Hi there, this is Jon & Mark from Salt & Light.
Picture this.
You're standing in front of the senior leadership team. The smiles, the nods, the energy in the room, it all tells you what the chart confirms. Sales are turning upward and accelerating. The product launch has exceeded expectations, and you tell yourself your decision worked well.
But did it work because you made a good decision, followed good process, or despite a flawed one?
Now picture the opposite.
The chart is flatlining. Sales are falling and picking up speed on the way down. In a meeting with the senior leadership team, the blame for the outcome falls on you. Your decision-making is questioned, leaving you doubting yourself and your reputation in question.
But the process was sound. You couldn't have known a new competitor would launch the following week at half the price.
Same decision-making process. Different outcomes. Different rooms. Different feelings about yourself.
The outcome changed everything, except the quality of the thinking that got you there. Because outcomes aren't only shaped by decisions. Markets shift, competitors move and the world intervenes. You can only ever decide with the knowledge you have in the moment.
The question is whether you remember that when you look back.
MAKE BETTER DECISIONS WITH AN HONEST RECORD
When did you last review a decision for how you made it, and what you were thinking, not how it turned out?
It's resulting bias that drives you to judge decision quality by the outcome. It also warps how you assign credit and blame.
A positive outcome encourages you to claim it was your skill that produced it. Incentives reward outcomes, and your ego rides on the attribution.
A negative outcome pushes you to claim bad luck, to the point you genuinely believe it. Your ego denies that the responsibility could be yours.
As Daniel Kahneman said, "…No matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favourable to us."
Hindsight bias compounds this. Once you know the outcome, you convince yourself you saw it coming. The decision that felt uncertain at the time looks obvious in retrospect, and that rewrites your memory of how sound your thinking was.
How many of your best decisions were down to luck? How many of your worst were actually sound?
Understanding resulting bias, hindsight bias, and the skill vs. luck misattribution is the best way to improve your decision-making.
But knowing them won't be enough.
You need a system that captures your thinking before the outcome arrives and memory does its work. A record that holds you honest, not to judge yourself, but to learn from yourself.
There are three lenses worth building into your practice.
Lens 1: Decision Journaling
A decision journal works well for an individual or partnership. It timestamps your thinking at the point of decision, before the outcome arrives and memory does its work.
At a minimum, capture four things at the point of the decision:
- Date and decision made
- The core issue you grappled with
- What you expect the outcome to be, and with what confidence
- Any insights or learning to remember
Then, 3–6 months later, return for a review: What actually happened? What do you notice? What have you learned?
The power of this is the time gap.
You're comparing your thinking at the point of commitment with reality, before your memory rewrites the story. This is the direct antidote to both hindsight bias and resulting bias.
What would you discover if you could read your own thinking from six months ago, exactly as it was?
Lens 2: Decision Logs
At a team level, a decision log lets you see patterns in your thinking and decision-making over time.
In practice, these often live as a table within leadership team minutes, a shared spreadsheet brought to discussions, or a dedicated Slack or Teams channel. At best, someone like a chief of staff takes ownership of completion and follow-up.
It captures the decision, the rationale, the outcome, and who made the call. Over time, it gives you an accurate record and reference point, increases transparency and visibility across the team, and supports tracking and accountability. It shows you where the same mistakes keep being made by different people, helps you identify decision patterns, and reveals where your process is strong and where it breaks down. Done well, it improves decision skills across the whole team, not just the individuals.
None of that is visible without a record.
Most teams don't have one. Which means every decision starts from scratch, and the organisation never gets smarter, only the individuals do.
If a new leader joined your team tomorrow, could they understand why you made the decisions you did?
Lens 3: After Action Reviews
AARs aren't just post-mortems.
Most teams run them after the fact, when the project has finished and the lessons are historical. That has value, but the real power is using them mid-way.
A structured, honest pause while the work is still live, moving through these four areas can help: Plan, reality, review, improve
• What was supposed to happen and what assumptions did we make?
• What happened and what surprised us?
• What went well, what went badly and what contributed to that?
• How can we tangibly improve while there's still time?
If you built tripwires into your implementation plan, this is where they earn their keep.
When did your team last pause mid-project to ask what you'd do differently, before it was too late to change?
If you'd like to explore how better decision-making could work across your team, whether that's our decision-making course or a conversation about what you're facing right now, we'd love to talk.
If you want to get your free decision journal template, click here and let us know how it goes.
Jon & Mark