowing a decision’s outcome changes assessments of its quality, even when the information available at the time of the choice is identical. In their experiments, a favourable outcome leads to a more positive assessment of the decision than an unfavourable one. This outcome bias undermines a common practice: calling reasoning sound simply because success followed.
2. A second mechanism: outcomes look more predictable afterwards
Baruch Fischhoff (1975, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance) shows that knowing an outcome increases the probability participants retrospectively assign to it. This hindsight bias differs from outcome bias: it concerns what seemed predictable, rather than directly assessing the quality of the choice. Together, these mechanisms can turn a decision review into a narrative in which success seems obvious and failure necessarily avoidable.
3. The premature conclusion: results should be ignored
These studies do not justify excluding results from management evaluation. An outcome provides information, but cannot by itself establish the quality of a process exposed to uncertainty. The effects achieved and the soundness of the reasoning should therefore be examined separately, using the information available before the decision as the reference point. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. The limitations: a written record does not guarantee a sound choice
These experiments use controlled situations and do not demonstrate that a decision journal automatically improves organisational performance. A written justification can itself be selective or become a formality intended to protect its author. Its value depends, among other things, on being recorded before the outcome is known and on whether the underlying assumptions can genuinely be challenged.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, imagine a family-run hotel deciding to increase staffing ahead of a busy tourist period: close contact between management and frontline staff facilitates discussion, but does not ensure that the reasons for the choice remain traceable. An exercise proposed within the “Decision-Making” programme is to record the available information, options, uncertainties and selection criterion before making the commitment, then have a colleague who does not yet know the outcome assess this record. The check consists of comparing that colleague’s assessment of the reasoning before and after the outcome is revealed, recording changes and their reasons without treating the difference alone as proof of bias. This is a hypothetical case; the same protocol could be adapted to a regional financial services provider or an industrial SME in Lucerne, particularly where short decision-making chains encourage verbal agreements. 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
- decision-making
- Lucerne
- research
- training lucerne